Monday, December 8, 2008

What kinds of disciplines?

There are several disciplines in the management level. Most of us don't take care to know these stuffs. I thought of providing you the information regarding these.
We’ve been through something called lean manufacturing, the Toyota production method, which is a basically cellular manufacturing—thing like the quality revolution. It’s breathtaking what’s happened. The way American quality was assured in the postwar period was what I call end-of-line inspection because we built a product, or a car, or an air conditioner and we got it to the end of the line and we turned it on and we drove it, we ran it, and it worked or it didn’t work. And if it didn’t work, it went to a repair shop for rework and got shipped later on. The Japanese quality revolution is extremely simple in its basic conception because instead of doing end of-line inspect, the idea is individual process control—at each individual workstation by each individual production employee. And it’s the whole notion of you build a perfect product in the first place—that’s how you get the right answer. That is, you don’t inspect quality at the end—that’s the old American way. Instead, you build it perfect in the first place, by the individual employee self-controlling his or her own individual process. And you can make people see that.
You show them little techniques that actually make that happen on a shop floor. And you take people and you show them what people sometimes call visual factory, and when someone has seen the visual factory and suddenly understands how this whole thing works, they go out of there with their eyes as big as saucers. And they believe. That’s how you do a revolution—first, using benchmarks and showing that you are ahead or behind and, second, applying hard discipline. People need to know what they need to do and not to be sort of motivated with slogans in the old Soviet style.

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