「華人戴明學院」是戴明哲學的學習共同體 ,致力於淵博型智識系統的研究、推廣和運用。 The purpose of this blog is to advance the ideas and ideals of W. Edwards Deming.

2010年4月25日 星期日

Communications, “lean start-up”

鍾漢清,現在從事企業管理顧問。東海大學工業工程系畢業(1975),英國Essex大學統計暨作業研究碩士(1978)。曾兼任於東海大學建築研究所和化工系 ,並曾任職於飛利浦、工研院電子所、摩托羅拉、杜邦等公司 。擔任過工業工程、品管、工程、行銷、銷售、大中華巿場開發專案等 職能的主管。著有《品質成本管理》《台灣戴明圈》《轉型》;翻譯過 W. Edwards Deming《轉危為安》、J. M. Juran的《管理三部曲》、P. Schotes《戴明領導手冊》、B. Joiner《第四代管理》《精實革命》《戴明博士文選》《Simon 管理行為》等等。



品質、 生產力與組織效能 (Quality, Productivity and Organizational Effectiveness)

宗旨: 這個兩天(12小時)的課程,目的是希望幫助學員了解: 20世紀半葉發展出的新整合知識,即,如何促進組織的"品質、生產力與效能"



我將"品質、生產力與組織效能"用簡易的"鍾氏三角"來表示: "品質""生產力""組織效能"各為三角之頂點,各設計成一模組 (3小時、含一小時之小組演練或遊戲)

第一模組
綜述與組織效能: 開會技術(meeting technology)到一體團隊 (all-one-team)

第二模組 統計品管到品質三部曲: 規劃,控制與改善。
第三模組
精實 (LEAN)與豐田生產方式
第四模組
領導與開創/ 組織的轉型 ,持續改善 面面觀。探討我們的經歷和經驗/ 我所所知 道的台商之中國/亞洲廠之轉型經驗



Strategic Communications Means MBOs: Management

Viewpoint by Jorrian Gelink, Management Architect, WCW Columnist

“The most important thing about communication is to hear what isn’t being said.” – Peter Drucker

Improving management communication is a continuous and ongoing process across all organizations. The addition of the internet, web-conferencing, administrative assistants, technology such as the BlackBerry or software that uses “cloud” computing; all these tools increase efficiency but may have little or no impact on organizational effectiveness. The guaranteed result of communicating the wrong information faster is getting the wrong tasks done faster. The framework of effective and functional communication is through management by objectives.

Management by objectives is the allocation of tasks focused toward a single or multiple goals. In Stephen Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, this would be “Beginning with the End in Mind”. Without concrete goals the entire team from the executive level down to the front line can follow, you fall victim to “management by inertia”: management by the way the environment forces you to manage. Of course, allocating the right tasks and making sure it is executed comes down to effective communication.

Consider the two scenarios below:

Company ABC in the Food & Services Industry:
Goal: Not passed down properly. “Inertia” goal is to “work hard and be productive”.

Management Communication:

Manager: “All right Sabrina, what I need you to do today is just keep busy, keeping cooking food so we can fill orders. Go, go, go and if someone else needs help, go help them as well.”

End Result:

Sabrina: “What a rough day today, I pushed myself to the limit cooking all this food for four hours straight and by the end of the day, we had tons of leftovers! My manager told me to just throw it out and to get ready for another day tomorrow. I also fell behind cooking because I was told to help everyone around me; I can’t stand it when my tasks fall through because of others!”

Company X in the Hotel Industry:

Goal: Create a memorable experience for each and every guest.

Management Communication:

Manager: “All right William, let’s do what we always do best and be creative with our guests. Yesterday, you had a customer compliment regarding the time you took during your break to deliver a magazine to her door. She was ecstatic and when she checked out of her suite brought it to my attention! Re-create that experience today, and let me know how it goes.”

End Result:

William: “Had an amazing day today, receiving a customer compliment always brightens up my day. Work is a breeze, I love being creative and coming up with new things I can do to make our guests remember me positively forever. Our hotel does well too, I have been seeing more clients come in and we can barely keep our rooms vacant! That’s why I work here, to use my talents.”

It is clear from these two examples which company performs and makes effective use of their time. From a management and direct engagement perspective, it is straight-forward on which company has stronger engagement leading to stronger performance.

The objective needs to be a concrete goal that one can gain experience from, build on new skills, find new and better ways to execute and develop decision-making processes within the employees. This indirect learning of skills comes from the human intuition to constantly find engaging ways to complete what they are responsible and accountable for.

Management communicating effectively through management by objectives is the core piece that defines whether an organization will succeed or ultimately fail. The separation of what one likes to do and what the situation requires of you is one that depends on what your core objectives are, and how you communicate them.



****
Unboxed

The Rise of the Fleet-Footed Start-Up


ERIC RIES and Steven Blank think they have a better way to build a start-up, one that takes less time and money to try new ideas and find paying customers. They are leading proponents of the “lean start-up” — a fresh approach to creating companies that has attracted much attention in the last year or so among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technologists and investors.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Eric Ries, left, with Farbood Nivi of Grockit, an online education network. Early on, Mr. Ries says, companies must create something there is a real market for.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Steven Blank teaching at Berkeley. Since 1978, he has been a founder or early investor in eight start-up companies.

The concept is gaining a following beyond the Valley as well. “If it works, it will reduce failure rates for entrepreneurial ventures and boost innovation,” says Thomas R. Eisenmann, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “That’s a big deal for the economy.”

The term “lean start-up” was coined by Mr. Ries, 31, an engineer, entrepreneur and blogger. His inspiration, he says, was the lean manufacturing process, fine-tuned in Japanese factories decades ago and focused on eliminating any work or investment that doesn’t produce value for customers.

“This is lean manufacturing for start-ups,” explains Mr. Blank, 56, a serial entrepreneur.

Since 1978, he has been a founder or early employee in eight start-ups, both winners and losers. To cite a couple, Rocket Science Games, a once-promising video game maker, founded in 1993, cratered amid losses a few years later, while Epiphany, a business software company, founded in 1997, was acquired by a larger corporation for $329 million in 2005 — “one my grandchildren will be grateful for,” Mr. Blank notes.

