Squonk, Platt, Mark(Maggie do you mean me?) and other people interested(or
not),
Thanx for your reactions in the first place. Sorry for the question, it was
way to general for real useful information. I did not want to influence you
and therefore I did not present my own opinion on this subject but with your
responds I can start getting a better view on quality(and you will be
introduced to my ideas). I hope you all can excuse me for my choice of
words, it’s hard to express my thoughts in a not native language, also I
tend to be a bit naive in my thinking, too intuitive! Please be critical!
Platt;
You wrote this:
Create works with no other purpose than to be admired.
Hmm, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that quality work is best
delivered when there is a goal outside the activity itself. Therefore
management should focus on giving external goals to employees in order to
'produce' quality goods or services? Do you understand what I mean? So the
activity does not become a goal, but the goal is to be admired! I want to
ask you, where do you think quality is seated? Where is quality to be found?
My opinion is that quality is within the experience. This experience or
activity must become a goal itself.
I know there is a lot of controversis here about Aristotle but his(don't
know if it really is his division, but I read it in his ''Ethica'') division
of transitive and immanent activities and his preference of the immanent
activities feels natural to me.
Squonk;
I like what you are saying, except that it will be hard to establish a
society where everybody has his ''hobby'' instead of his/her work. What
people like is not always what other people need. I do agree on what you are
saying though. I want to go a little bit further now to a more concrete
level I hope you are willing to travel with me;
people perform at their best when they are motivated by the job itself, that
is where we are now I think(please say so if you do not agree). Therefore
the job of a (HRM) manager must be > motivate your people on an intrinsic
level(let people enjoy their job!). Therefore the conditions for motivated
people must be good, a safe environment, comfortable work place etc.... And
most important of all, the people need to express their creativity. And here
comes the part I do not understand, how come that most of the organizations
who pretend to strive for quality have such a design that represent
everything creativity is not? I am talking about those big plants with big
yellow arrows on the floor that tell you where to walk to, rules for
everything, every attempt for change is doomed to fail cause those attempts
get tangled up in bureaucratic procedures. Why aren't there more
organizations with a more organic structure? If creativity is so
important(Pirsig, Wilber) , why appears it to be surpressed in our modern
society? I know these kind of organizational designs go back to Fayol,
Taylor and Weber, and their ideas I think come from Descartes(Descartes is
just a name, I hope you know what I mean when I mention his name,) who was
one of the initiators of modern science. But why are there so many companies
that still breathe the cold atmosphere of their ideas(rather the practical
implementation), is that because of a wrong idea of what quality really is?
I live in a modern country but where I work to finance my study and dreams,
time have stand still. It's a big bakery where everything is SQ, I can't
believe how frustrating that is and it is the reason why I initially became
interested in quality. Quality is perceived differently in different
situations, where I work the managers see quality as low failures, a perfect
process! Economically they are right, but is this quality? Pirsig says that
everybody knows what quality is, when exactly are the two 'knowing' and
'practising' quality taken apart, raped by bureaucratics and left out on the
street for the working class people who suffer the most from the kind of
organizational designs that are a (possible)result of this seperation of
knowing and practising. I'm getting totally carried away now and that is not
good for the structure and the purpose of this post, sorry about that!
Please tell me where it went wrong, and why it keeps on going wrong over and
over again. I think it is that some people do not know what quality is, and
these people start those big ugly sq plants!
Mark;
Thanks for pointing out and write that piece on TQM, I liked it. It doesn’t
really help me though, I’m looking for a more practical solution. The main
problem for me with Deming his continious improvement is that for most
companies this constant change isn’t possible or isn’t made possible! One of
the most basal emotions is fear, and change for a lot of people is scary.
This leads to static patterns which are hard to change. So there always must
be a balance between changes and what remains, maybe you have any ideas in
how to find this balance?
I hope I didn’t bore you all numb and you still have some energy to write
what is wrong!
Greetings Davor
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