Chapter One - Thinking about Quality
THINKING ABOUT QUALITY - CHAPTER ONE
"The will to believe is perhaps the most powerful, but certainly the most dangerous human attribute." -John P. Grier
The best way to make people understand that there is a basic problem with the economy of the United States is to state the problem bluntly: American managers, by and large, don't know how to manage; not just in manufacturing, but in the service industry, in education, in health care, and in government at all levels. That is not because American managers are stupid, but because they are smart. They were taught how to manage in school and by experience, they learned it better than anyone else in the world, and they don't want to give it up. They were taught; they learned; they are comfortable.
What they were taught, what they learned, what they are comfortable with Doesn't work. It used to, but it doesn't anymore.
That's hardly shocking. What we were all taught over the last 50 years in all fields is changing so rapidly that it defies our ability to adapt. It's easier to accept the changes in technology because you can see the advantages. In writing, for instance, when you compare manual typewriters with the word processors, no one can miss the vast improvement. Because of the obvious, enormous, and immediate benefit, people go through the frustration and bother of changing and learning new skills, even if they wish they didn't have to. They can see the need!
The concept of quality management, developed since World War II, does not involve technology; it involves thought. You have to stop thinking about quantity and start thinking about quality. What makes that more difficult is that quality isn't a convenient list you can consult or even anything you can look at. Thinking is an invisible process, and what American managers must change if we are to survive is how they think and what they believe. The world is developing a new economic game, and the players who appear to do best are those who know how to think quality methods. American managers have been taught to think quantity. That has to change, but only a fool or a masochist thinks change is easy or fun.
Years of experience demonstrates that persuading people to change to quality methods is not a matter of marshaled fact and cogent argument. Change is so difficult that people must believe it is neceesary. Executives generally turn to quality only when they believe that if they continue to do what they've been doing, their companies will not survive. They may not be in trouble at that moment -- most aren't -- but smart executives can look toward the future and see trouble coming if they don't change. Once they believe survival is at stake, recommending that they adopt a quality management system is simpler.
Getting them to change from the old quantity belief to the new quality belief is the hard and important part, because belief beats fact hands down. If people operated on a factual basis, everyone would have adopted a quality method by now. The fact is that quality methods provide better results. Another fact is that people who work in quality companies are happier, better trained, and more dedicated employees. An even bigger fact is that quality is the standard of competition in the global market.
Those facts don't win converts because people don't operate factually. They operate emotionally, and emotion is controlled by belief. The accepted estimate is that only 10 to 40 percent of the information each of us carries around mentally is fact. All the rest of what is in our minds -- up to 90 percent -- is belief or misinformation we've picked up from popular myths or outdated teaching. Once those erroneous beliefs are in our minds, getting them out is always tough and occasionally impossible. People deeply resent being told that part of what they believe is wrong. Just as perception is reality, belief is truth -- and powerful truth. All the world's religions are based on belief.
Some of our everyday beliefs get between us and quality methods, because we never learned or have forgotten the advice of Harold Geneen, former chairman of ITT: "We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs." We are hampered. Americans can't accept that quality methods work; too many of the quality requirements disagree with what we as a people have long believed to be true. Only a relatively few people oppose quality methods. Most who resist are only clinging to what they believe, unable or unwilling to change no matter what the facts may be. That mind-load of beliefs and myths, many so deeply ingrained we aren't even aware we have them, bogs us in a mire of immobility. We have those beliefs reinforced all the time.*
During the 1992 presidential campaign, on a network evening newscast, then President George Bush said, "Competition never hurt anything." He meant it, and we suspect that the vast majority of Americans who heard the broadcast agreed with him or at least accepted his statement as wisdom. Accepted or not, it's wrong. In his book "No Contest: The Case Against Competition," Alfie Kohn identifies and debunks the competitive myths we so easily accept. We compete and are taught to compete from our earliest days, and we believe that we must compete to succeed. We are told that competition is part of human nature, that it brings out the best in us, that it's fun (for the winners), and that competition builds character (for the losers). None of that is true. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the quality philospher, says, "Competition is our ruination."
We are talking about competition within a company or an organization or competition among groups of people who ought to be working together -- division heads of corporations, students, team members. Anywhere there should be teamwork and cooperation, there must not be competition. What Bush should have said -- although only a handful of Americans would have believed him -- was, "Cooperation never hurt anything." In any quality program, cooperation is a requirement. "What we need to do," Deming says, "is learn to work in the system, by which I mean that everybody, every team, every platform, every division, every component is there not for individual competitive profit or recognition, but for contribution to the system as a whole on a win-win basis."
Cooperation is always productive; conflict, defined as "a state of open, often prolonged fighting" never is; and competition may be productive if it is a conflict with rules and a cooperative aim. Most of what people call competition is really conflict -- the sole object of the exercise is to destroy the opponent. In competition, as Dr. Russell L. Ackoff points out, there may well be a cooperative purpose. He uses the example of a tennis game. It is a conflict because one player will win, the other will lose. It is also cooperation because both players have agreed to play by the same rules. While one player wins and one player loses, that is not the only, and often not even the more important aim. Another aim, among amateurs at least, is to enjoy the contest, get some exercise perhaps, and have fun. If the conflict is uneven -- one player is clearly superior -- then the purpose of "having fun" is destroyed for both players. To have fun, it must be an equal competition played under agreed rules.
