Out of the Crisis

Becoming Fit, Fast, Lean and Hungry

Comment by David Hutchins

The term 'Out of the Crisis' was first coined by Dr Edwards Deming two decades ago!   What has happened since? The American Auto giants are teetering on the brink of bancrupcy and being advised to apply for Clause 11. In the gloom and doom laden messages that we are getting from our politicans and Financial experts today what has anybody done to reverse the progress of Western companies in their steady march towards eventual oblivion? 

The crisis we are suffering today is not a phenomenon that has sprung from out of the blue. It is claimed that it was triggered by the problem in the American Sub Prime Mortgage market which then resulted in the Banks not lending to each other. We believe that this is a red herring. It was a disaster waiting to happen and would eventually have happened anyway. The Sub Prime situation was the final straw that finally exposed a weakness that began decades before. In fact ever since the initial emergence of Japan as a significant Post World War 2 trading nation, Western Industry has been in denial that it has had to do anything to respond.  

Initially, Western industrialists squealed that the Japanese were trading unfairly, that their workers were only paid a bowl of rice a day and how could we compete with that. Interestingly the Japanese now have a living standard at least equal to the best in the West and far better than most yet still their top end producers continue with their crushing competitiveness, why? Still the excuses abound.

In the 1970s, even when Japanese electronics manufacturers were wiping out their Western rivals, still the West refused to accept that their out of date manufacturing methods were at the root of the problem. I became extremely unpopular with some who accused me of being unpatriotic for even mentioning it and that included some high ranking DTI civil servants!
One of them actually said  to me 'do you advocate that we return to the days of dark satanic mills!' Such a comment betrays an appalling lack of understanding of modern industry. Modern well run factories these days are light, bright, even with pot plants and water features in suitable locations. The ergonomics are well considered and people are treated with great respect probably more so than in many office environments. One only has to take a look inside the Nissan Plant in Washington, the Honda Plant in Swindon or the Toyota Assembly Plant at Derby to bear this out. Even the foundries are clean and safe today.

Instead of even contemplating the establishment of such environments many short sighted bosses would prefer to take what they percieve to be the easy way out and to ship all of their production to China and thereby hand them an industrial revolution on a plate rather than face up to reality and become more efficient. Well, now we are paying the price for that. China has emerged along with India who we also gave our inheritance and are now fast becoming the most powerful economies in the world.

If the British Government is really serious about attempting to resolve the British economic crisis once and for all it should consider tax incentives to those companies that have shipped manufacture overseas but now wish to recover them back to the UK. This would mean converting the now industrial wastelands of the West Midlands and elsewhere back from valueless warehousing to value and wealth creating manufacture. Reestablish the old apprenticeship systems, give incentives to colleges and universities to rebuild our resource of education, training and skills development that we can build a society to be proud of.

The situation is even now retrievable but only just. We could revive our prosperity making industrial base but it will take time. If we do not do it then we and the USA are faced with a future economy no better than that of other long since departed once glorious empires. It is our generation which because of witless stupidity, pride, arrogance and sloth that has landed us in the mess we are in today and will have bequethed our beautiful grandchildren to a standard of living that none of us would wish on them.

What can we do?

As I said, I do not believe that the situation is irretrievable even at this late hour, nothing ever is but it will not be easy. To recover, we must abandon the old rules, stop listening to institutionalised thinking, tired politicians, and those who got us into the mess in the first place. We need to find men and women with vision, they are there somewhere, we just have to find them and back them.

I have a vision of a throbbing heartland of excellence - real excellence and not just a stupid label that is pasted over any old rubbish but still containing the junk that it was before. Ditch the terms 'team this' and 'team that' which are frequently nothing of the sort. Instead creat real teams based on the proper use of the Quality Circles concept and not psudo teams that lack any form of definable substance. Stop using packaged convenience management concepts which spew from the USA with all of their dubious claims as being panaceas which they never are. Instead start from basic principles, embrace Hoshin Kanri which is not a packaged cure all but a framework for management, cascade the problem solving process downwards with appropriate training for appropriate people instead of trying to force fit concepts like Six Sigma and Lean into areas where they do not apply. Use TQM appropriately as well. Use ISO for what it is best fitted for, to hold the gains of improvements and not be fooled by claims that it is the centre of the universe.

We must stop deluding ourselves with marketing slogans that only paper over the cracks of a rotting society but it continues to rot all the same.

We need to throw out the mindless risk assessment monsters who stifle joy and laughter with senseless rules and beaurocracy that has done nothing to reduce accidents and why do they not concentrate on where real misery and heartache is caused? where? On the roads of course. 33000 dead a year and yet they consentrate on creating heaps of bumph to suffocate those who want to clean up footpaths etc? Or to prevent someone having a small fatty lump removed from his leg because he has a heart pacemaker? With this sort of mindless nonsense and waste of our national resources of course we are in trouble.

A recession is bad and people get hurt sometimes badly. Sadly the people that get hurt are not usually the ones responsible for the situation, they are usually fireproof. However, it can also be an opportunity to take a new look at everything. We do not have to be victims, we can influence our own destiny as Henry Ford did during the great depression in the USA. He did not accept his fate but instead used the situation to build what in its day was the most powerful and productive manufacturing unit on the planet.

We also need to cut down on the stupifying growth of regulations for this and regulations for that which are then accompanied by an ever increasing army of auditors who add value to nothing and cost to everything.
Remember, auditing adds no value to a good system, all it does is add cost. All it is capable of is to remove bad products and practices but it does not have the means to create good ones. Also it only sees a fraction of the whole system. The ratio of what is sampled and what is not is random and not based on any science. Therefore the risk of missing what is important is totally unknown. There are no sampling tables for auditing to set the sample size against the risk so everything is arbitrary and of course it does not work.

We need to concentrate all of our attention on wealth creation and not wealth consumption.

This is why we say that we have to become FIT, FAST, LEAN AND HUNGRY  if we are every to regain the respect that our forbears fought for and we appear to have lost.

If you want to make your organisations one of the global front runners then read David Hutchins latest book

Hoshin Kanri - The Strategic Approach to Continuous Improvement.

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