Today, he advises start-up companies and teaches at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

Technology animates the lean start-up process. Free open-source programming tools and easily distributed Web-based software drive down the cost of developing new products and services. The early companies embracing the principles live largely on the Web, which makes it possible to measure and track customer behavior constantly and to invite suggestions and criticism.

Internet companies have steadily taken advantage of the falling costs of getting up and running — often spending just hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of the millions that were required several years ago. But the lean start-up formula adds management practices tailored to exploit the Web environment.

The concepts apply both to designing products and to developing a market, and emphasize an early and constant focus on customers. To be sure, the methods often build on the work of others.

In product development, for example, Mr. Ries is an enthusiast of so-called agile programming methods, which emphasize rapid development, small teams and constant improvement. But, he adds: “The agile practices have to be adapted, shifting the focus somewhat from generating stuff to learning about what customers will want. Most technology start-ups fail not because the technology doesn’t work, but because they are making something that there is not a real market for.”

So the lean playbook advises quick development of a “minimum viable product,” designed with the smallest set of features that will please some group of customers. Then, the start-up should continually experiment by tweaking its offering, seeing how the market responds and changing the product accordingly. Facebook, the giant social network, grew that way, starting with simple messaging services and then adding other features.

The goal, explains Mr. Blank, is to accelerate the pace of learning. “A start-up is a temporary organization designed to discover a profitable, scalable business model,” he says.

Mr. Ries points to his own experience as a study in contrasts between the traditional start-up model and the lean approach. He was a senior engineer at There.com, a 3-D virtual world, from 2001 to 2003. There.com raised $40 million and spent years in stealth mode, building impressive technology, he recalls. But it had so much invested in one technology path and one business plan that the company lost its ability to change, Mr. Ries says.

To switch course, Mr. Ries joined a founder of There.com, Will Harvey, and in 2004 they started a company called IMVU, a social network in which users chat online and create personalized avatars. By design, it raised no outside money in the early going. “I didn’t want us to have the freedom to go for years without customer feedback,” recalls Mr. Harvey.

IMVU began as a bootstrap operation, a forerunner of the lean start-up model. Its early revenue goals were just a few hundred dollars a month. (Users buy clothing and other virtual goods for their avatars.) Today, while There.com has folded, IMVU claims one million active users — and is profitable, says Mr. Harvey, the chairman.

Many young Internet businesses have embraced the lean start-up principles of beginning small and getting products into the marketplace quickly in pursuit of paying customers. Several gathered last week at a conference in San Francisco, including representatives from Grockit, an online education network; KISSmetrics, a Web site measurement business; and Dropbox, an online file storage and sharing service. Others represented PBworks (Web collaboration tools), Flowtown (software for social media marketing) and Aardvark (a social network search service, recently acquired by Google).

THE rise of smaller, fleet-footed companies in the lean start-up mold is also bringing changes in venture financing. These companies are typically funded with $500,000 or so from professional angel investors instead of traditional venture capital firms, which are geared toward investing millions at a time. The venture capital investment may well come later, when the companies need money for expansion.

But, according to some Silicon Valley veterans, this means a shrinking role for venture capitalists in seeking and backing promising young entrepreneurs. That vital task in the food chain of capitalism, they add, is increasingly being taken over by major angel investors like Ron Conway, Dave McClure and Mike Maples Jr.

“Venture capital has to reinvent itself for this world,” says Mitchell Kapor, an angel investor who has made 25 investments in lean start-up companies in the last two years.

2010年4月21日 星期三

台灣戴明圈 336-42


台灣戴明圈

342

经济学不是科学


4月的第二个周末,一群非常杰出的经济学家汇聚一堂,参加 了由乔治•索罗斯(George Soros)倡议的新经济思维研究所(Institute for New Economic Thinking)创立大会。面对最近这场危机中经济学的失败之处,他们扪心自问。失败在两个领域最为明显:现代金融经济学的基石——有效市场假说的失 效,以及近代宏观经济学理论的无用。

有效市场假说的核心思想是,价格是估算资产潜在价值的最佳表现形式。这个论点最近遭遇重创。美国房地产 泡沫促成了货币市场的繁荣与萧条。在泡沫之前,“新经济”一败涂地,而长期资本管理公司(Long-Term Capital Management)也几近崩溃,这家对冲基金从一开始就是金融经济学复杂性的最佳例证。

而当前高等经济学中教授的宏观经济学大体上是基于一种名为动态随机一般均衡(DSGE)的分析模式。这个乏味的名字本身就泄漏了天机:理论家们大多是在自说自话。在预测危机、分析危机进展和提供应对措施建议方面,他们的理论几乎一无是处。

近 期的经济政策激辩不仅在很大程度上忽视了动态随机一般均衡模型,而且与上世纪30年代的经济政策之辩有着惊人的相似之处,尽管最终的解决方式有所不同。被 引用最多的经济学家是约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯(John Maynard Keynes)和海曼•明斯基(Hyman Minsky),两者都已去世。

无论是有效市场假设还是动态随机 一般均衡模型,都与理性预期的概念有关——大概可以如下描述这个概念,即家庭和企业在做经济决定时仿佛掌握着关于这个世界的一切可知信息。如果你纳闷为何 这样一种难以置信的理念会被普遍接受,部分原因在于它的保守含义。根据理性预期理论,公司和家庭不仅与决策者知道的一样多,而且还能预料到政府的行动,因 此政府做到最好也不过是维持自身的可预测性。大多数经济政策都是无效的。

自由市场中的大部分干预手段亦是如此。有人认为那些购买次贷或基于 次贷的证券化产品的人之所以这么做是因为掌握的信息比卖家少,这种观点是没有存在空间的。当高盛(Goldman Sachs)的男男女女做着“上帝的工作”时,他们赚得的利润并非来自信息优势,而是他们服务的价值。政府在经济中扮演的角色是保证市场运转。