The same circumstances can be applied in business. "It's perfectly okay," Ackoff says, "to have parts of organizations compete with one another, providing that their conflict is serving the purpose of the whole more effectively than they could otherwise." As an example, neither tennis player could have as much fun, get as much exercise, or be as challenged by hitting a ball off a wall. What gives the game value is the cooperative competition.
If you want a clear example of the power of conflict (called competition) to do harm, you need look no farther than the competition among the states to lure business and industry. In the process, states give free land, low-interest loans, and billions of dollars worth of tax breaks. Industry plays the states against each other, fishing for higher subsidies with new jobs as bait. One state will win; all the others will lose. No higher purpose is served; there are no agreed rules; there is no cooperation. When states are already getting to be almost as short of cash as the federal government, "buying" industrial development makes no sense, particularly when the "sale" doesn't go through. North Carolina was generous to get RJR Nabisco to build a huge, new bakery near Garner, southeast of Raleigh. When the largest leveraged buyout in corporate history left RJR Nabisco up to its chocolate chips in debt, the new bakery was "postponed" into the next century. Even if the bakery is built sometimes in the distant future, North Carolina may never recover all the money it used to "buy" the bakery, because the tax breaks for RJR Nabisco also applied to other firms and, according to one report, North Carolina loses $30 million a year in taxes.
If the states would cooperate, refuse to compete, all business and industry would still have to locate somewhere and pay taxes that would help states improve their education, health care, and law enforcement to the benefit of everyone in the area, including the new industries. That isn't likely to happen in today's competitive world. A newspaper article reports, "(Governor Jim) Hunt says that other states are handing out wads of cash and that if North Carolina wants to remain in the game, it's got to ante up." He is also quoted as assuring taxpayers that there will not be another "RJR fiasco." Perhaps not in North Carolina, but as long as the states continue to compete for industry, there will be another fiasco somewhere.
Another place where the price of competition is obvious and painful is the Congress of the United States. The country is now deeply in debt and saddled with social problems that are so horrendous they defy description. Members of Congress have not been able to help solve those problems as well as they should have because they are organized to compete, not to cooperate. The members are elected in their districts or states to represent those districts and states, and meeting those local needs is the only way to win reelection. Rep. David E. Price (D-NC) says he spends as much time in his district as he does in Washington, and we doubt he is unique.
"The will to believe is perhaps the most powerful, but certainly the most dangerous human attribute." -John P. Grier
The best way to make people understand that there is a basic problem with the economy of the United States is to state the problem bluntly: American managers, by and large, don't know how to manage; not just in manufacturing, but in the service industry, in education, in health care, and in government at all levels. That is not because American managers are stupid, but because they are smart. They were taught how to manage in school and by experience, they learned it better than anyone else in the world, and they don't want to give it up. They were taught; they learned; they are comfortable.
What they were taught, what they learned, what they are comfortable with Doesn't work. It used to, but it doesn't anymore.
That's hardly shocking. What we were all taught over the last 50 years in all fields is changing so rapidly that it defies our ability to adapt. It's easier to accept the changes in technology because you can see the advantages. In writing, for instance, when you compare manual typewriters with the word processors, no one can miss the vast improvement. Because of the obvious, enormous, and immediate benefit, people go through the frustration and bother of changing and learning new skills, even if they wish they didn't have to. They can see the need!
The concept of quality management, developed since World War II, does not involve technology; it involves thought. You have to stop thinking about quantity and start thinking about quality. What makes that more difficult is that quality isn't a convenient list you can consult or even anything you can look at. Thinking is an invisible process, and what American managers must change if we are to survive is how they think and what they believe. The world is developing a new economic game, and the players who appear to do best are those who know how to think quality methods. American managers have been taught to think quantity. That has to change, but only a fool or a masochist thinks change is easy or fun.
Years of experience demonstrates that persuading people to change to quality methods is not a matter of marshaled fact and cogent argument. Change is so difficult that people must believe it is neceesary. Executives generally turn to quality only when they believe that if they continue to do what they've been doing, their companies will not survive. They may not be in trouble at that moment -- most aren't -- but smart executives can look toward the future and see trouble coming if they don't change. Once they believe survival is at stake, recommending that they adopt a quality management system is simpler.
Getting them to change from the old quantity belief to the new quality belief is the hard and important part, because belief beats fact hands down. If people operated on a factual basis, everyone would have adopted a quality method by now. The fact is that quality methods provide better results. Another fact is that people who work in quality companies are happier, better trained, and more dedicated employees. An even bigger fact is that quality is the standard of competition in the global market.
