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[post_date] => 2013-04-25 19:58:40
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[post_content] => I have mentioned “Listen, Enrich and Optimize” in previous articles and I'll probably mention them again. They are the main principles of my LEO methodology and they are integral to "Quality is Everyone’s Business” (QIEB) philosophy. We use QIEB to ensure that everyone in the organization is driving toward the same goal of Quality. LEO helps ensure that this transformation is sustainable.
Why must we as individuals “listen” better to our customers, suppliers, co-workers and our competition? All too often, we dedicated ourselves to collecting data associated with a problem without asking deeper questions like “why” and “how” that might give us better clarity about the processes behind the data. Watch and observe what works and what doesn’t. Understand and empathize with all your stakeholders until you “get it.” How they express what they need; how they define their expectation of Quality; what it takes to make them delighted and enthused with you, your employees and your company – these are the realizations that will ultimately redefine the level of service you offer and provide.
[pullquote]We use QIEB to ensure that everyone in the organization is driving toward the same goal of Quality. LEO helps ensure that this transformation is sustainable.[/pullquote]
When I say “Enrich,” I mean to point out a process that guides us toward what we should do once we have full knowledge of the situation. In other words, if listening leads us to lessons of how we may improve, then enriching means putting those lessons to work thereby increase our potential to achieve a successful solution. Here we apply some logical organization to how we are going to use our data. What does the data tell us about how we currently do things? How can we implement the data and when? If this sounds somewhat familiar, it should, since it echoes many of the aspects of the Quality Mindset that we constantly refer back to in QIEB: Honesty, Integrity, and Resistance to Compromise.
Ultimately, once you and your entire organization have gotten the processes and procedures honed down and working to meet and exceed the needs, wants and desires of your customers, both internal and external, then you must keep raising the bar. That’s the point of “Optimize.” The goal is not just to put out a fire but also to prevent it from happening again. We can challenge known solutions and compare them against other solutions you have discovered; select the best ones and constantly subject them to every situation they may encounter. When you have corrected for any and all possible shortcomings, start the process over. Ultimately, we will never settle for just “good enough” again.
We can spend quite a bit of time on sharpening our LEO skills. By Listening, we don’t get complacent. By Enriching, we strive for perfection. And by Optimizing, we look at Quality as a universal, everyday goal, not an exception that rests with a few people. Ultimately, to be successful, quality must be “everyone’s” business.
[post_title] => LEO Revisited: The benefits of “Listen, Enrich, Optimize”
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[post_modified] => 2013-04-26 13:04:21
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[post_date] => 2013-04-29 03:32:12
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[post_content] => Over the last 50 plus years, Toyota has led the automotive industry in quality and cost. As a result, the company rose to become the world's largest automotive manufacturing corporation and Japan's largest corporation with revenues of $230 billion in 2009.
However, this once untarnished icon of Japan's status as an economic powerhouse, is now in decline and the impact on the company and the entire country is tangible.
As Dr. Masatomo Tanaka says, a professor at the Institute of Technologists, a university that specializes in training engineers, "If Toyota is not healthy, then Japan is not healthy." As goes Toyota, so goes Japan.
Toyota has long enjoyed near hallowed status in Japan as the greatest practitioner of "monozukuri," a centuries-old ideal of perfection in craftsmanship central to ancient pottery and sword-making. The pride of craftsmanship, burned into Japanese culture as the apex of accomplishment, was turned loose on the factory floor and was once the secret to Japan's postwar "miracle."
Then something changed. Yes, the earthquake and tsunami last year was a serious blow to Japanese manufacturing, but the decline at Toyota was evident long before the natural disaster. About the time the company achieved its global dominance, rumors began to filter out that management was cutting corners on quality – fewer personnel on the factory floor, lower quality raw materials and suppliers, reductions in research and development.
[pullquote]Shaving a few dollars off the cost of each car has resulted in billions of dollars in recall costs, not to mention the billions of dollars in legal costs the company has incurred from lawsuits filed by customers and government regulators – and in a few cases, possible loss of life.[/pullquote]
The result has been devastating. Shaving a few dollars off the cost of each car has resulted in billions of dollars in recall costs, not to mention the billions of dollars in legal costs the company has incurred from lawsuits filed by customers and government regulators – and in a few cases, possible loss of life. The damage has also been broadly felt: dealerships have lost sales, negatively impacting local economies, and for a time Toyota’s global position fell. But Toyota’s once unblemished record of quality is now questioned in the media and among many customers.
To compound matters, as Toyota moved away from quality, some of its competitors have moved in. Some have embraced their previous methods to the extent that their products are now surpassing Toyota. Korea's Hyundia-Kia is rapidly gaining on once dominant giant and Detroit's big three have partially adopted Toyota's engineering and manufacturing methodologies and improved their quality as well.
Toyota had the quality mindset before it become the largest corporation in Japan and the largest automotive company in the world. The company’s actions proved that quality can be the principle driver of efficiency and profitability, but also market dominance. Now the company is learning a new lesson about what happens to giants when they cut corners too often.
[post_title] => Cutting Corners
[post_excerpt] => Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?
