Conference 7.286::digital

    
    	There is much truth in that article..many of the old ways will
    	not suffice in today's business world. 
    
    	On the bright side, I'm now working with people in my part of the
    	business (education) who are doing the right thing. For example,
    	we used to develop courses and tell our customers, internal and
    	external, what courses we would offer on X. This has changed now
    	to the following scenario:
    
    	Customer: "So, what courses are you going to offer on A**** ?
    	DEC manager: "Tell me what you need for training; we'll offer it."
    
    	One small example, but a good example of fresh new thinking, and
    	listening to what our customers want and need. A positive step in
    	the right direction.
    
    	John

    EXCELLENT article...
    
    who wrote it?
    
    

    Peter Moyes wrote the article.

re .5

>Peter Moyes wrote the article.

   I suspected that.  Mark up another for Peter.
   
Dick

    Re: .0 / basenote
    Just a small nit with an otherwise stimulating essay.
    Icarus was a person, not a creature or a thing. In fact, he was a 
    product of Greek mythology. According to the tale, Icarus desired to
    fly as no man could do. Accordingly he observed the birds, and after
    considerable study, he contrived to make for himself a set of wings
    which attached to his arms. The materials which he used were feathers
    and wax. As was related, he did fly. He made a second set of wings for
    his son who joined him. However his son became so overcome
    with his own success that he was not satisfied with flying amongst
    the birds but instead flew higher than any bird. He eventually flew
    too close to the sun and the wax melted and the wings fell apart,
    wherupon he crashed and was killed. Icarus destroyed his wings and 
    vowed never to try anything that stupid agaiin.
    DL
    
    

    
    Re .7
    
    	Daedalus was the father.  Icarus the son who died.  The
    	wings helped them escaped the maze of the Minotaur which
    	Daedalus fashioned and in which he and Icarus were
    	subsequently imprisoned.

    All very interesting, but how will we escape the maze that our cretins
    have managed to build?
    
    ken

    I'm delighted by some things in the base note.  The recognition that we
    need to ask fresh questions and consider unsettling answers. 
    Especially, the recognition that we've allowed success to fog our
    attention to finding out what real human beings called Customers want
    and need, and then how best to add that value;  vs. getting distracted
    into things that look good and sound good within the company but are
    not necessary for doing profitable business.
    
    However, I'm also dismayed by other things in the base note.  When I
    joined Digital in 1960, it wasn't just the company that was Simple. 
    The outside world was also a lot simpler.
    
    And I worry when people talk about Adapting.  I think you get monopoly
    profit-margins only by creating new monopolies.  It makes good
    journalism maybe to say the Industry Has Matured and Therefore, we are
    into dog-eat-dog competition between suppliers of almost
    undifferentiated commodity products and services.  But that's not the
    viewpoint from which to create new monopolies;  that's settling for the
    viewpoint of all those companies that were *not* flying high when we
    used to know how.  What is baby here, and what is bathwater?  We need
    to know;  otherwise we'll un-learn what we used to do that was key to
    success and accept too uncritically that we are stuck in a maze that
    "they" created.
    
    I'm all for simplicity when simplicity is possible.  But one of my
    favorite Einstein quotes is "Things should be made as simple as
    possible, but not simpler."  If the world's human race is getting
    globally integrated, if the world's companies and countries have the
    potential for partnerships/customer-supplier/competitorships across
    previously unheard-of gulfs of space and technology and business
    domains, it may be charming to wish for simplicity but it may be like
    trying to fly with waxed feathers in the age of jet planes and rockets.
    
    So it distresses me to read that we should un-learn "process
    management."  This term may mean something different to the author than
    it means to me.  What it means to me is:  the special skill that makes
    Japanese managers (at least, in the leading Japanese companies that we
    have reason to worry about) superior to Western managers.  Namely:  the
    ability to manage by eye, when complexity is unavoidably beyond the
    level at which managing by ear will work.
    
