Productivity Reimagined

2The Productivity Toolkit

As W. Edwards Deming told television viewers in 1980, the “miracle” that turned Japan around was not achieved by adopting a few production tricks, but through a radically different approach to management that defied anything that business graduates had learned in school.

The work of managers, according to this alternative approach, was not in their traditional command-and-control role, but in enabling a collaborative work environment where every employee was expected to take an active role in improving work processes.

To appreciate the scope of this, let’s look at a hypothetical comparison. Imagine two companies that operate in the same region and compete with each other. It doesn’t matter what sector they’re in. But let’s assume that they are the same size and have access to similar resources.

• Company A follows traditional top-down management practices. Leaders determine how the work is to be done and give orders to their staff accordingly. Individuals, functional groups, and departments are treated as independent entities under centralized control. Pay and promotion are determined by individual performance according to a set of predetermined criteria. Employees are ranked and encouraged to compete with each other.
• Company B is managed as an interactive system where people and functional teams depend on each other. Supervisors aren’t expected to have all the answers, and they rely on frontline workers to share their workplace knowledge and take an ...