这 些理论的吸引力远远超越了富人和保守派阶层,其中有着更深层次的原因。如果说有一种简单的、单一的、放诸四海而皆准的经济行为学理论,那么由理性预期、有 效市场假说和动态随机一般均衡模型所组成的那一套论点就是那种理论。任何其他描述这个世界的方式都必须认识到人们的行动由他们的信念和感知(难免会出错) 所决定,必须承认一切皆无定数,必须适应行动对于不断变化的社会及文化准则的依赖。这样一来,经济模型就无法放诸四海而皆准:它们必须因地制宜。

标 准方法有着科学的外表,因为它能根据少数几种原理得出清晰的预测。但这只是表象而已,因为这些预测往往是错误的。在投资者和决策者所面对的真实环境中,行 动确实取决于信念和感知、必须应对不确定性、也是社会背景的产物。没有什么放诸四海而皆准的经济理论,而新经济思维必然应该是兼收并蓄的。这种见解就是凯 恩斯最伟大的遗产。

约翰•凯是新经济思维研究所顾问委员会成员之一。

译者/管婧

Economics may be dismal, but it is not a science


A remarkably distinguished group of economists gathered last weekend for the inaugural conference of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, an initiative of George Soros. They were soul searching over the failures of economics in the recent crisis. Such failures are most evident in two areas: the inadequacies of the efficient market hypothesis, the bedrock of modern financial economics, and the irrelevance of recent macroeconomic theory.

The central idea of the efficient market hypothesis is that prices represent the best estimate of the underlying value of assets. This thesis has recently taken a battering. The boom and bust in the money markets was precipitated by a US housing bubble. That bubble followed the New Economy fiasco and was preceded by the near-failure of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund designed to showcase sophisticated financial economics.

The macroeconomics taught in advanced economics today is largely based on analysis labelled dynamic stochastic general equilibrium. The unappealing title gives the game away: the theorists are mostly talking to themselves. Their theories proved virtually useless in anticipating the crisis, analysing its development and recommending measures to deal with it.

Recent economic policy debates have not only largely ignored DSGE, but have also been remarkably similar to the economic policy debates of the 1930s, although they have been resolved differently. The economists quoted most often are John Maynard Keynes and Hyman Minsky, both of whom are dead.


Both the efficient market hypothesis and DSGE are associated with the idea of rational expectations - which might be described as the idea that households and companies make economic decisions as if they had available to them all the information about the world that might be available. If you wonder why such an implausible notion has won wide acceptance, part of the explanation lies in its conservative implications. Under rational expectations, not only do firms and households know already as much as policymakers, but they also anticipate what the government itself will do, so the best thing government can do is to remain predictable. Most economic policy is futile.

So is most interference in free markets. There is no room for the notion that people bought subprime mortgages or securitised products based on them because they knew less than the people who sold them. When the men and women of Goldman Sachs perform "God's work", the profits they make come not from information advantages, but from the value of their services. The economic role of government is to keep markets working.

These theories have appeal beyond the ranks of the rich and conservative for a deeper reason. If there were a simple, single, universal theory of economic behaviour, then the suite of arguments comprising rational expectations, efficient markets and DSEG would be that theory. Any other way of describing the world would have to recognise that what people do depends on their fallible beliefs and perceptions, would have to acknowledge uncertainty, and would accommodate the dependence of actions on changing social and cultural norms. Models could not then be universal: they would have to be specific to contexts.

The standard approach has the appearance of science in its ability to generate clear predictions from a small number of axioms. But only the appearance, since these predictions are mostly false. The environment actually faced by investors and economic policymakers is one in which actions do depend on beliefs and perceptions, must deal with uncertainty and are the product of a social context. There is no universal economic theory, and new economic thinking must necessarily be eclectic. That insight is Keynes's greatest legacy.

John Kay is a member of the advisory board of the Institute for New Economic Thinking


341
說的 跟做的 可能各一套
巧言令色

雙英辯/馬:台灣補藥 蔡:糖衣毒藥

自由時報 - ‎6小時之前‎
〔記者施曉光/台北報導〕雙英辯論第四輪交互詰問中,先提問的馬英九總統主攻綠營口口聲聲政府資訊不透明,卻不斷杯葛行政部門報告,立場矛盾,進而強調兩岸開放政策是補藥,絕非所謂「包裹糖衣的毒藥」;民進黨主席蔡英文反批馬政府拒絕提供有用資訊,反諷馬總統 ...

340

Why Do Firms Use Non-Linear Incentive Schemes? Experimental Evidence on Sorting and Overconfidence

Published:April 21, 2010
Paper Released:March 2010
Authors:Ian Larkin and Stephen Leider

Executive Summary:

The use of "non-linear" performance-based incentive contracts is very common in many business environments. The most well-known example is salesperson compensation, though many other types of performance-based pay, including stock options, bonus systems based on defined metrics, and pay based on subjective performance, often exhibit non-linear characteristics. Research has demonstrated that non-linear incentives are highly distortionary because employees manipulate their work in order to maximize their pay. While some scholars have recommended that companies stop using non-linear incentives, little research has been done to investigate the possible benefits of non-linear schemes. In this paper, HBS professor Ian Larkin and Ross School of Business professor Stephen Leider (HBS PhD '09) explore the role that the behavioral bias of overconfidence may play in explaining the prevalence of non-linear incentive schemes. They conclude that the linearity or non-linearity of an incentive system could play an important role in sorting employees according to their level of confidence; in addition, there may be three possible benefits to having overconfident employees. Key concepts include:

  • First, overconfidence is valuable for certain job functions; for example, salespeople lose deals much more frequently than they win them, and being overconfident may help them be effective despite the many failures they go through.
  • Second, absent non-linear contracts, employers and overconfident employees may have a difficult time agreeing to a compensation scheme in the first place. Non-linear systems allow employers and employees with fundamentally different beliefs form compensation agreements.
  • Third, the non-linearity of an incentive system may allow firms to lower their wage bill. A convex scheme, for example, may allow firms to take advantage of overconfident employees' systematic and persistent bias toward believing they will perform well.
  • The study confirms recent findings in psychology literature that overconfidence is not an individual trait so much as a trait around a specific task.

