Content By Tripp Babbitt

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By: Tripp Babbitt

In my last column I wrote about the seven perspectives that pollute customers and culture. These perspectives rule the design of our organizations. They are inherent to our work cultures and thinking. They put us on autopilot as we toil in our everyday work. The first step to change that is to awaken from slumber.

We need to be aware of how the seven perspectives influence the performance of our systems. How do customers interact with them? How do these perspectives affect culture? Where does management spend its time?

Improvement efforts seem to focus management’s attention on process and efficiency, even though it’s the assumptions and beliefs in our organizational and work designs that make us effective. Not many dare challenge our assumptions and beliefs. You would be labeled a troublemaker.

Tripp Babbitt’s picture

By: Tripp Babbitt

Are you losing customers? Is your employee morale low? Is your management focused on the wrong things?

Customers come into contact with your culture daily. Culture is shaped by your organization’s perspective on work and how best to do work. Your organizational performance is the result of the interaction of customer and culture.

Organizations have adopted perspectives that are familiar. Only the brave organization will step outside the norm and try other perspectives. Distinction is typically lost to sameness. This would be OK, if the sameness delivered great service.

It does not.

Service organizations have many of the same perspectives from one organization to the next. In fact, there are seven perspectives that emerge that create this “sameness.”

So, what are the seven perspectives found in service organizations?
1. The individual perspective
2. The self-centered perspective
3. The cure-all perspective
4. The control perspective
5. The financial perspective
6. The functional perspective
7. The productivity perspective

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By: Tripp Babbitt

Delivering better products or services to customers is the undisputed aim of any organization. They just don’t always act that way. Manufacturing organizations have circled the wagons since the 1950s, when Japanese competitors began capturing market share from the rest of the world.

Looking back at the history of the quality and improvement movement, you can see the wake left through which we’ve traveled. In the book, The Man Who Discovered Quality (Penguin Books, 1992), author Andrea Gabor allows us to go back in time to see the dire straits faced by manufacturing in the United States. The story of Nashua Corp. during the 1980s paints a bleak picture.

At that time, Nashua made carbonless paper for U.S. industry. As it began to export internationally, the company discovered that its quality wasn’t good enough to compete with Japanese firms, which had moved in with a better quality product and thereby captured the market. What stupefied William Conway—CEO of Nashua—were the hurdles that the Japanese had to clear just to be competitive.

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By: Tripp Babbitt

Do you find yourself trying to solve the same problems over and over again? Do you treat the symptom but not the source of problems? Do you get unintended consequences from “solutions” in your organization?

In the book, Idealized Design (FT Press, 2006), author Russell Ackoff discusses four ways to treat problems: absolution, resolution, solution, and dissolution. This column will discuss these four approaches and their value. Hopefully you will discover a desirable approach that you may have missed, and by its omission lead you to increased costs and missed revenue.

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By: Tripp Babbitt

After WWII, W. Edwards Deming provided the spark that ignited Japan into making quality products. I like to refer to it as the greatest upset in economic history. How did such a small country with few economic and natural resources build a manufacturing juggernaut that could overcome the great resource advantages of the United States?

Some say the devastation that the Japanese suffered made them open to Deming’s ideas; others say that Asian culture allowed for the adoption of his ideas. Regardless, Deming came back to the United States and worked with American companies, where in 1985 he listed his original 14 points for the transformation of management at a Deming Users’ group meeting in San Diego (detailed in Nancy Mann’s 1989 book, The Keys to Excellence). Later, these 14 points were seen to flow from his System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK), which included appreciation for a system, knowledge of variation, theory of knowledge, and psychology.

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By: Tripp Babbitt

W. Edwards Deming is often given as the source for the following quote: “Managing a business on historical data is like driving a car while looking in the rearview mirror.” Deming actually borrowed the quote from Myron Tribus. The idea is that management should be looking ahead and not behind. Many fail to consider what the future of their organizations will look like.

I have been doing a lot of reading lately about the future and came across books from several futurists. One I particularly enjoyed was called Entering the Shift Age by David Houle. Houle has a background in media, an industry that has seen huge upheaval over the past decade.

I have spoken with David several times in the past month about this “Shift Age” (past ages include agricultural, industrial, and information.) He describes this Shift Age as an inflection point that “will change how we live, how we think, how we interact with each other, and what we do.” He uses the metaphor of an earthquake to describe the coming change.

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By: Tripp Babbitt

In my last column, “Deming’s Challenge to Us, Part 1,” I sounded the alert that just being improvement people is not enough, and waiting for management to do something is a poor strategy. In this column, I’m focusing on our choices and options to move forward as change agents.

For a couple of decades I have spoken to executives, change agents, and workers about how entropy can destroy organizations. Entropy is the natural deterioration that occurs when energy is not exerted for company growth and sustainability. Like a plant that will ultimately die if water and sunlight are taken away, organizations wilt if not nourished.

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By: Tripp Babbitt

While doing some research for my book on W. Edwards Deming’s activities during World War II, I came across some fascinating information, particularly in Nancy R. Mann’s book, The Keys to Excellence (Mercury Business Books, 1989). I wrote this column based on my research notes and excerpts from Mann’s book.

In 1942, Deming was working for the Bureau of the Census and served as a consultant to the Secretary of War. He received a letter from W. Allan Wallis, who was a member of the statistics faculty at Stanford University. Wallis and several other members were seeking ways to contribute to the war effort. Deming responded that, “The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action.”

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By: Tripp Babbitt

S

ometimes it’s necessary for a person to offer up views that seem to be an affront. Because these views often challenge the status quo, people’s reactions can be mixed. Some will consider the person a heretic for expressing them, and others will wonder why anyone would say such a thing. The latter group is the one worth convincing, because the people who comprise it are curious by nature and interested in the truth.

So at the risk of affronting, I believe there’s too important a story to be ignored when it comes to Japan: Copying Toyota is a bad idea. Not because I say so, but because if we look at the foundational elements of Japanese manufacturing, we find the work of W. Edwards Deming. Many in the lean community agree that without Deming, there would have been no Taiichi Ohno or Toyota Production System (TPS). The fact that Toyota achieved a set of results is really of no use to another company, even one in a similar industry, unless that company understands how Toyota did it and how that applies to the company’s own issues.

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By: Tripp Babbitt

There is much to be learned from history. Lately, I’ve been researching Frederick Winslow Taylor and scientific management. Better known as Taylorism, scientific management was popular from the early 1900s to the 1930s. The lessons and future impact of his efforts still drives how we design and perceive work today—the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Let’s start by giving kudos to Taylor for the work he did. One reader of these columns said he “rocked the world he lived in,” especially considering that at the time there were no studies on human behavior, the workforce was uneducated, the industrial revolution was at its peak, and the conventional management approach was command and control. These are salient points that we should all keep in mind when looking back at history. Given all that, we’d still like to be able to look back and see how far we’ve come in the last century.

So: How far have we really come since the days of Frederick Winslow Taylor and scientific management?