Hi Davor:
> 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.
Yes. Activities are merely the means to achieve goals. Regardless of
the activity, the goal for each employee is to produce results he can be
proud of, that is, to be able to sign his work, "Beautifully done by (fill in
name)."
> Therefore
> management should focus on giving external goals to employees in order to
> 'produce' quality goods or services?
No. Management should focus on building on the internal goals of
each employee to produce quality work.
> So the
> activity does not become a goal, but the goal is to be admired!
Yes. The goal is for the employee to create work (first) that he himself
can admire and (second) that his boss, peers, customers, etc. can
admire.
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.
Yes. Quality is seated in each person's experience. Management
should build on each employee's "sense of quality."
> 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.
Yes. Employees know what quality is. Management should absorb the
following passage from Pirsig's SODV paper and manage accordingly:
"It was a common mischievous practice for students to send the same
rhetoric paper to different teachers and observe that it got different
grades. From this the students would argue that the whole idea of
quality was meaningless. But one instructor turned the tables on them
and handed a group of papers to several different students and asked
each student to grade them for quality. As he expected, the student's
relative rankings correlated with each other and with those of the
instructor. This meant that although the students were saying there is
no such thing as quality, they already knew what is was, and could not
deny it.
"So what I did is transfer that exercise into the classroom, having the
students judge four papers day after day until they saw that they knew
what quality is. They never had to say in any conceptual way what kind
of object quality is but they understood that when you see it you know it.
Quality is real even though it cannot be defined."
Platt
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