Abstract

Non-linear incentive schemes are commonly used to determine employee pay, despite their distortionary impact. We investigate possible reasons for their widespread use by examining the relationship between convex pay schemes and overconfidence. In a laboratory experiment, subjects chose between a piece rate and a convex pay scheme. We find that overconfident subjects are more likely than others to choose the convex scheme, even when it leads to lower pay. Overconfident subjects also persist in making the mistake despite clear feedback. These results suggest non-linear pay schemes may help companies select and retain overconfident workers, and may reduce the wage bill. 35 pages.

Paper Information



339
台大有一領袖/領導學程 在圖書館搞什麼 "嶺悟展" 如攀登喜馬拉亞山等等

內政部徴"增子150萬"

這些正如各地開花的"ECFA"廣告

都是造假 反教育

338


The Census Bureau is hiring a million or more people to assist with the 2010 count. It is temporary work, but it pays well. With national unemployment at nearly 10 percent, it looks like an excellent opportunity. That is unless you are one of the nearly 50 million Americans with any arrest or conviction on record.

A new class-action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of applicants who say they were unfairly turned down for census jobs based on an opaque screening policy that relies on F.B.I. checks for any criminal histories. Those checks are notoriously unreliable. A 2006 federal report found that half of them were inaccurate or out of date.

The Census Bureau is vague about what makes someone ineligible. In Congressional testimony, it suggested that it is excluding people who have been convicted of crimes involving violence and dishonesty. The bureau’s Web site seems to say that applicants whose background checks turn up any arrest — no matter how trivial, distant in time, irrelevant to the job — receive a letter advising them that they can remain eligible only if they produce “official court documentation” bearing on the case within 30 days. Incredibly, the letter does not identify the alleged criminal activity. Applicants must prove eligibility, even if they don’t know why they were flagged.

Official court records are often unobtainable for the millions of people whose convictions have been sealed or expunged or for people who have been arrested and released because of lack of evidence or mistaken arrest. This problem falls heaviest on black and Hispanic communities where stop-and-frisk policies and indiscriminate arrests are common.

The hiring problem is not limited to the Census Bureau. After 9/11, Congress required port workers to undergo F.B.I. background checks to keep their jobs. Last year, a study by the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group for workers, found that the government had mistakenly denied credentials to tens of thousands of those workers.

States and cities are wisely revising employment policies. The federal government needs to develop a fair and transparent screening system for job applicants and a more effective appeals process. Congress must also require the F.B.I. to verify the criminal records — and find missing data before issuing background checks.


337

World Renowned Deming Seminar Comes to Los Angeles: June 7-9, 2010

Learn Proven Ways to Survive, Thrive and Build Customer Loyalty

LOS ANGELES, April 20 /PRNewswire/ -- In search of a proven method that will transform your organization and your ability to innovate and exceed expectations? For decades, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a name synonymous with quality, taught companies, governments, and businesses around the world how to compete in a world of shrinking margins and increased competition. Dr. Deming's approach to business pulled an entire nation out of crisis.

On June 7-9, The W. Edwards Deming Institute® will present "Out of the Crisis," its 21st century management seminar to Los Angeles. This signature seminar provides the knowledge to transform your organization for the challenges of today while being prepared for those of tomorrow.

"Deming's practices are timeless and as relevant today as they were decades ago, if not more," asserts Los Angeles based business pioneer, Robert Rodin, former CEO of Marshall Industries. After Rodin met Dr. Deming in 1989, he transformed his conventionally successful $500 million company into a $2 billion global competitor. His industrial electronics distribution and supply company grew to 2500 employees and 77,000 customers in 36 countries. "Deming showed me that we could break down the old barriers, reinvent ourselves and integrate the voice of the customer into every corner of our business while preparing ourselves for a future you can't predict," added Rodin.

Why are Deming's ideas the answer? Dr. Deming ignited the worldwide "quality" revolution. In 1950, Japanese industry was in ruins and "Made in Japan" was synonymous with poor quality. In an effort to revive their ailing economy, the Japanese government invited Dr. Deming to Japan. After Japanese executives attended his many seminars, they revitalized their industry and their economy. In recognition, the Emperor of Japan awarded Deming the highly coveted Second Order Medal of the Sacred Treasure. In 1980, a highly acclaimed NBC documentary introduced his principles to America's greatest companies. Deming became the voice of quality worldwide.

The Deming Institute seminar identifies practices that create problems in organizations and then introduces attendees to management practices that are both proven and revolutionary – ones that will lead them on a path to short-term recovery and long-term sustainability.

The seminar is designed for a broad range of executives, managers and team leaders eager to elevate productivity, think strategically and create a sustained competitive advantage. "Deming understood that quality was not the answer but the outcome of better leadership, management and practice," says Deming's grandson, Kevin Edwards Cahill, Vice President of The W. Edwards Deming Institute®. "Whether you are a start-up or established organization, these proven management practices will profoundly affect your bottom line. My grandfather's legacy lives through this seminar and I encourage you to sign up today."

"Out of the Crisis, Los Angeles," a two-and-a-half day event will feature Deming Institute trained facilitators Kelly Allan, Senior Associate of Kelly Allan Associates, Ltd and Jussi Kyllonen, Quality Systems Manager at Eaton Corporation Aerospace Operations. The seminar will be held on June 7-9, 2010 at the Ayres Hotel Hawthorne / Manhattan Beach / LAX. (14400 Hindry Ave. Hawthorne, CA, 90250) For more information, or to register, visit www.deming.org.

The W. Edwards Deming Institute® is a not for profit 501(c)3 organization incorporated in Washington, DC with offices in Los Angeles, CA. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090612/NE31805LOGO )

SOURCE The W. Edwards Deming Institute

336

海國圖志

主要作者 清 魏 源
書名/作者 海國圖志 一百卷(卷四十四至卷一百) / (清)魏源撰
出版項 上海市 : 上海古籍, 1995序-

總圖1樓四庫全書專區 082.1 2426 v.744

《海國圖志》已有螺絲釘一詞
p.546 火板圖中說明

2010年4月13日 星期二

台灣戴明圈 330-35

台灣戴明圈


335

Why Iceland's Minor Volcano Is a Major Problem By Bryan Walsh The eruption in Iceland hardly compares with some of the major ones in history. But in our interconnected modern world, the impact can be massive

334

作業定義
消基會:牛橫膈膜是內臟牛舌風險亦高
自由時報
〔中央社〕美牛輸台爭議不斷,消基會董事長謝天仁指出,牛的橫膈膜屬於牛內臟,牛舌風險也很高,OIE 正考慮將牛睪丸列為高風險範圍;政府認為橫膈膜不是內臟,真是「不可思議」。 中華民國消費者文教基金會董事長謝天仁今天接受中央社記者訪問時指出,立法院今年初修正 ...


