May 5, 2008 at Kaizen. Supplement to the 2nd principle of Deming
I decided to make an addition to the second principle of Deming (a new philosophy) to say about kaizen.
When I talked about the second principle of Deming, I often jumped up and down on the table and shouted. This probably affected the presentation of the meaning of what I wanted to convey. Let's be prim and cultured.
A new philosophy is a rethinking of business.
When you try to understand what the meaning of business is, the following questions are interconnected in a certain way:
Attitude to life;
Method vs Result;
Product (service);
Consumer (people).
The whole difficulty is to gracefully place these substances in your head.
Kaizen
The idea of continuous improvement, mentioned in Deming's first principle (constancy of purpose), lies at the heart of the new philosophy. In Japanese, this idea is called "kaizen."
(“Kai”) means “change”, “correct”;
("Zen") means good, good.
Kaizen is a philosophy that is not just a part of the minds of the Japanese: kaizen only dominates their lives. Take the samurai. Take the "Seagull named Jonathan Livingston." Take the “Chess Short Story”. These texts will give you an idea of what kaizen is in general terms.
In Western thinking, there is a paraphrase of the concept of kaizen - perfectionism. The difference between kaizen and perfectionism is that, as a rule, perfectionism occupies a certain place in your brain - somewhere between the resort where you like to relax, the team that you support, and the cafe in which you prefer to eat shawarma. I want to say that perfectionism in most cases is a fad, an ant in your head that wakes up when you, for example, leaf through a document with grammatical errors.
The word "perfectionism" is associated with "mania" and "complex", and therefore, sometimes people are afraid that perfectionism would not begin to dominate their lives, if at all they have a penchant for it.
Japan is about 100% maniac perfectionists.
Go, for example, to the Carousel. All these wooden pallets with tons of half-opened boxes between the shelves look terribly careless. In Japan, you will not find this even in production. Go to Dixie if you want to clearly understand what I mean. Paphos - in our case, negligence is not perceived as a problem.
Imagine a professional table tennis player.
What worries him:
master the technique;
achieve reproducible performance;
bring the technique to grace;
achieve mastery of performance;
come to perfection in the game.
What he does not care at least until then, until he became a master:
the rivals;
viewers
score.
When you are absorbed in something - sports, cars, coding, books - you are able to attach decisive importance to the details of the process itself. And when you are absorbed in something professionally, you polish the process, improve it. The process is the only, perhaps, value for you. This is kaizen.
When management seeks profit and when management makes everyone around in its company seek profit, management demonstrates that it simply does not know what to do and is unable to manage. Imagine a trainer who demands results from a chess player. The result does not come from requirements, not from financial (and generally external) motivation, but from ownership of the process, i.e. method. The chess player will strive to master the technique every day, all the time. It does not focus on results in the form of process outputs.
Kaizen does not tolerate negligence. Negligence is contrary to the meaning of kaizen.
Nevertheless, focus on output (profits, terms, etc.) gives rise to negligence. The negligence that employees allow is ignored when they seek money or deadlines. The phrase “continuous improvement” is meaningless if the firm is incorrectly focused. Although it is negligence that spoils the whole thing, nothing is probably ignored as stubbornly as negligence due to improper focus. Negligence due to incorrect focus generates tons of concept products. There are wheels, there is a body, there is a steering wheel, brakes, engine, transmission - everything is there (the concept of the car is respected), but it’s terrible to drive it if it’s done, for example, at AvtoVAZ.
Kaizen is not that. Kaizen is how.
Management is focused on profits and deadlines, not because perfectionism is not in fashion (if you take an extreme case, imagine the degree of general annoyance when a designer draws a banner for a month or a whole year), but because he misunderstood the meaning of the work that he took up . In most cases, management does not want to hear anything about how something will be done. Moreover, in most cases, management does not understand how something is done. Management is used to living in an atmosphere divorced from the world of three dimensions, revolving among “goals,” “profits,” and “deadlines.” Management sleeps and sees how everything will be formed by itself and "goals will be achieved." Or, conversely, management prefers to get into everything, imagining itself to be an organizational genius. After such raids, employees take a couple of hours or a couple of days,
Imagine a coach again who demands a result from a chess player. Supplement this with the fact that the coach says that he has no idea and he doesn’t give a damn how it will be done (and how it is generally done), but the chess crown should be present in the five-year plan. Obviously, this coach did not understand his mission.
“Replace leadership with leadership,” Deming says. I will speak in detail about the meaning of this phrase when describing the following principles of Deming, especially the eleventh, where this phrase sounds twice. Now I will say that if management does not know how something is done, then it is doomed to live in a world created by itself.
Product, service, society (employees, consumers, suppliers, partners) - all this sets a kind of business corridor. Product and consumer are company beacons, which do not include profit and generally measurable results. The content of the business should revolve around your attitude to life, the product (service), people and the improvement of methods. This is the meaning of business.
Kaizen does not limit freedom of business: he does not say whether to make a Web 2.0 product or extract E211 preservative from mayonnaise. Kaizen is an attitude towards life. You can fill your life with anything. You can try to put kaizen into parts:
attention to detail;
improvement;
process reproducibility;
the importance of methods;
accuracy;
etc.
But it’s better to just grasp the idea of kaizen as a whole. Try to improve yourself constantly, and you will begin to practice kaizen.
