How many times in the past few years have you heard, “This is not just an improvement program. It’s a revolution in management thinking”? Then, after thinking about this specific revolution, you find that, in many ways, it is similar to other revolutions you’ve recently heard about, such as reengineering, total quality management, activity-based costing or management, just-in-time management, time compression management, employee empowerment, benchmarking, lean manufacturing, economic value analysis, or broadbanding.1
How can so many revolutions — similar in many ways — be concurrent? First, some revolutionary improvement techniques are identified with problems that are limited to specific parts of the organization. Second, only a small subset of an organization’s members may understand the jargon of each method. Third, different strategies often require emphasis on different aspects of performance to which the specific improvement methods are directed. Organizations face the challenge of choosing from a plethora of methods that claim to effectively and efficiently reduce costs and improve service and value to customers. One way for the whole organization to improve is to merge methods, because each revolutionary method, by itself, may be ineffective or inefficient in parts of the organization. We present a framework that helps managers understand why this failure occurs. The framework also helps managers merge improvement methods. This leveraging of methods makes it possible to produce more... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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