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Toyota recalls 600000 Sienna minivans
The Associated Press
Separately, Toyota said its engineers in Japan had duplicated the same results of tests that led Consumer Reports to issue a rare "don't buy" warning on the ...


332

Toyota Agrees Lexus S.U.V. Has Problem With Handling

Toyota said Friday that its engineers had duplicated the errant slide that prompted Consumer Reports to issue a “don’t buy” warning on the 2010 Lexus GX 460 and acknowledged that the vehicle had a safety problem.

A Lexus spokesman, Bill Kwong, said the engineers in Japan had “duplicated Consumer Reports’ results on the GX 460, and they are currently evaluating potential remedies, but at this point there are no details of what the remedy is.”

On Tuesday, Consumer Reports announced that its tests had uncovered a dangerous handling problem that caused the rear end of the GX 460 to swerve, putting the sport utility vehicle at risk for a rollover. “When pushed to its limits on our track’s handling course,” the magazine wrote on its Web site, “the rear of the GX we bought slid out until the vehicle was almost sideways before the electronic stability control system was able to regain control.”

Mr. Kwong said Friday that the automaker “definitely” considered the tail sliding to be a safety issue and was “very concerned.” He said Toyota hoped to have the problem isolated in no more than a week.

About 12 hours after the magazine publicized the problem, Lexus told its dealers to stop selling the GX 460 and started an investigation. On Thursday, Toyota said it was conducting safety inspections of all its S.U.V. models. Consumer Reports said that on other S.U.V.’s it tested — including models from Lexus and Toyota — the electronic stability control quickly caught the slide.

Separately, Toyota has until Monday to tell the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration whether it will contest a proposed $16.4 million fine over reportedly failing to disclose information concerning a sticky pedal recall. If Toyota decides to fight the fine, the agency could take it to court.

Elsewhere, the House Energy and Commerce Committee said that it would hold a second hearing on Toyota on May 6 to continue its investigation of whether electronic systems played a role in Toyota’s sticky-pedal recalls. The committee’s first hearingwas in late February.

The committee has invited James E. Lentz, the president of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., to testify, as he did at the original hearing. Lawmakers also asked Toyota to provide documents concerning tests by Exponent, an engineering consulting firm, into electronic systems. It is seeking the documents by April 26.

Siennas Are Recalled

WASHINGTON (AP) — Toyota said on Friday that it was recalling 600,000 Sienna minivans sold in the United States to address potential rusting spare tire cables that could break and create a road hazard.

Toyota said its latest recall covered the 1998-2010 model year Siennas with two-wheel drive that have been sold or registered in 20 cold-climate states and the District of Columbia. Toyota said road salt could cause the carrier cable that holds the spare tire to rust and break, allowing the tire to tumble onto the road.

Toyota said it was unaware of any accidents or injuries. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it had received six complaints of spare tires falling off Siennas.

Micheline Maynard contributed reporting.



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1 in 3 Americans Failed to Return Census Forms
By SAM ROBERTS
Nearly one in three Americans failed to return their census questionnaires by Friday’s official deadline, the Census Bureau said.

More forms were expected to be received over the weekend. Census workers will not begin going door to door until May 1 to count people who did not return their questionnaires by mail.

As of early Friday, the mail participation rate was 68 percent. The mail participation rate, which the bureau is using this year for the first time, is the percentage of forms mailed back by households that received them.

Unlike the mail response rate, which the census used in earlier counts, it excludes forms returned by the postal service as undeliverable, often because a house or apartment was vacant. The mail response rate was 67 percent in 2000. If the undeliverable forms had been excluded then, the mail participation rate would have been 72 percent.

Final rates for this year’s count will not be posted until early May, so it was unclear whether this year’s unprecedented publicity and marketing campaigns had reversed a decades-long decline.

Wisconsin logged the highest participation rate of any state, 78 percent, followed by Minnesota (76 percent) and Iowa (75 percent). The lowest rates were in New Mexico (59 percent) and Louisiana (60 percent). Livonia, Mich., recorded the highest rate, 85 percent, among places with 50,000 or more people.

An analysis by the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York found that 10 percent of counties had exceeded their 2000 rates by five percentage points or more. Some of the urban neighborhoods typically considered hardest to count appear to have been among the highest-rated areas this time.

The research center said the gains might be a result of the Census Bureau’s advertising campaign and community outreach as well as changing demographics.

In big cities, predominantly black areas tended to have lower participation rates than mostly white ones. Detroit was an exception. While Hispanic areas generally logged lower participation rates, that was not the case in Miami, Newark and New York.



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Welcome to MarvinWeisbord.com
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After years of answering requests one at a time, I am posting some articles, book excerpts and video clips that I have assembled over the years. This web site identifies people, values, theories, research, and methods related to organization development and social change that I've come to appreciate since 1969. To date I have posted a bibliography of books and articles, a brief personal history, downloadable copies of articles and speeches, and excerpts from Productive Workplaces Revisited, published by Jossey-Bass/Wiley in 2004. I am building this site over an 18 month period, starting in 2005, with help from technology consultant Thomas Forstik.

For those who want to get copies of books or videos, I include links to relevant web sites. Sales of these materials support the work of Future Search Network (FSN), an international non-profit collaboration of 350 colleagues dedicated to community service and learning. FSN makes planning services affordable worldwide in all cultures and languages. I am a co-director of the Network, which enables me to use all of my past experience to support worthy work around the world.

If any of this material inspires you, I hope you will consider joining Future Search Network. You'll have a chance to be part of a global community of diverse people who value working together to create more open, cooperative, and sustainable societies. See how to join at www.futuresearch.net.

