Driving Eureka!. Doug Hall

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ success was that he blended logical, rational discipline with emotional, soul-inspiring hope. He used his statistical science to enable the human spirit. At many of his four-day seminars he would start by saying: “Why are we here? We are here to come alive, to have fun, to have joy in work.”

      In the early 1980s, as Dr. Deming predicted would occur, the Western world faced the invasion of higher-quality products from Japanese manufacturers at better prices. It was called the Japanese miracle. In just 30 years they had risen from the ashes of war to challenge the world.

      Dr. Deming’s role in the Japanese transformation was “discovered” in the USA with the airing of an NBC White Paper documentary by Clare Crawford-Mason titled “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”

      The television special featured Dr. Deming and the story of Nashua Corporation, where the CEO, Bill Conway, had hired Dr. Deming to help him transform his company. The TV special discussed Nashua’s success with applying Dr. Deming’s mindset to the company’s carbonless paper division. It was a story I knew well, as my father, M. Bradford “Buzz” Hall, had helped lead that project as director of central engineering.

      The TV special made Dr. Deming, at the age of 80, the management rock star of the 1980s. He led up to 40 (four-day) Deming Seminars a year, well into his nineties. His teaching of system thinking ignited the greatest change in how companies are managed in 100 years or more.

      More on the history of Dr. Deming’s work can be found in the back of this book, along with an interview with Kevin Cahill, president and executive director of the W. Edwards Deming Institute and grandson of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Additional information, including a link to the original NBC documentary, can be found at the Deming Institute website: deming.org.

      The Factory Represents Just 3% of the Opportunity

      Derivatives of Dr. Deming’s teachings are classically packaged today under names such as Total Quality, 6 Sigma, Lean, and the Toyota Production System. Each has had, and continues to have, a transformational impact on factories.

      However, the factory was and is but a small part of Dr. Deming’s vision. In his book The New Economics, Dr. Deming wrote that the factory represented just 3% of the opportunity for company improvement from applying system thinking: “The shop floor is only a small part of the total. Anyone could be 100% successful with the 3% and find himself out of business.” He felt that 97% of the opportunity for improvement from applying system thinking lay in applying it to innovation, strategy, and the way we work together.

      Just as Dr. Deming taught leaders how to transform manufacturing quality from a random act to a reliable science, Innovation Engineering teaches how to transform innovation from a random act to a reliable science.

      To survive, companies need a durable competitive advantage. No technology, plant, product, or market will ever be that. The only durable competitive advantage is your people and their ideas.

      Yes, Innovation Engineering takes its founding principles from Deming, and I am sure Deming would have loved it. I am also quite confident that Juran, Crosby, and Taguchi would approve. The key issue to me is that Innovation Engineering creates a repeatable process that leads to a durable competitive advantage.

      —Walter Werner, Deming Master

      What Held Back the Application of System Thinking to Innovation?

      Applying system thinking to innovation struggled because of a lack of data. In a factory, it’s easy to gather data from production equipment. Innovation is more difficult because it involves “human systems,” which are classically unstable and unmeasured.

      To paraphrase Dr. Deming: Much of what matters about innovation has been immeasurable, unknown, and unknowable. The good news is that, today, innovations and the impact of various innovation methods are measurable.

      For more than 30 years, client projects at the Eureka! Ranch have served as a “laboratory” for innovation measurement experiments. PhDs and statisticians have run experiments and analyzed data from thousands of real innovation projects. To develop a significant database from idea to creation to eventual marketplace success took a lot of time and patience. Fortunately, the corporations mentioned previously—and others—were willing to participate in experiments and data collection requests over many years.

      Statistical analysis of the database enabled us to identify what separates successful from unsuccessful innovations. The analysis also identified principles and methods for helping everyone think smarter, faster, and more creatively.

      Thanks to the support of organizations large and small, we have the world’s first and only complete database from idea creation, week by week through development, and all the way to market. It is this quantitative database that makes it possible to apply system thinking to innovation.

      The Mission of the Innovation Engineering Movement

      The Innovation Engineering movement is a global community of innovation pioneers dedicated to system-driven innovation. Our mission is . . .

      To change the world through systems that enable innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day, resulting in increased speed (up to 6x) and decreased risk (up to 80%).

      Systems that Enable Innovation by everyone, everywhere, every day is the core of our mission. It’s also the right thing to do.

      William Hopper, coauthor of The Puritan Gift, explained to me that enabling employees was the key to the Japanese Miracle: “In 1961 when Sumitomo Electric Industries won the Deming Prize, they did it in a totally different way. Before their victory the winner’s quality efforts were driven by experts. Sumitomo enabled all of the workers to be a part of the process of quality.”

      The Deming prize committee in 1961 wrote of the win by Sumitomo:

      One of the most important differences between Sumitomo Electric and other companies which have been awarded the Deming Prize is that in Sumitomo people from the top down to foremen worked together. This was an important difference from what happened in previous winning companies and may have contributed much to success.

      A newspaper story in Japan on Sumitomo’s success told how they enabled frontline employees:

      Foremen were trained to prepare control charts and became fully able to use them themselves. They then changed working methods so that younger workers could make products at a high yield. Before this quality-control method was introduced, only some highly trained technicians, with special skill and experience, could make products at a high yield. Afterwards, foremen were able to change the production method so that high yield was attained.

      Sumitomo spent several million yen to introduce the new quality-control procedures, but the profit from them was in the hundreds of millions. The experience of Sumitomo is that if all employees cooperate to improve the method of manufacturing the product, a very high standard can be achieved.

      —shared by Kenneth Hopper

      As Japanese companies enabled frontline employees, industry gains from Deming’s teachings grew exponentially. Kenneth Hopper created the graph of productivity gains (shown on the following page) for an article he wrote in 1979. Note the dramatic growth in Japan starting in 1961 with the win of the Deming Prize by Sumitomo.

СКАЧАТЬ