    I'll explain briefly what I mean.  The ear is a serial channel.  Brief
    bursts of language can be remembered and dealt with, sometimes by
    building a simple diagram in the mind's eye and then looking at the
    diagram.  But when things get complex, serial thinking gets you tangled
    up in your underwear.  The eye is a parallel channel.  All of the TQM
    methods are ways to use the eye in managing, by putting shapes on the
    wall and allowing a team or group to learn and build and design despite
    complexity that would cause chairs-around-a-table meetings to go on and
    on without effective productivity.  The pattern-recognition equipment
    behind the optic nerve is becoming essential to effective management,
    on those relatively rare but utterly pivotal occasions when talk talk
    talk is a set-up for too much conversational scrap and rework.
    
    Customers' needs are probably not going to get simpler with time. 
    Business relationships are probably not going to be getting simpler.
    Technology is probably not going to get simpler (though we do need to
    deliver to customers a simple experience in using technology.)  Process
    management the way I am using the phrase, making the process visible so
    we can manage it effectively by eye:  this is not something we should
    be un-learning.  We have scarcely learned it!  The Japanese are masters
    at it.  IBM and HP I know, and most other major competitors I suspect,
    are studying and learning at a high rate how to use the TQM methods to
    allow them skilled managing-by-eye when complexity is not only not
    avoidable, but is exactly the locus of greatest potential contribution
    to customers.  Let's be careful not to un-learn the wrong thing!

    WAll Street Journal - Thur 1/23/92
    
    ... Maynard, Mass.   Digital Equipment today announced a new group Vice
    President responsible for Wax and Feathers.....
    
    
    
    Couldn't Resist

re: .11,

>   I think you get monopoly profit-margins only by creating new monopolies.

    	Good point.  We have a shot at having a monopoly on process.
    Now we need to figure out how to get the associated profit-margins.
    For example, I have heard our COHESION products aren't selling.
    I view COHESION and other CASE tools into that broad category of
    TQM process.  As a developer, I know we don't even use these sorts
    of CASE tools to develop our major software products.  I feel that
    despite training, most developers have yet to adopt true process in
    their work.  It seems there is an assumption that "the process" has
    already magically been put into place, and then proceed to mistake
    the existing chaos for process when it isn't.

>    I'll explain briefly what I mean.  The ear is a serial channel.  Brief
>    bursts of language can be remembered and dealt with, sometimes by
>    building a simple diagram in the mind's eye and then looking at the
>    diagram.  But when things get complex, serial thinking gets you tangled
>    up in your underwear.  The eye is a parallel channel.

	I am reminded of my first real encounter with a large group of
    the hearing impaired.  The situation involved a large conference room
    filled with approximately 30 people (7 or 8 of whom were deaf and/or
    communicating with sign language).  There were also two presenters
    for the meeting - one spoke, and the other translated into sign language.
    I can get over how awesome it was to watch the group of sign speakers
    all communicating in parallel conversations with each other while also
    watching and/or communicating with the sign presenter without any of
    them interrupting each other's conversations.  Meanwhile, the rest of
    us "hearing unimpaired" folks were forced to quietly sit and listen
    to the only [serial] thought waves we could understand (the spoken
    voice).  This experience has prompted me to want to learn sign language
    - if only to allow me to participate in such parallel conversations
    with other sign language speakers.

    	To get back to the subject, I agree that the eye is capable of far
    more parallel communications capabilities (which is one reason I note).
    A picture is worth a thousand words.  The problem as I see it is to
    adequately connect the appropriate pictures to the appropriate words.
    Furthermore, I think there is a famine of such "pictures" out there
    for eyes to be consuming.  There are a good many potential modes of
    eye contact for transmitting the information necessary for TQM to be
    successful which are not being utilized.  For example, if we must
    spend millions of dollars on these expensive employee office facilities,
    then maybe we should consider feeding the optic nerves with a bit of
    TQM information in the hallways and in places with high visibility.
    Think of such messages as "TQM billboards" - sure it's tacky, but
    maybe that's what's needed to help communicate the process messages.
    Without such reminders, the process is too easily forgotten (and/or
    never learned to begin with due to the high costs of training).

				    -davo