--Marvin Weisbord

2010年4月12日 星期一

Toyota Delayed a U.S. Recall, Documents Show/Inside Toyota, Executives Trade Blame Over Debacle



Inside Toyota, Executives Trade Blame Over Debacle


Toyota Motor Corp.'s quality crisis is exposing -- and exacerbating -- a long-simmering internal feud. The battle pits the founding Toyoda family against a group of professional managers, each blaming the other for the auto maker's woes.

Behind the scenes in recent weeks, the skirmishing has grown intense. President Akio Toyoda, the 53-year-old grandson of the founder, has tried to push out one of the nonfamily executives: his predecessor as president, Katsuaki Watanabe, now vice chairman.

Not long after the company made one of its massive safety recalls in mid-January, Mr. Toyoda suggested to Mr. Watanabe, through an intermediary, that the former president leave the auto giant and instead run a Toyota affiliate, according to an executive who says he was told about the move by Mr. Toyoda.

Mr. Watanabe refused.

The standoff, which hasn't been reported before, is a dramatic example of how the old split between the two camps is bubbling to the surface amid Toyota's crisis. The feud is a distraction for a divided leadership as officials struggle to regain their footing after three months of attacks unprecedented in the company's 75-year history.

Mr. Toyoda and his allies have been saying openly that when he took the top job last year after a 15-year hiatus for the Toyoda clan, he inherited a company weakened by nonfamily predecessors who sacrificed quality for faster growth and fatter margins.

The problems arose when 'some people just got too big-headed and focused too excessively on profit,' Mr. Toyoda said at a Beijing news conference in March. He acknowledged the 'ultimate responsibility for mistakes . . . lies in me.'

A week earlier, Jim Press -- once the top Toyota executive in the U.S. before he jumped to a rival auto maker -- issued a statement declaring: 'The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-family, financially oriented pirates.'

Those executives 'didn't have the character to maintain a customer-first focus. Akio does,' said Mr. Press, who had a run-in with nonfamily Japanese bosses several years ago.

A Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment on the infighting, saying: 'We do not discuss executive changes unless they are formally decided.' She declined to comment on the statements by Messrs. Toyoda and Press, or to make Mr. Watanabe available for comment.

Privately, the nonfamily managers have been waging their own campaign within the Toyota group. They say Mr. Toyoda never publicly opposed their profit-growth strategy when the company was widely praised for making big money and surpassing General Motors Corp. to become the world's No. 1 auto maker. They say Toyota's current troubles are less a quality crisis and more a management and public-relations crisis of Mr. Toyoda's making, reflecting their longstanding warnings that he wasn't ready to run a global corporation.

'Is Akio ducking criticism of being a beneficiary of nepotism by accusing us and trying to justify his ascendancy to the top job?' one of Mr. Watanabe's top aides said. 'One of our biggest social responsibilities is to generate profits and pay taxes. To criticize the company's effort to maximize profits and thus taxes is just complete nonsense.'

Hiroshi Okuda, a nonfamily president who ran the company from 1995 through 1999, has told at least two associates since the recalls of cars involved in sudden acceleration incidents earlier this year: 'Akio needs to go.' The 77-year-old remains a key company adviser even though he gave up his board seat last year.

Toyota declined to make Mr. Okuda available for comment. The Toyota spokeswoman declined to comment.

Takahiro Fujimoto, a professor of economics at Tokyo University who has studied Toyota extensively, says airing problems openly is very much part of Toyota's corporate culture focused on kaizen, or continuous improvement. 'But it's highly unusual for anybody inside Toyota to publicly criticize certain individuals by name,' or to criticize in a way that it's easy for anybody to identify the targets.

The feud dates to the mid-1990s, when the family relinquished control of the chief executive's office for the first time since Eiji Toyoda, the cousin of the founder, became president in 1967. Non-Toyodas also ran the company from 1950-67.

By the time Akio's uncle, Tatsuro, stepped down as president in 1995, after a stroke, the company was losing market share and risked posting its first loss since 1950. It was vulnerable to a weak Japanese economy, trade friction with the U.S., and a strong Japanese currency that crimped exports.

A series of non-Toyodas took the helm, beginning with Mr. Okuda in 1995 and ending with Mr. Watanabe in 2009. During their terms, the company revived financially and emerged as one of the most admired and studied companies in the world.

The gist of the Okuda-Watanabe strategy was to take Toyota's globalization efforts, launched under the previous generation of family management, to new levels. Even though the company had begun to build factories in the U.S. and other markets in the 1980s, it still was seen as largely insular and Japan-focused.

In 1996, Mr. Okuda and aides unveiled a new strategy dubbed the '2005 Vision.' They aimed to retool the auto maker over the coming decade, growing rapidly while relying less on exports and more on factories producing locally in target markets, from Argentina to Thailand to the U.S. Mr. Watanabe was one of the authors of the plan.

To realize this 10-year vision, the executives devised interim 'global master plans' to assign resources efficiently to different divisions, along with 'global profit management' plans that required sales executives around the world to attain certain profitability goals.

The 2005 Vision also pushed Toyota to implement kakushin, or revolutionary innovations, in vehicle design and manufacturing. That included efficiency drives to reduce costs, not only through conventional means, such as simplifying designs and using cheaper materials, but also by changing the way cars are engineered. For example, engineers were pushed to combine functions into fewer parts and systems. Their aim: cut the number of components in a car by half.

In 2002, the plan morphed into the '2010 Vision,' aiming for 15% global market share by the early 2010s, an ambitious jump from the 10% mark Toyota had at the time. Toyota has yet to achieve this goal. Its consolidated group market share rose to as high as about 13% in 2008, according to CSM Worldwide, a consulting firm that tracks auto makers.

The effects of those measures were phenomenal. Starting around 2000, the company's global sales began growing by up to 600,000 vehicles a year, more than the annual overall volume achieved by Volvo.

During this 15-year non-family reign, Toyota achieved other milestones: operating profit margins zoomed to an industry-leading high of 8.6%. In 2008, Toyota displaced GM as the world's biggest auto maker by unit sales.

