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Vanguard News – January 2010
Lean is mean in the car industry
Going back to the debacle that is ‘lean’, during the Christmas break I read a book all about how ‘lean’ has gone down (badly) with the workers in car manufacturing. It shows how ‘lean’ has been just another tool of management, used to control and exploit the workers. A complete tragedy, Ohno (the man who developed the Toyota Production System) would be shocked and appalled. In the 1950s Ohno secured a major transformation in industrial relations by committing to workers sharing the first fruits of success, putting them above customers and shareholders.
This blundering wrong-headed lean tools stuff has not only created antipathy among workers it has, more importantly, meant that manufacturers have failed to realise the benefits Ohno achieved.
The big mistakes in both the car industry and HMRC are to have kept control with management and the failure to see the organisation as a system. ‘Lean’, as applied, amounts to no more than a bit of process improvement in badly designed systems. The tool heads have a lot to answer for.
The book on the car industry is titled: ‘We sell our time no more, workers’ struggles against lean production in the British car industry’, Stewart et al, Pluto Press. I shall be recommending it to my students.
John Seddon
Author: "Systems Thinking in the Public Sector”, available from Triarchy Press: www.triarchypress.com and “Freedom from command and control: a better way to make the work work" available from Vanguard (www.systemsthinking.co.uk).. “Freedom from command and control” is also available in the US from: http://www.productivitypress.
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戴久永老師的分享
Enjoy this beautifully written story, whether true or fiction, but its very moving and inspirational.
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Peter 來訪 談些"法令遵守"等方面的事 用這篇當紀念
Group Gives Up Death Penalty Work
WASHINGTON
Sidebar
Adam Liptak’s column about the legal world appears weekly. Columnist Page »Last fall, the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago, pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it.
There were other important death penalty developments last year: the number of death sentences continued to fall, Ohio switched to a single chemical for lethal injections and New Mexico repealed its death penalty entirely. But not one of them was as significant as the institute’s move, which represents a tectonic shift in legal theory.
“The A.L.I. is important on a lot of topics,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “They were absolutely singular on this topic” — capital punishment — “because they were the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States.”
The institute is made up of about 4,000 judges, lawyers and law professors. It synthesizes and shapes the law in restatements and model codes that provide structure and coherence in a federal legal system that might otherwise consist of 50 different approaches to everything.
In 1962, as part of the Model Penal Code, the institute created the modern framework for the death penalty, one the Supreme Court largely adopted when it reinstituted capital punishment in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976. Several justices cited the standards the institute had developed as a model to be emulated by the states.
The institute’s recent decision to abandon the field was a compromise. Some members had asked the institute to take a stand against the death penalty as such. That effort failed.
Instead, the institute voted in October to disavow the structure it had created “in light of the current intractable institutional and structural obstacles to ensuring a minimally adequate system for administering capital punishment.”
That last sentence contains some pretty dense lawyer talk, but it can be untangled. What the institute was saying is that the capital justice system in the United States is irretrievably broken.
A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience had proved that the system could not reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment was plagued by racial disparities; was enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers were underpaid and some were incompetent; risked executing innocent people; and was undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.
Roger S. Clark, who teaches at the Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., and was one of the leaders of the movement to have the institute condemn the death penalty outright, said he was satisfied with the compromise. “Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”
The framework the institute developed in 1962 was an effort to make the death penalty less arbitrary. It proposed limiting capital crimes to murder and narrowing the categories of people eligible for the punishment. Most important, it gave juries a framework to decide whom to put to death, asking them to balance aggravating factors against mitigating ones.
The move to combat arbitrariness without giving up sensitivity to individual circumstances is known as “guided discretion,” which sounds good until you notice that it is a phrase at war with itself.
The Supreme Court’s capital justice jurisprudence since 1976 has only complicated things. Justice Harry A. Blackmun conceded in 1987 that “there perhaps is an inherent tension between the discretion accorded capital sentencing juries and the guidance for use of that discretion that is constitutionally required.”
