Enough With the Japanese Improvement Jargon

The next wave of improvement is German

Wed, 04/01/2020 - 12:03

Mea culpa! I have a reputation for mercilessly bashing management, but I’ve finally come to realize that I owe executives an apology.

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As I have been constantly reminded in my career, these are very busy, very bright people. This column is a peace offering of my unique, executive quality-improvement brand to acknowledge this, while helping leaders communicate their very hard work with even more passionate public speeches about commitment to quality.

When faced with yet another patronizing assault of Japanese gobbledygook, executives can confidently counter with an improvement process perfectly describing their woefully underappreciated efforts that entitle them to a six- or seven-figure salary. Its impressive German label and imposing magnitude will immediately shut down anyone daring to further utter anything Japanese. It captures the essence of their hard work and commitment, and oozes that no-nonsense German aura of leadership.

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Comments

Verschlimmbesserung is the industry leader of mission-critical TQM. We will morph the commonly-used term "24/7/365". Our proactive feature set is unmatched, but our bleeding-edge CAD and easy use is constantly considered a remarkable achievement. We usually strategize bleeding-edge content management. That is a terrific achievement when you consider today's market conditions! Your budget for benchmarking should be at least twice your budget for pushing the envelope. We will generate the capacity of architectures to seize. We will scale up our capability to empower without depreciating our capability to productize. We think that most user-centric web applications use far too much ActionScript, and not enough ASP. The metrics for TQC are more well-understood if they are not client-focused. Do you have a game plan to become viral, B2C? What do we deploy? Anything and everything, regardless of incomprehensibility! Think ubiquitous.

I realize that all this is par for the course, but, at the end of the day, rather than throw everything done to date under the bus, the best bang for the buck is to get all hands on deck to circle back around, think outside the box, and hit the ground running to get the ball rolling on getting back to the drawing board and creating a win-win synergy using a drill-down on the low-hanging fruit to address the elephant in the room.  If you don’t have the bandwidth, redouble your efforts to become personally accountable and take this offline to get your manager’s blessing, move the goal post and proudly say, 'It’s on my radar, but, more importantly, on my plate as well.'  Make it a no brainer with an apples-to-apples comparison of Six Sigma versus Lean versus TPS, then ping me to touch base again. Please know that I'll be (w-a-a-a-y) behind this effort and, if you need my support, you know where to go.

 

Cliched mixed metaphor of the month Davis.  Clearly management potential!  You need to step up to the plate, keep pushing the envelope, burn the candle at both ends, and remember failure is not an option ... unless you do give in and drink the cool aid.

Bless you good sir for reminding us of this engineering marvel. Revolutionary, cutting-edge technology designed for frictionless plug and play integration, taking the state of the art to the next plateu with seamless backwards compatability!

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