Comments on: Be corrigible

By: Grace

Grace — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:53:34 +0000

Thanks for this post. I was just chatting with two colleagues yesterday about failure analyses.

It appears that in both her case and mine, the scientific/engineering consensus was reached in about 40% of the study time. The rest of the time was spent discussing how to best package our findings and recommendations so that people do not reflexively shut out our comments and recommendations. We need people to act on them.

Finger pointing and shouting are not going to get all of us where we need to go. In any field of endeavor.

I would also like to add the importance of reading literature just for its own sake. Sometimes, fiction gets at the essence of life better than nonfiction.

By: Susan McElroy

Susan McElroy — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 19:16:57 +0000

Two other books that have affected me greatly in this line are _The End of Office Politics as Usual_ which sounds like a touchy-feely book but in my opinion should be treated more as an organizational optimization study, and _The Divine Right of Capital_ which explains to me why we’re doing so much manufacturing overseas in the first place.

By: Susan McElroy

Susan McElroy — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 19:01:37 +0000

It’s funny, I think I found your book by looking up Birnbaum’s book, and I don’t remember what linked them. Yes, I have the steps sheet and I’ll try to scan it today. This book was fascinating–I read it while sitting with my dad in his last weeks–and I would tell him “you know, I don’t know why, but somehow this book makes me encouraged about the return of manufacturing clothes in the US”. But not knowing the industry, I figured that what was encouraging me was seeing this massive tangle of international shipments going back and forth across continents, mountains of paperwork, lobbyists, contractors, politicians, mills, etc. I kept wondering how much that cheap Chinese shirt REALLY cost in terms of environmental pollution, returns, waste, etc. One thing that struck me especially–he would describe moving mountains and searching the world to find the cheapest and best supplier of a particular specified grade, color, type (pardon my not knowing the terminology) because it was specified that way, and it struck me that locally, the end consumer (which I don’t think he mentions much) might actually not care; they might actually pay a few bucks more for a slightly different fabric type or color run or whatever if they knew it meant less long-run harm to the environment or keeping local jobs. Also a local manufacturer might know more about local climate and lifestyle, especially if they had close contact with their market. Is this naive?

By: Carol

Carol — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 14:57:00 +0000

Utterly fascinating. It’s gratifying to have concrete justification that decent wages and working conditions don’t have to be buttressed by stupid tariffs to keep manufacturing safe here at home.

By: John Hunter

John Hunter — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 14:56:07 +0000

It is true Deming's ideas do not get the attention they deserve, in my opinion. However, it is interesting to note the recent BBC radio program on Deming (available online) and Business Week including him in their list of the Top 25: Influential Business Leaders. Our Curious Cat Deming Connections is an attempt to provide quick and easy access to resources on his ideas including many great articles.