" To me, this rabid fixation on short-term profits is a bigger threat than outsourcing -- it is killing our ability to make astonishing things."
Carly's Way As Told to Michelle Delio March 4, 2005 http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/03/wo/wo_delio030405.asp?trk=nl
An electronic engineer who worked as a Research Scientist at the Hewlett-Packard Imaging Systems Laboratory starting in 1975 until he resigned in 2003, G.S. thought HP represented the very best of American character -- "a spirit of adventure and a belief in unlimited possibilities."
He charges, though, that starting in 2000 the can-do attitude was killed by management choices intended to placate nervous investors and board members rather than benefit the company and its workers over the long-term. He warns that sustained cut-backs to R&D budgets over the past half-decade may have irreversibly damaged H-P and the entire U.S. technology industry. <...>
Four Words... One name (ok... not *just* one...): Dr. W. Edwards Deming http://www.skymark.com/resources/leaders/deming.asp
http://lists.netspace.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0502A&L=newsroom-l&P=R13690
[Shameless plug for Jules Siegel, [Newsroom-L] list-owner, follows:
Why Things Don't Work By Jules Siegel <jules_siegel at cafecancun.com> <siegel at prodigy.net.mx>
Originally published in Playboy, Sept. 1982. http://www.cafecancun.com/bookarts/dontwork.htm
The American automobile industry has worked much the same way from the beginning. Henry Ford was so obsessed with uniformity and standardization that he wanted every American to drive the same car, a black Ford. The classic modern failure of this approach was the Vega, produced by General Motors in a brand-new plant in Lordstown, Ohio, by young workers especially selected for their upbeat qualities. At first, the plant worked fine. Then new supervisory techniques were introduced along with a speed-up. Not only were all complaints about this crushed, but so were the workers' own unofficial ways of overcoming conditions that were unworkable in the first place. Grievances, which had only amounted to a few hundred a year at the beginning, quickly rose to more than 5,000 in the first few months of the repression. The Vega soon become known as a lemon, not necessarily because it was badly designed, but because the workers were unable to keep up with the speed of the line. Finally, they went out on strike. <...>
L http://www.geocities.com/leighcmeyers