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[post_modified] => 2013-05-16 22:34:48
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[post_date] => 2013-04-10 07:05:58
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[post_content] => In some respects, the old way of managing the quality process is part of the problem. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the old approach to management has become problematic. When we manage quality, we are addressing problems as we become aware of them. But by then we are already behind; we're reacting and not 'proacting' - we're most definitely failing to prevent anything. You see, it is not enough to notice quality problems. The problems we discover today have roots in events that occurred days ago - weeks ago - maybe years ago. The real challenge is to catch issues before they become problems.
Think of all the problems we face today: rising healthcare insurance, inefficient disaster response, the financial meltdown, oil spills; each of them have one thing in common - failure of quality.
Are our health care practitioners incompetent or are we truly that sick to cause health insurance cost to rise so precipitously? Why can't we find a more efficient response to disasters? How did the financial meltdown occur and why did it cause so much damage? Why do oil spills seem to be getting worse and worse? Is our technology inferior? Are the people in charge truly corrupt and bereft of ability? In my view, in each circumstance I have researched, I find similar answers: failure of quality assessment, failure of quality design, failure to conduct quality implementation. Quality. Quality. Quality. At times, the systems we put into place to prevent failure become the source of additional failure.
[pullquote]I believe that in order to achieve quality, we must stop thinking about quality.[/pullquote]
We have become so ingrained to manage things that suddenly we find that nobody really cares about quality. They only care about getting the job done. A very good friend of mine is fond of saying that quality hangs in the balance between doing the job right and doing the right things. If we imagine that quality is a separate deliverable - like a component that you add to a car or a building – then we have an incorrect definition. Quality is not a tangible thing. Quality is intangible as the air between us: a dream, a concept, a behavior, a reaction. Therefore, quality is a human element.
Consider this equation: Quality equals People Power plus Process Power.
Q = PeP + PrP
People Power (PeP) is the workforce, of course, with direct and indirect elements. Direct elements are the members of your team who are directly responsible for producing deliverables be it a service, a product, or a combination of both. Indirect elements are the members of the team who support the producers and the deliverables – accounting, customer service, account management, even your receptionist who answers the phone. Quality is in the touchpoints that leads your customer to your your organization. Quality is also in the relationships between members of your company.
Process Power (PrP) is the means by which the deliverable is possible. It may entail research, planning, implementation, evaluation; production, delivery and support. For obvious reasons, we want the process to be as robust and as streamlined as possible. But for process power to work, we need people power to drive it.
That is why I believe that in order to achieve quality, we must stop thinking about quality.
For one thing, when we have perfected our quality process, we will have reached the point where quality management is no longer an issue. But that first important step toward a total quality process requires that our focus be on our people.
[post_title] => Activating the Revolution
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[post_modified] => 2013-04-16 12:21:11
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[post_date] => 2013-02-10 02:01:25
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[post_content] => Modern economies depend heavily upon the distribution high quality education to members of our society. Without high-quality structured learning programs, not only are companies left without viable candidates to fill skilled jobs, society is often required to take care of the 'drop outs' one way or another.
The tragedy is that had these kids found something they liked about education, they might have stayed in school. They might have gone on to lead productive lives and avoided the blemish of a criminal record. But for many of them, education reminds them of past failure. Without guidance and mentorship, that's a very difficult (if not impossible) barrier to ask school-age kids to overcome on their own.
So I ask, who failed whom?
In 2007, I received a letter from the Orange County Corrections Department in Orlando, Florida that still amazes me. The letter described how Warren Kenner, a facilitator for a "youthful offender program," introduced my book, "The Ice Cream Maker" as part of the curriculum for an eight-week literature study class for about a dozen students.
If you have read this book, you know that it addresses concepts of deploying quality in a business operation. Mr Kenner saw another application of the concept; to offer it to his student as a model for injecting quality into their lives.
He wrote, "If you want to get ahead in life, then you've got to treat everyone with respect; not just the people you like. Most important, you've got to be thinking daily on how to improve yourself in service to others."
He also said that many of his students have been told all their short lives that they are losers; that they would never achieve anything in their lives. After a while, you begin to believe it. Most of them have such a low opinion of themselves that they lack the basic attributes of ambition and hope that you and I take for granted.
His goal is to keep the kids from internalizing the negative voices and reach out for excellence. "My whole thrust is to have them commit to themselves. The have to believe in themselves before they can help themselves or anybody else."
In Ice Cream Maker, one of the primary motivators for the fictitious business owner was recognizing the price of failure. For some of the students in this class, it was the first time that they had ever finished reading a book, yet remarkably, many came away from the experience recognizing the price of their own failure and fully comprehending that failure isn't final; that once you shed negative feelings about failure, you can begin working for total quality mindset in everything that you do.
Imagine what we might accomplish if more people understood this very simple concept. If these kids get it, why can't the rest of us?
[post_title] => Impact of Quality of Learning
[post_excerpt] => Is it culture, the weather, geography? Perhaps ignorance of what the right policies are? Simply, no. None of these factors is either definitive or destiny. Otherwise, how to explain why Botswana has become one of the fastest growing countries in the world, while other African nations, such as Zimbabwe, the Congo, and Sierra Leone, are mired in poverty and violence?
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