Tomorrow, I still tell you about the dependence on quality control.
When I talked about the second principle of Deming, I often jumped up and down on the table and shouted. This probably affected the presentation of the meaning of what I wanted to convey. Let's be prim and cultured.
A new philosophy is a rethinking of business.
When you try to understand what the meaning of business is, the following questions are interconnected in a certain way:
Attitude to life;
Method vs Result;
Product (service);
Consumer (people).
The whole difficulty is to gracefully place these substances in your head.
Kaizen
The idea of continuous improvement, mentioned in Deming's first principle (constancy of purpose), lies at the heart of the new philosophy. In Japanese, this idea is called "kaizen."
(“Kai”) means “change”, “correct”;
("Zen") means good, good.
Kaizen is a philosophy that is not just a part of the minds of the Japanese: kaizen only dominates their lives. Take the samurai. Take the "Seagull named Jonathan Livingston." Take the “Chess Short Story”. These texts will give you an idea of what kaizen is in general terms.
In Western thinking, there is a paraphrase of the concept of kaizen - perfectionism. The difference between kaizen and perfectionism is that, as a rule, perfectionism occupies a certain place in your brain - somewhere between the resort where you like to relax, the team that you support, and the cafe in which you prefer to eat shawarma. I want to say that perfectionism in most cases is a fad, an ant in your head that wakes up when you, for example, leaf through a document with grammatical errors.
The word "perfectionism" is associated with "mania" and "complex", and therefore, sometimes people are afraid that perfectionism would not begin to dominate their lives, if at all they have a penchant for it.
Japan is about 100% maniac perfectionists.
Go, for example, to the Carousel. All these wooden pallets with tons of half-opened boxes between the shelves look terribly careless. In Japan, you will not find this even in production. Go to Dixie if you want to clearly understand what I mean. Paphos - in our case, negligence is not perceived as a problem.
Imagine a professional table tennis player.
What worries him:
master the technique;
achieve reproducible performance;
bring the technique to grace;
achieve mastery of performance;
come to perfection in the game.
What he does not care at least until then, until he became a master:
the rivals;
viewers
score.
When you are absorbed in something - sports, cars, coding, books - you are able to attach decisive importance to the details of the process itself. And when you are absorbed in something professionally, you polish the process, improve it. The process is the only, perhaps, value for you. This is kaizen.
When management seeks profit and when management makes everyone around in its company seek profit, management demonstrates that it simply does not know what to do and is unable to manage. Imagine a trainer who demands results from a chess player. The result does not come from requirements, not from financial (and generally external) motivation, but from ownership of the process, i.e. method. The chess player will strive to master the technique every day, all the time. It does not focus on results in the form of process outputs.
Kaizen does not tolerate negligence. Negligence is contrary to the meaning of kaizen.
Nevertheless, focus on output (profits, terms, etc.) gives rise to negligence. The negligence that employees allow is ignored when they seek money or deadlines. The phrase “continuous improvement” is meaningless if the firm is incorrectly focused. Although it is negligence that spoils the whole thing, nothing is probably ignored as stubbornly as negligence due to improper focus. Negligence due to incorrect focus generates tons of concept products. There are wheels, there is a body, there is a steering wheel, brakes, engine, transmission - everything is there (the concept of the car is respected), but it’s terrible to drive it if it’s done, for example, at AvtoVAZ.
Kaizen is not that. Kaizen is how.
Management is focused on profits and deadlines, not because perfectionism is not in fashion (if you take an extreme case, imagine the degree of general annoyance when a designer draws a banner for a month or a whole year), but because he misunderstood the meaning of the work that he took up . In most cases, management does not want to hear anything about how something will be done. Moreover, in most cases, management does not understand how something is done. Management is used to living in an atmosphere divorced from the world of three dimensions, revolving among “goals,” “profits,” and “deadlines.” Management sleeps and sees how everything will be formed by itself and "goals will be achieved." Or, conversely, management prefers to get into everything, imagining itself to be an organizational genius. After such raids, employees take a couple of hours or a couple of days,
Imagine a coach again who demands a result from a chess player. Supplement this with the fact that the coach says that he has no idea and he doesn’t give a damn how it will be done (and how it is generally done), but the chess crown should be present in the five-year plan. Obviously, this coach did not understand his mission.
“Replace leadership with leadership,” Deming says. I will speak in detail about the meaning of this phrase when describing the following principles of Deming, especially the eleventh, where this phrase sounds twice. Now I will say that if management does not know how something is done, then it is doomed to live in a world created by itself.
Product, service, society (employees, consumers, suppliers, partners) - all this sets a kind of business corridor. Product and consumer are company beacons, which do not include profit and generally measurable results. The content of the business should revolve around your attitude to life, the product (service), people and the improvement of methods. This is the meaning of business.
Kaizen does not limit freedom of business: he does not say whether to make a Web 2.0 product or extract E211 preservative from mayonnaise. Kaizen is an attitude towards life. You can fill your life with anything. You can try to put kaizen into parts:
attention to detail;
improvement;
process reproducibility;
the importance of methods;
accuracy;
etc.
But it’s better to just grasp the idea of kaizen as a whole. Try to improve yourself constantly, and you will begin to practice kaizen.
Tomorrow, I still tell you about the dependence on quality control.