Rehearsal of some of the problems.We live in a society dedicated to dividends, organization, decision, orders from top to bottom, confrontation (every idea put forth must win or lose) and all-out war to destroy a competitor be he at home or abroad. Take no prisonner, there ust be winners and there must be losers. This may not be the way to better material living.
We live in an era in which everyone expects to see an everyrising standard of living. A little arthmetics sometimes helps to clarify thinking. When cometh the ever-increasing supply of worldly goods that build up an ever-increasing supply of food, clothing, housing, transportation and other serices ? It is gard to understand of a significant economic development could happen in the United States as long as our products are not competitive in our country and in the rest of the world.
How can anyone buy products from others if he can’t manage to sell them his own ones ? The only possible answer is a better conception, higher quality, higher productivity.
Only a better management can bring the necessery improvement. The question is to know how long it will take for managament to assume at last its responsabilities and for a new attitude to bear fruits. The american industry doesn’t have to prepare for restauration but for transformation. Solving problems from day to day and installing gadgets won’t put an end to our difficulties.
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An article in Business Week […] cited the paradoxal case of an executive who was laid off from his company, even though he had been hired to manage long term planification. The only reason was that the last quarter’s dividends […] felt off.
CxOs managed to make shareholders believe that dividends were a measurement of management performance. Some business schools teach their students how to maximize short term profits. […] When will industry leaders learn that they have a moral obligation to protect the capital.
This could have been a post about current affairs.
This could have been about management 2.0. Better product conception (crowdsourcing ?), better productivity (social networks ?), better quality (by acting globally on the system instead of locally on the people at the end of the chain ? ).
This could have been the continuation of my words on social business, on Antoine Riboud, the logical contination of a thought process that makes me say that the right decisions at a micro level (enterprises) won’t be made as long as CxOs don’t understant that they have macro (market) false assumptions.
I could have told you this text was mine.
In fact you can find these paragraphs in “Out of the Crisis
by W. Edwards Deming. By the way I apologize for the translation I made from the french edition of the book (ok…translating in english a book that has been originally written in this language sounds a bit stupid…). In this book I found many issues that companies haven’t solved yet.
I almots forgot ! “Out of the crisis” dates from 1986. Its original version, (I don’t have the english title but translated from french it would be like “quality, the revolution in management”) dates from 1982. It tells us that distinctions have to be made between dysfunctions caused by people (minority part) and those caused by the system (nearly all), that everything starts at the client’s and with the final operator in the production line (bottom up logic), that many indicators are useless, that leadership is more efficient than objectives, that the obsession of short term jeopardizes long term value creation and that nothing can be done without a deep cultural revolution.
27 years later it seems to me that the same causes have the same effects. Maybe even more dramatic.
actionnaires, deming, dividendes, leadership, Management, organisation, qualité,culture,management 2.0
