Values of Quality Culture
Go to start of home page or Go to list of reviews
THE SIX VALUES OF A QUALITY CULTURE
Building a Culture to Develop Committed Employees, Delighted Customers, and Continuous Improvement
By John A. Woods CWL Publishing Enterprises Madison, Wisconsin Copyright © 1996 by John A. Woods, 3010 Irvington Way, Madison, WI 53713-3414, (608) 2733710, Fax: (608) 274-4554, E-Mail: jwoods@execpc.com. All rights reserved. Contact author for permission to reprint or to purchase additional copies. This article is printed here with the permission of John Woods.
THE SIX VALUES OF A QUALITY CULTURE
By John A. Woods This paper starts from a basic premise: All businesses are systems. What a business system does is take inputs from various suppliers, and transform these into outputs that customers will value. When your business does this well, your customers will want your company's outputs enough to purchase them at a price high enough for you to be profitable. As a system, a business has a lot of interacting parts that transform inputs into outputs. The way these parts interact makes up the system's transformation processes. These parts are interdependent and affect one another. Figure 1 is a way of illustrating how an organization operates as a system. The arrows are the processes. If you touch one, it will inevitably affect another and so on in a chain reaction throughout the system.
If you want the whole system to work well, you can't just focus on one part, optimize its performance, and expect what you did there to trickle down through the whole system. You have always got to consider the implications of any action for how it will affect everything else. So here is a crucial point for managing well: What you have to always think about is the whole system and its processes. Even if you are not aware of it, what you will be managing are processes. And if you are not aware of it, you are likely to do a poor job of it. You will cause waste and rework. You might make your
THE SIX VALUES OF A QUALITY CULTURE
Building a Culture to Develop Committed Employees, Delighted Customers, and Continuous Improvement
By John A. Woods CWL Publishing Enterprises Madison, Wisconsin Copyright © 1996 by John A. Woods, 3010 Irvington Way, Madison, WI 53713-3414, (608) 2733710, Fax: (608) 274-4554, E-Mail: jwoods@execpc.com. All rights reserved. Contact author for permission to reprint or to purchase additional copies. This article is printed here with the permission of John Woods.
THE SIX VALUES OF A QUALITY CULTURE
By John A. Woods This paper starts from a basic premise: All businesses are systems. What a business system does is take inputs from various suppliers, and transform these into outputs that customers will value. When your business does this well, your customers will want your company's outputs enough to purchase them at a price high enough for you to be profitable. As a system, a business has a lot of interacting parts that transform inputs into outputs. The way these parts interact makes up the system's transformation processes. These parts are interdependent and affect one another. Figure 1 is a way of illustrating how an organization operates as a system. The arrows are the processes. If you touch one, it will inevitably affect another and so on in a chain reaction throughout the system.
If you want the whole system to work well, you can't just focus on one part, optimize its performance, and expect what you did there to trickle down through the whole system. You have always got to consider the implications of any action for how it will affect everything else. So here is a crucial point for managing well: What you have to always think about is the whole system and its processes. Even if you are not aware of it, what you will be managing are processes. And if you are not aware of it, you are likely to do a poor job of it. You will cause waste and rework. You might make your