Those facts don't win converts because people don't operate factually. They operate emotionally, and emotion is controlled by belief. The accepted estimate is that only 10 to 40 percent of the information each of us carries around mentally is fact. All the rest of what is in our minds -- up to 90 percent -- is belief or misinformation we've picked up from popular myths or outdated teaching. Once those erroneous beliefs are in our minds, getting them out is always tough and occasionally impossible. People deeply resent being told that part of what they believe is wrong. Just as perception is reality, belief is truth -- and powerful truth. All the world's religions are based on belief.
Some of our everyday beliefs get between us and quality methods, because we never learned or have forgotten the advice of Harold Geneen, former chairman of ITT: "We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs." We are hampered. Americans can't accept that quality methods work; too many of the quality requirements disagree with what we as a people have long believed to be true. Only a relatively few people oppose quality methods. Most who resist are only clinging to what they believe, unable or unwilling to change no matter what the facts may be. That mind-load of beliefs and myths, many so deeply ingrained we aren't even aware we have them, bogs us in a mire of immobility. We have those beliefs reinforced all the time.*
During the 1992 presidential campaign, on a network evening newscast, then President George Bush said, "Competition never hurt anything." He meant it, and we suspect that the vast majority of Americans who heard the broadcast agreed with him or at least accepted his statement as wisdom. Accepted or not, it's wrong. In his book "No Contest: The Case Against Competition," Alfie Kohn identifies and debunks the competitive myths we so easily accept. We compete and are taught to compete from our earliest days, and we believe that we must compete to succeed. We are told that competition is part of human nature, that it brings out the best in us, that it's fun (for the winners), and that competition builds character (for the losers). None of that is true. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the quality philospher, says, "Competition is our ruination."
We are talking about competition within a company or an organization or competition among groups of people who ought to be working together -- division heads of corporations, students, team members. Anywhere there should be teamwork and cooperation, there must not be competition. What Bush should have said -- although only a handful of Americans would have believed him -- was, "Cooperation never hurt anything." In any quality program, cooperation is a requirement. "What we need to do," Deming says, "is learn to work in the system, by which I mean that everybody, every team, every platform, every division, every component is there not for individual competitive profit or recognition, but for contribution to the system as a whole on a win-win basis."
Cooperation is always productive; conflict, defined as "a state of open, often prolonged fighting" never is; and competition may be productive if it is a conflict with rules and a cooperative aim. Most of what people call competition is really conflict -- the sole object of the exercise is to destroy the opponent. In competition, as Dr. Russell L. Ackoff points out, there may well be a cooperative purpose. He uses the example of a tennis game. It is a conflict because one player will win, the other will lose. It is also cooperation because both players have agreed to play by the same rules. While one player wins and one player loses, that is not the only, and often not even the more important aim. Another aim, among amateurs at least, is to enjoy the contest, get some exercise perhaps, and have fun. If the conflict is uneven -- one player is clearly superior -- then the purpose of "having fun" is destroyed for both players. To have fun, it must be an equal competition played under agreed rules.
The same circumstances can be applied in business. "It's perfectly okay," Ackoff says, "to have parts of organizations compete with one another, providing that their conflict is serving the purpose of the whole more effectively than they could otherwise." As an example, neither tennis player could have as much fun, get as much exercise, or be as challenged by hitting a ball off a wall. What gives the game value is the cooperative competition.
If you want a clear example of the power of conflict (called competition) to do harm, you need look no farther than the competition among the states to lure business and industry. In the process, states give free land, low-interest loans, and billions of dollars worth of tax breaks. Industry plays the states against each other, fishing for higher subsidies with new jobs as bait. One state will win; all the others will lose. No higher purpose is served; there are no agreed rules; there is no cooperation. When states are already getting to be almost as short of cash as the federal government, "buying" industrial development makes no sense, particularly when the "sale" doesn't go through. North Carolina was generous to get RJR Nabisco to build a huge, new bakery near Garner, southeast of Raleigh. When the largest leveraged buyout in corporate history left RJR Nabisco up to its chocolate chips in debt, the new bakery was "postponed" into the next century. Even if the bakery is built sometimes in the distant future, North Carolina may never recover all the money it used to "buy" the bakery, because the tax breaks for RJR Nabisco also applied to other firms and, according to one report, North Carolina loses $30 million a year in taxes.
If the states would cooperate, refuse to compete, all business and industry would still have to locate somewhere and pay taxes that would help states improve their education, health care, and law enforcement to the benefit of everyone in the area, including the new industries. That isn't likely to happen in today's competitive world. A newspaper article reports, "(Governor Jim) Hunt says that other states are handing out wads of cash and that if North Carolina wants to remain in the game, it's got to ante up." He is also quoted as assuring taxpayers that there will not be another "RJR fiasco." Perhaps not in North Carolina, but as long as the states continue to compete for industry, there will be another fiasco somewhere.
Another place where the price of competition is obvious and painful is the Congress of the United States. The country is now deeply in debt and saddled with social problems that are so horrendous they defy description. Members of Congress have not been able to help solve those problems as well as they should have because they are organized to compete, not to cooperate. The members are elected in their districts or states to represent those districts and states, and meeting those local needs is the only way to win reelection. Rep. David E. Price (D-NC) says he spends as much time in his district as he does in Washington, and we doubt he is unique.
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