Sublime

Picture it. One Ford employee making ten cars a year for thirty-five years while his Toyota counterpart goes from four to sixty. Toyota’s supplier network? A typical GM car factory used eight hundred suppliers. Toyota? Just 125 … with half the in-house work. This dispels the Western myth of needing more to do more: Toyota was doing more with less.

That was the genesis of what has been called MBWA. I learned that quality requires minute attention to every detail, that everyone in an organization wants to do a good job, that written instructions are seldom adequate, and that personal involvement is essential.

Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge encompasses four elements and includes fourteen points of management and seven deadly diseases of management. These four elements of Profound Knowledge are: 1. A Theory of Knowledge: How do we know what we believe we know? 2. A Theory of Variation: How do we analyze and understand what we know? 3. A Theory of P

guide change management activities

The value chain is another Porter framework that managers refer to all the time. Most, I believe, know what a value chain is—the metaphor of a series of linked activities is intuitive. But many miss the “so what.” Why does it matter? The answer: The value chain is a powerful tool for disaggregating a company into its strategically relevant activiti

The paradox is that when managers focus on productivity, long-term improvements are rarely made. On the other hand, when managers focus on quality, productivity improves continuously. John Seddon

Whatever it is called, the underlying principle is that improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives.