Outstanding Post

[Joe Tilghman]

I found this old post and found it to be informative and correct, this is on the spot in every business and thought it would be worth bringing up again.

First off, thank you for commenting on my cartoon - it's always great to get feedback as it's the only way I know if what I've done resonates with forum members and brings a little chuckle to the day.

The inspiration for "The Company Motto" came from a visit I made to a printshop a few years ago. Everywhere I walked through the shop there were banners and posters like this one posted near a door:



"ROAR" meaning: Reduce Our Annual Rework.

It struck me because the posters were so contrary to the 10th of 14 obligations of management articulated by W. Edwards Deming (the father of modern quality production systems).

He wrote:
"Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets asking for zero defects or new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force."

Put another way the use of such posters is highly correlated with managers that don't understand the processes they are managing and so they attempt simplistic "solutions" like telling everyone to "do a good job," "a happy worker is a busy worker," "avoid accidents," etc.

Exhortations, posters, targets, and slogans are directed at the wrong people, causing general frustration and resentment. Posters and charts do not consider the fact that most trouble comes from the basic process.
Management needs to learn that its main responsibility should be to improve the process and remove any special causes for defects found by statistical methods. Numerical goals set for other people without a road map to reach the objective can lead to playing games with the numbers and detrimental behaviors.

best, gordon p

[Yoga]

Greatly true!

Thanks Joe and Gordo