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| Sunday, 30 October 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Management
method to tackle divisive opportunists
Solemn Thoughts by Wendell Solomons Our first task is to take on two contrasts. We know that major universities have been offering MBA degree courses for more than twenty years. Yet, experience outside academe has created an apprehension about management degrees. In contrast, engineering degrees offered by the same universities have not been affected. The next contrast. I chose to query a small business. I selected a micro-business in motorcycle service and repair because such shops are doing a flourishing trade in today's otherwise placid market place. When I added the ages of the operators in this particular shop, father and son, that gave me 75 years. [Myself as researcher]: "I want an idea. You find that an MBA degree holder, after two or three years of experience, is placed in a manager's room. In his room the new manager sometimes gains the attention of an informer on fellow employees. The MBA man begins to manage in the company using information sneaked to him. Isn't that what you see in conventional large companies?" My reply came in swiftly, "Yes. That's the way it goes. Enmity comes in then and workmen begin to discover that they hate work." [Myself]: "Don't educated people end up dumb or stupid in such situations?" The father responded, "Just so. They become educated dummies." You can try running the quiz at other small shops like I did. There you will find a salient exception in the micro-business that is no more than a revenue-collecting vessel of a long-pumping business e.g. in soft drinks. In general, however, you notice a general rule that micro-business has remained lively and awake. Meanwhile, service standards are well known as having dropped in long-established, formerly customer-friendly large business (or you can discern the extension of the same causes of fall to their spanking new subsidiaries.) Where do we go from here? To proceed we must mind a pitfall. The trained MBA has come to grief too in the country that produces the largest number-the USA. There, large corporations were taken over by finance capital institutions. As a result the US experiments of the 1970s and 1980s to shift management from the grapevine model (i.e. reliant on opportunist informants) - flopped. Top managers installed by finance capital institutions harmed innovation in the USA where it was legendary in manufacturing till the mid-20th Century. At bottom this legacy of manufacturing innovation was altered by holding houses such as Goldman-Sachs who have puffed up overblown financial activities and can no longer keep the lid on (this giant has been censured in recent times for unethical practices in raising capital.) To go beyond that we must now keep our eyes on the ball. To win, our focus must be on customer service. That, after all, serves as the only secure source of business profitability. 1. Enhance company focus on customer service Continuous process improvement is required to improve customer-focused service. Managers currently tend to think in terms of programs having a beginning, middle, and an end. Better management does not have an end; it is a continuous process. The phrases `forever improving' and `continuous improvement' are common to thinking within such a dynamic business culture. Continuous improvement of product and service includes maintenance of equipment, furniture and fixtures. Yet, besides visible items, innovation and time invested at work for education and self-development are required. 2. Use face-to-face group discussion Weekly group encounters with face-to-face discussion help in workforce development and service enhancement. Such an encounter is not the ordering of a manager to deliver a pep talk over the bowed heads of staff. True participation is gained in a group by keeping the number to no more than five. 45 minutes helps keeps a group session business-focused. The manager appoints a secretary for the group and gives him or her a straightforward query, e.g., "Customer A registers a complaint; how do we remove causes for Customer A's type of complaint?" During the session the secretary writes down solutions and briefs the manager. A good group session may need to receive answers to queries from other departments. Fostering interrelationships among departments encourages higher quality decision-making. Managers may discover barriers that prevent staff from making new, larger commitments to quality of service. 3. Dispel fear from work place Shareholders evaporated in Japan's war-torn environment. In that context, corporations such as fledgling SONY experimented by enhancing the stakeholder status of employees. Implementing what the best British companies of the day were doing, SONY instilled confidence and commitment towards joint goals by aiming for `Lifetime employment.' The confidence instilled at corporations such as SONY drove out fear of job loss and suffering; jobs were few then. People at work often fear reprisal if they `make waves'. Managers must create an environment where workers can express constructive concerns about quality of service without being misunderstood. I want to close this discussion by providing a few sentences on what the continuous improvement model is not. Management-by-Exception (`MBE') is management by identifying specific targets for management attention and action. It produces short-term results by reacting to immediate problems, but there is no analysis of the processes that produced the problems and therefore long-term benefits are lost. The continuous improvement model we have been discussing is predominantly concerned with correcting processes that produce problems and not solely in reacting to individual problems. An acknowledgement is due here to the fruit that flourished in Japan through the pioneering work done in the mid-1940s by Dr. W. Edward Deming, a quality control statistician in the group of US specialists whom General MacArthur mustered. |
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