That was an understatement, Justice Antonin Scalia said in 1990. “To acknowledge that ‘there perhaps is an inherent tension,’ ” he wrote, “is rather like saying that there was perhaps an inherent tension between the Allies and the Axis powers in World War II.”
Justice Scalia solved the problem by vowing never to throw out a death sentence on the ground that the sentencer’s discretion had been unconstitutionally restricted.
In 1994, Justice Blackmun came around to the view that “guided discretion” amounted to “irreconcilable constitutional commands.” But he drew a different conclusion than Justice Scalia had from the same premise, saying that “the death penalty cannot be administered in accord with our Constitution.” He said he would no longer “tinker with the machinery of death.” The institute came to essentially the same conclusion.
Some supporters of the death penalty said they welcomed the institute’s move. Capital sentencing “is so micromanaged by Supreme Court precedents that a model statute really serves very little function,” Kent Scheidegger of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation wrote in a blog posting. “We are perfectly O.K. with dumping it.”
Mr. Scheidegger expressed satisfaction that an effort to have the institute come out against the death penalty as such was defeated.
But opponents of the death penalty said the institute’s move represented a turning point.
“It’s very bad news for the continued legitimacy of the death penalty,” Professor Zimring said. “But it’s the kind of bad news that has many more implications for the long term than for next week or the next term of the Supreme Court.”
Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, said he recalled reading Model Penal Code as a first-year law student in 1970. “The death penalty was an abstract issue of little interest to me or my fellow students,” Professor Gross said. But he remembered being impressed by the institute’s work, saying, “I thought in passing that smarter people than I had done a sensible job of figuring out this tricky problem.”
Things will look different come September, Professor Gross said.
“Law students who take first-year criminal law from 2010 on,” he said, “will learn that this same group of smart lawyers and judges — the ones whose work they read every day — has said that the death penalty in the United States is a moral and practical failure.”
