by Lee Fried, on 08 Aug 2006 02:18 pm
The Journey
Flavor of the Month
A manager I am working with that has been with the organization for a long time sent me a manual from the early 1990s that was created by the Quality Department to promote an internally branded TQM strategy. A strategy that lasted only a couple of years and was abandon as leadership lost focus. As I have worked with different departments skeptics often refer to this manual as evidence of why LEAN will not be successful and just another “flavor of the month.” Flipping through the manually I am impressed with how professionally it was put together and how useful many of the tools are that are described. So what happened? Why did the program disappear? What can we learn so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes?
Since I was not here during the 1990s I can only guess what happened. In the manual there is a lot of discussion on tools, but not much on strategy. Basically, it describes the organizational approach as train as many people as possible and then turn them loose to “improve their departments.” I can imagine this approach consuming a lot of energy and good will, but not leading to much improvement, as systemic problems remain untouched and improvements remained scoped with departments. Without focus the organization might be able to make a whole bunch of improvements to small parts that add up to very little for the end customer. I wonder if others have these manuals lying around their offices and can make better guesses then me?
on 10 Aug 2006 at 2:38 pm 1.Ben Royal said …
Back in the mid-1990’s I was part of a TQM effort at an aerospace manfuacturing facility.
There was little planning or discussion about an overall strategy other than “Let’s save a lot of money by training a lot of people and turning them loose.”
Lots of training on tools with some interesting games used to teach the tools. The customer never came up in any of the conversations.
Less than 2 years later it had disappeared as we started preparing for kaizen. Then came Six Sigma. Right now we are innovating.