Deming's perspective requires another non-Western lens: accept randomness and reject the idea of complete control. Random events cannot be eliminated, and any attempt to prevent or correct for specific random events without addressing the entire system will likely produce unintended and often worse consequences than the original event. The question, of course, is, How do you distinguish between a random event and a systemic problem? How, for example, would you determine if a sharp rise in bus accidents came about by chance or from a systemic cause, like poor brake installation? The wisdom to ask and the ability to answer that question is the essence of Deming's teachings and should be in every manager's tool kit.
Igniting the creativity within your company
Creativity in Business
BY MICHAEL RAY AND ROCHELLE MYERS (1986)
No enterprise can prosper solely on efficiency; it must also have that magic spark of creativity and innovation. The problem, of course, is how to nurture and capture that elusive element. In the 1970s Stanford professor Michael Ray pondered the enigma of human creativity and decided to take a sabbatical to India to contemplate the question. He concluded during his quest that creativity emanates from deep inside the human spirit and that all people have an innate capacity to be creative. Upon his return he teamed up with Rochelle Myers to create a truly revolutionary course on creativity at Stanford Business School.
Ray and Myers wrote the book and built the course around "live with" assignments, whereby you take a concept and spend an entire week trying to live--to act out--the concept. The live-with assignments rest on the assumption that all humans have a creative resource within, which gets stifled as we grow up and become socialized. The key, therefore, lies in removing the barriers to the creativity that we already possess, not to "acquiring" creativity through techniques.
The course on which the book is based became one of the most popular on campus, despite the fact that Ivy Leagueeducated, Wall Streetbound M.B.A.'s were required to meditate, practice visualization, discover their passions, and develop their intuition. Many of the graduates of the course readily describe it as the single most significant and influential course of their graduate education, and most still consciously practice the live-withs years and decades later.
Be prepared to have this book challenge your assumptions and frame of reference. It can be tough going, especially for those of us trained in the analytic tradition. I myself, with a background in applied mathematics, almost abandoned the pursuit after only two days. "I can't take this; it's just too weird," I moaned to my wife. Fortunately, she urged me to continue. "It will do you good," she said. Indeed, she couldn't have been more right. It's one of my most treasured books.
Railing against oppressive, inhuman structures
In Search of Excellence
BY TOM PETERS AND BOB WATERMAN (1982)
OK, here it is--the grand pooh-bah of business books; the all-time best-seller; 67 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, 30 weeks at number one; more copies sold in one year than the Bible; the most talked-about, reviled, and praised management book ever written.
But is it a classic?
I must admit, I'm a bit biased on this one. I worked in McKinsey's San Francisco office during the research phase of the book. Bob Waterman hired me, and my office was directly across the hall from the office of Tom Peters. As a very junior researcher, I did a bit of the background research on Boeing, which sparked my interest in studying great companies--a passion that has guided much of my own work and remains with me to this day. Nonetheless, I still think In Search of Excellence is legitimately a classic.
I didn't select the book for the soundness of its research or of its conclusions. In fact, the "eight attributes" of excellence came not from thoughtful analysis but straight from Peters's head when he had less than one day to prepare a talk for Pepsi. Furthermore, some of those original eight attributes have proved wrong. For example, a company need not "stick to its knitting" (Motorola hasn't) or be "close to the customer" (Sony isn't) to be excellent.
Some of the particulars may have been wrong, and the research may have been flawed, but the essential theme was correct and powerful. As an all-out broadside attack on the rational man/scientific-management models that had dominated American business, In Search of Excellence rang through with a desperately needed message: Soft is hard! It railed against the rational-man theory and the economics-is-all ideology that sensible managers knew in their own gut to be inhuman, wrong, and destructive. It was, in fact, not a research book but a manifesto--a call to arms--that gave hundreds of thousands of people the confidence to trust their instincts and participate in a revolution to dismantle the oppressive structures that dominated our business institutions. It's a revolution that continues to this day and has done much more good than harm. In Search of Excellence earns its classic status because of its huge, positive impact on the practice of management.
Jim Collins is co-author of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (HarperBusiness 1997) and operates a management laboratory in Boulder, Colo.
Copyright c 1996 James T. Collins. All rights reserved.
