In a post World War II era when the rest of the industrialized nations was blown away and devastated, American business was booming. Corporate American management held firm to the belief that whatever they where doing was “the right way” since ultimately there was no competition and whatever was being produced was being consumed by the rest of the world.
Fast forward to 1980 and a televised documentary on NBC called “If Japan Can… Why Can’t We?” (copies are available from http://www.managementwisdom.com/ifjapcanwhyc.html) discussing how Japanese industry had rebuilt from total destruction and begun to overtake American products with competitive pricing and superior quality.
The interesting part to note in the documentary was an interview with a man named Edwards Deming.
In the WWII time frame Deming taught some of his tools and techniques to US based businesses… ultimately the Western management at that time (and still does today) clung to the belief that what they where doing was “the right way because it worked” and couldn’t fail they dismissed Deming’s concepts and his efforts where in vain and mostly ignored.
After being largely ignored by US businesses Deming later took his work to Japan, which was receptive and wanted to listen since it was trying to rebuild its industry, and now the rest is history.
Without getting into lengthy discussions about statistical process control, ultimately at the root of what Deming preached was continuous improvement, the never ending quest for business to continually refine and improve its processes… never accepting the fallacy that how the business operates today is the best way even in the face of profitability.
Simply put establishing a culture and practice of continuous improvement will work in any business in any setting from manufacturing, distribution, Internet businesses to pure service industries. While creating consistent results, better quality and delivering more value to customers at a lower cost.
Have you started to leverage the power of continuous improvement in your business or are you a lemming with beliefs and practices that have doomed companies like the Detroit auto makers?
Don’t try to reengineer the organization in a day, improvement efforts are incremental and need to be sustained for the long term and life of the company. That why it’s a cycle, it can start but continuous improvement must never stop.
Creating standardization (process flows, SOPs, documentation) is the first step in improving a process or business system. Without clear work standards there is no baseline for performance measurement and typically a business without standardization has tons of variation and hidden waste lurking about.
With the standards in hand it is time to sit down with those who perform the processes (meaning involve the employees, no exception) and devise commonsense, no cost ways to make it better. Incorporate those improvements into the work standards and verify the results to ensure it achieved the desired plan. Repeat these steps for every process in your business, make it a part of everyone’s responsibility, in fact make improvement a part of the work standards.
Continuous improvement really is that simple and the results achieved using it can be astounding. But first you need accept that there is room for improvement no matter how successful your business currently is.