Forces of Destruction: grades in school, merit system, incentive pay, business plans, quotas.
Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.
You don’t know what you don’t know.
She learns, after she finishes the job, that she programmed very well the specifications as delivered to her, but that they were deficient. If she had only known the purpose of the program, she could have done it right for the purpose, even though the specifications were deficient.
It is not enough to just do your best or work hard; You must know what to work on.
Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, and of machine-time, all of which raise the manufacturer’s cost and price that the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste. The inevitable result is loss of market. Loss of market begets unemployment.
Any substantial improvement must come from action on the system, the responsibility of management. Wishing and pleading and begging the workers to do better was totally futile.
Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement of product and service for the future, not by the quarterly dividend.
Many customers form their opinions about the product or about the service solely by their contacts with the people that they see – contact men, I will call them.
As long as management is quick to take credit for a firm’s successes but equally swift to blame its workers for its failures, no surefire remedy for low productivity can be expected in American manufacturing and service industries.
Schools of business responded to popular demand for finance and creative accounting. The results are decline.
Competent men in every position, if they are doing their best, know all that there is to know about their work except how to improve it.
On production floors and in corporate offices, sociological verbiage has replaced a basic understanding of human behavior.
Management of a system, cooperation between components, not competition. Management of people.
No one has all the answers. Fortunately, it is not necessary to have all the answers for good management.
Short-term profits are not reliable indicator of performance of management. Anybody can pay dividends by deferring maintenance, cutting out research, or acquiring another company.
People generally want to do the right thing, but in a large organization, they frequently don’t really understand what is the right thing.
Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products and services.
The purchasing department must change its focus from lowest initial cost of material purchased to lowest total cost.
Money and time spent for training will be ineffective unless inhibitors to good work are removed.
A new president came, talked with the head of sales, design, manufacturing, consumer research, and so forth. Everybody was doing a superb job, and had been doing so for years. Nobody had any problems. Yet somehow or other the company was going down the tube. Why? The answer was simple. Each staff area was sub-optimizing its own work, but not working as a team for the company.