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Prof Naman's really bad mistakes

  • 1.  Prof Naman's really bad mistakes

    Posted 12-22-1999 19:12
    Ken Miller, Instructor of Health Services Management and Business said,
    "Virtually all that we do today in business has its roots in TQM. We may have
    changed the name, but at its core it is still TQM."
    John Naman said:
    >I propose that the set of all businesses that "all they do" has with roots in
    >TQM constitute a set of really bad mistakes.

    If I understand Prof. Naman’s statement, I wonder how teamwork, employee empowerment, statistical analysis, identification of variation, customer needs assessment, building quality in rather than inspection followed by rework, management listening to employee ideas for process improvement, just to name a few, could be called "really bad mistakes"

    John Naman then said:

    >While quality and TQM may be
    >necessary, they are NOT sufficient. There is a lot more to "do" in business
    >that has roots elsewhere, such as psychology, economics, and technology
    >(albeit not a mother discipline).

    Again I wonder about the "really bad mistakes" involved in the psychology of understanding your customer, the economics of supplying what customers demand at a profitable price and in better and better quality, the psychology involved in treating our employees like they actually had brains . I wonder about the "really bad mistakes" of understanding the systems involved in our technology in order to eliminate the variation in them.

    With all due respect Prof. Naman, I most profoundly disagree with you


    Ken Miller, Instructor of Health Services Management and Business
    Massey School of Business and
    School of Health Sciences
    The College of West Virginia
    kmiller@cwv.net
    Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. (Dr. Martin Luther King, JR.)

    Home Page: http://spitfire.cwv.net/~kmiller