As part of his strategy, Mr. Okuda sought to diminish the family's role. According to executives close to him, Mr. Okuda said founding-family dominance was an outdated concept -- especially when the family controlled less than 2% of the stock in the publicly traded company.

At the peak of his power, Mr. Okuda publicly was frank about that belief. 'The Toyoda family will eventually become a 'shrine' to the company's foundation, to which we will pay respect once a year,' he told The Wall Street Journal in a 2000 interview.

Asked then about future prospects for Mr. Toyoda, then a 43-year-old general manager, Mr. Okuda said: 'Nepotism just doesn't belong in our future.' He elaborated: 'Akio-class talents are rolling around all over Toyota, like so many potatoes.'

At the time, Mr. Toyoda seemed to have been sidelined. When he was assigned to lead Toyota's Chinese operations in 2001, China was still a backwater in Toyota's global strategy. Mr. Okuda, by then Toyota chairman, likened the job to 'mopping the floors' -- a safe place for grooming a scion with more ambition than experience, according to a separate Journal interview in 2003.

But Mr. Toyoda fixed the troubled Chinese subsidiary and put it on a path for growth. He was then promoted in 2005 to the position of executive vice president, where he had broad responsibilities, including quality, product management, purchasing and global sales.

Even as he climbed the ladder, Mr. Toyoda said little in top management meetings, according to some nonfamily executives. As Toyota made progress, the non-family executives began dismissing Mr. Toyoda and treated him as a not-so-bright spoiled rich kid, say several non-family managers.

Executives close to Mr. Toyoda dispute the notion that he was overpowered by top management. While the company's financial reports were improving, a number of vehicle recalls signalled that its famed quality was slipping, and Mr. Toyoda began to sound the warning bell. On Dec. 2, 2005, the end of the year when Mr. Okuda's 10-year vision was coming to fruition, Mr. Toyoda gave an unpublicized, internal speech questioning the new direction.

Talking to engineers and mid-level executives, Mr. Toyoda said the rapid expansion exceeded the company's ability to assure the quality and reliability of each model. He called on the engineers, seated inside an auditorium at Toyota's global headquarters, to shift their mindset and attain the 'resolve to make a big turn from emphasizing volume to quality,' according to a summary of the speech reviewed by the Journal.

Top executives at the time say Mr. Toyoda never took such complaints directly to them.

In 2008, the question of family vs. nonfamily management came to a head as Mr. Watanabe was preparing to retire as chief executive. Mr. Okuda, then a board member, angled for a close aide, another nonfamily executive, to take the job. Shoichiro Toyoda, a former president who remained an influential adviser, weighed in for Akio, his son, according to senior Toyota executives.

In January 2009, the company announced Akio Toyoda would replace Mr. Watanabe as president in June. Taking charge at 53 years old, Mr. Toyoda became Toyota's youngest chief executive since his grandfather became president in 1941 at age 47.

The younger Mr. Toyoda declared as one of his first priorities undoing many of his predecessor's policies. He began by signaling to underlings that he didn't share Mr. Watanabe's informal goal of hitting two trillion yen or more in annual operating income. He immediately killed the 'global profit management' plan, associates say.

The reality of Toyota's quality problems -- the main battleground inside the company today -- is a bit ambiguous.

Two separate surveys conducted by J.D. Power & Associates show the Toyota brand quality has actually improved over the past decade, measured by a decline in the rate of owner complaints. This occurred even as the number of vehicles the company recalled around the world skyrocketed in that time.

The surveys also show that Toyota rivals improved faster. In 2000, Toyota's luxury brand Lexus placed first in quality rankings for used-car owners, while the Toyota brand ranked fourth. By 2009, Lexus fell from the top spot, ranking behind Buick and Jaguar, while the Toyota brand again placed fourth. In quality rankings for new-car owners, the Toyota brand in 2000 tied with BMW for fourth. In 2009, Toyota ranked sixth.

Mr. Toyoda's supporters blame the slippage in relative quality rankings -- as well as the sharp rise in recalls -- on the company's previous non-family managers. It takes two to three years to develop a new car, so the models experiencing problems were developed before Akio Toyoda took the helm last June.

The nonfamily executives acknowledge they made some mistakes. One says a large number of inexperienced contract engineers hired from outside agencies -- an effort to save money as they tried to boost engineering capacity -- led to at least some of the increase in quality glitches.

But the non-family managers blame Mr. Toyoda's management style -- both external and internal -- as much as anything for letting the defects turn from a fixable problem into a full crisis.

Mr. Toyoda's in-house detractors say the president has created an informal team of loyalists, making it tough for managers trying to communicate through the formal channels. One nonfamily manager says the current executive structure operates like a 'shadow management team,' doubling up information and management.

In terms of handling the American public, politicians and press, they say Mr. Toyoda was slow to address publicly the controversy. And when he did finally speak out, they say, his statements were widely criticized as vague and halting.

Mr. Toyoda's supporters say, on the contrary, he's been clear and direct about the direction he wants to follow. At a press conference last month, Mr. Toyoda said the previous expansion push may have caused it to scrimp on quality, compromising its just-in-time production system, for example. 'I would like to make sure we re-embrace those basics and rebuild the foundation of Toyota and its production system,' he said.

Norihiko Shirouzu

2010年04月14日12:18
豐田管理層派系之爭的淵源
Bloomberg News
豐田總裁豐田章男上個月在公司總部的一次會議上發言。
田汽車公司(Toyota Motor Corp.)的質量危機暴露並加劇了由來已久的內部不和。這場較量使豐田創始家族與一批職業管理人員對立起來﹐雙方都指責對方令公司陷入了困境。

近幾週來﹐雙方的紛爭暗中變得激烈起來。豐田公司創始人53歲的孫子、現任豐田總裁豐田章男(Akio Toyoda)試圖將一位非豐田家族成員高管擠出管理層──前任總裁、現在的副董事長渡邊捷昭(Katsuaki Watanabe)。

據一位自稱從豐田章男處得知這一情況的高管說﹐在1月中旬豐田因安全問題進行了大規模召回之後不久﹐豐田章男通過一位中間人建議渡邊捷昭離開豐田﹐轉去運營豐田的一家關聯企業。