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12月31日傍晚﹐就在中國即將開始三天長週末慶祝2010年的到來之際﹐新華社報導說﹐上海質量技術監督部門的一項調查發現﹐上海熊貓乳品有限公司的部分奶粉和奶製品三聚氰胺含量超標。報導說﹐該公司已經關門停業﹐產品召回涉及七個省市﹐有三位高層管理人員被警方拘留。在午夜將近之際﹐新華社又用英文向讀者重復了這則報導。
此次受到三聚氰胺污染的牛奶成了2008毒牛奶事件令人心寒的再現﹐當時全球很多人對中國在食品安全上的承諾產生了質疑。在短短幾個月中﹐有六名嬰兒死亡﹐逾30萬兒童生病﹐大部分是因為食用了受到三聚氰胺污染的問題奶粉。
中國乳製品行業徹底根除三聚氰胺的使用從來都不是簡單的事情﹐原因是業內普遍存在向牛奶中摻入三聚氰胺的做法﹐這已經是一個公開的秘密﹐而且微量的三聚氰胺也仍是被允許的。三聚氰胺的特性貌似蛋白質。
不過﹐中國在2008年的毒牛奶事件之後承諾要加強管理。國家主席胡錦濤說﹐這類事件顯示出﹐一些官員喪失了原則性、對公眾利益的意識、責任感和對人民疾苦的關注。政府去年還通過了一項新的食品安全法﹐旨在彌補衛生制度中的漏洞。
這究竟帶來了多少變化﹐目前還是個未知數。
事實證明﹐甚至想從有關部門瞭解上海熊貓乳品有限公司案的更多情況都很難。據報導﹐上海質量技術監督局主 持對該公司的調查。不過﹐到目前為止﹐該部門尚未發表任何公開聲明。該部門發言人請《華爾街日報》到上海市衛生局尋求答案。在上海市衛生局﹐一位官員又指 向上海市食品藥品監督管理局﹐那裡的發言人建議《華爾街日報》給質量技術監督局或市政府打電話。在市政府新聞辦公室﹐一位發言人說﹐質量技術監督局才是負 責此事的部門。
國有媒體的報導引發了對政府在處理此案時緊迫程度的更多質疑。舉例來講﹐上海熊貓乳品有限公司的三名高管已經受到起訴﹐目前還在訴訟過程中﹐這通常不是一件簡單的事。此外﹐顯示這個過程將很漫長的還有﹐報導說有多個政府機構參與了對該公司的調查。上海熊貓乳品有限公司在2008年時就是22家被捲入醜聞的企業之一﹐並在之後一度短暫關閉。
週二又出現新的波折﹐《21世紀經濟報道》說﹐有文件顯示業內人士早在2009年4月就知道上海熊貓乳品有限公司使用了三聚氰胺。同一篇報導還說﹐去年11月﹐中國衛生部部長陳竺在共產黨內部會議上提到該公司的三聚氰胺問題。
報導為上海三聚氰胺問題早在上週之前就已浮出水面提供了新的證據。舉例來講﹐該報稱由於衛生部部長陳竺的發言﹐12月初溫州浙江熊貓乳品有限公司(Zhejiang Panda Dairy Products Co.)發表聲明﹐以便與上海熊貓乳品有限公司撇清關係。該公司的聲明和公司網站上的其他文章宣稱﹐儘管兩家乳製品企業有相同的名稱﹐它們並沒有關係。
另 外﹐據一位瞭解該行業的人士說﹐至少早在去年9月份﹐上海熊貓乳品有限公司就接受了有關三聚氰胺的調查。此人說﹐當時該公司倉庫里存有約1,000噸奶粉 ﹐價值約人民幣2,000萬元（合290萬美元）。此人說﹐該公司引入了三聚氰胺﹐部分是通過再加工受污染的煉乳﹐部分是通過從寧夏的一個關聯企業獲得的 原奶。
在新華社發表有關上海熊貓乳品有限公司問題乳製品的報導前六天﹐新華社發表了一篇新聞專題報導﹐討論乳製品行業整改情況。報導說﹐過去三聚氰胺被添加到牛奶里﹐以便讓牛奶以次充好﹐在三聚氰胺醜聞曝光後﹐不可能再銷售質量差的牛奶了。
James T. Areddy
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日本的職場比喻
しょうねん-ば しやう― 0 【正念場/性念場】
- (1)歌舞伎・浄瑠璃などで、主人公がその役の本質的性格（性根）を発揮させる最も重要な場面。性根場(しようねば)。
- (2)その人の真価を問われる大事な場面。重要な局面。
- ◆アクセント ： しょうねん-ば 0
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官方連夜應對黃河油污染事件要求確保下游水質安全--新聞中心_中華網2010年1月5日 ... 中新網1月5日電據水利部黃河水利委員會主辦的網站黃河網消息，黃委4日就陜西渭河油污染事件再次緊急會商，提出強化三道防線，確保黃河下游水質不受 ...
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這真的是有錢能使鬼推磨 文化的虛妄
"美國有線電視新聞CNN報導時，還跟各地駐外記者連線，請他們拿（杜拜塔）和當地最高建築比較，以彰顯（杜拜塔）高度。 CNN駐紐約記者說，（杜拜塔）比紐約帝國大廈高出一倍，帝國大廈只有443公尺，還不到（杜拜塔）的一半。CNN駐倫敦記者說，倫敦大笨鐘只有96公尺高，（杜 ..."
阿联酋虽然也遭遇到危机，负债累累，
[更多]
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世界上可能各行各業都有類似的神奇妙方
G-Spot
(171)
我去三總醫院
他們的辦公室真的是迷宮
周一周二有"奉麥茶" 有點人情味
他們有
宗旨 (mission)
願景 (vision)
核心價值 (value)
有意思的是 我以前服務過的DuPont 公司是採取:|
核心價值 (value)
願景 (vision)
宗旨 (mission)
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現在熱衷於中國的人 都應該讀讀 一個人的聖經 (高行健) 中共產黨的本質
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