渡邊捷昭拒絕了豐田章男的建議。

豐田的質量危機凸顯並加劇了該公司長期以來的內部派系鬥爭。豐田創始人家族成員與一些外姓職業高管處於對立態勢,他們相互指責是對方給公司帶來了如今的厄運。
以前從未報導過的僵局凸顯出﹐在豐田遭遇危機之際﹐兩個陣營之間舊有的分歧開始浮出水面。在豐田75年曆史上前所未有的危機之後三個月﹐公司高管們努力重新站穩腳跟﹐而內部不和則分散了分裂的領導層的精力。

豐田章男及其盟友一直公開表示﹐當他去年成為15年來首位豐田家族成員總裁後﹐他繼承的是一家在非家族成員前任總裁們手中變得羸弱的企業﹐那些總裁犧牲了質量來換取更快的增長和更高的利潤率。

豐田章男3月份在北京的一次新聞發佈會上說﹐當有些人變得過於自負、過於專注利潤的時候﹐問題就出現了。他承認﹐失誤的最終責任在自己身上。

在那之前一週﹐曾擔任豐田公司駐美國高管、之後跳槽到一家競爭對手公司的普萊斯(Jim Press)發表了一份聲明說﹐他們的問題根源在於﹐這家公司幾年前被反豐田家族、以財務為導向的海盜劫持了。

普萊斯說﹐這些高管“沒有堅持客戶第一的品質”﹐而豐田章男則具備這種品質。普萊斯幾年前與非豐田家族日本高管之間發生過口角。

豐田發言人拒絕就內部不和發表置評。她說﹐除非高管人事變動正式確定﹐否則我們不會討論此事。她拒絕就豐田章男和普萊斯的聲明置評﹐也拒絕安排渡邊捷昭發表置評。

私 下裡﹐非豐田家族管理人員一直在豐田集團內部開展自己的宣傳活動。他們說﹐當公司因大幅盈利、超過通用汽車公司(General Motors Corp.)成為全球第一大汽車生產商而獲得普遍讚譽的時候﹐豐田章男從未公開反對過他們利潤增長的戰略。他們說﹐豐田公司目前的困境與其說是質量危機﹐ 不如說是豐田章男造成的管理和公關危機﹐折射出他們一直以來認為豐田章男沒有準備好運營一家全球企業的警告。

渡邊捷昭的高級助手之一說﹐豐田章男是否在通過指責我們、試圖給他擔任總裁一職尋找合理的理由﹐而逃避外界認為他是裙帶關係受益者的批評?我們最大的社會責任之一是盈利和納稅。批評豐田公司最大化利潤和納稅的努力﹐純粹是無稽之談。

今年早些時候豐田因突然加速問題而召回汽車以來﹐曾在1995年至1999年擔任豐田公司總裁的非豐田家族人士奧田碩(Hiroshi Okuda)對至少兩名助手說過﹐豐田章男必須離開。77歲的奧田碩去年放棄了董事會席位﹐不過仍是公司主要顧問之一。

豐田拒絕安排奧田碩發表置評。上述豐田發言人拒絕置評。

東京大學經濟學教授、對豐田公司有廣泛研究的籐本隆宏(Takahiro Fujimoto)說﹐將問題公佈於眾是豐田不斷進步的企業文化的一部分。不過﹐豐田內部人員公開指名道姓地批評某個人﹐或是批評的方式讓人很容易就能確定批評對象身份的做法是非常少見的。

豐田內部的不和可以追溯到20世紀90年代中期﹐當時豐田家族自1967年豐田英二(Eiji Toyoda)擔任總裁以來首次放棄了對總裁一職的控制。豐田英二是豐田創始人的堂弟。1950年至1967年﹐公司也是由非豐田家族高管運營的。

到豐田章男的叔父豐田達郎(Tatsuro Toyoda)1995年因中風卸任總裁職位之時﹐豐田公司已經在失去市場份額﹐面臨著在1950年以來第一次報出虧損的危險。當時日本經濟疲軟﹐與美國發生貿易摩擦﹐日圓堅挺也不利於出口﹐都很容易對豐田公司造成影響。

一系列外姓人掌權豐田公司﹐始於奧田碩1995年上任﹐終於渡邊捷昭2009年卸任。在他們的任期內﹐豐田公司實現了財務重振﹐並成為世界上最受景仰、受到最多研究的公司之一。

從奧田碩到渡邊捷昭﹐他們的策略要點在於﹐要把前一代豐田家族管理層開創的國際化行動提升到一個新的水平。雖然豐田公司在上世紀80年代就已經開始在美國和其他市場建廠﹐但它仍被認為在很大程度上只是偏居日本一隅。

1996年﹐奧田碩團隊公佈了名為“2005願景”(2005 Vision)的新戰略。他們打算在後面的10年重新塑造豐田公司﹐使之快速增長﹐同時減少對出口的依賴﹐更加倚重於在阿根廷、泰國和美國等目標市場進行生產的工廠。渡邊捷昭是這一計劃的倡導者之一。

為實現這個10年願景﹐管理團隊推出了臨時性的“全球大師計劃”﹐目的是把資源有效地配置給不同的部門﹐另外還推出“全球利潤管理”計劃﹐要求全世界的銷售經理人實現一定的盈利目標。

“2005 願景”還促使豐田公司在汽車設計和生產中實施“革新”(kakushin)。這包括提高效率、降低成本﹐其實現途徑不僅僅是簡化設計、降低材料成本等傳統 手段﹐還有改變汽車的建造方式。例如﹐工程師們被要求用更少的部件和系統來實現各種功能﹐目標是要把汽車的組件數量減半。

2002年 ﹐“2005願景”演進為“2010願景”﹐目標是到2010年代初期取得15%的全球市場份額。相比當時豐田公司10%的份額﹐這是一個很有野心的跳 躍。目前豐田公司還沒有實現這一目標。據跟蹤汽車生產商的咨詢公司CSM Worldwide稱﹐2008年﹐豐田公司的集團綜合市場份額達到了13%左右。

上述措施效果明顯。從2000年前後開始﹐該公司的全球銷量以每年高達60萬輛的速度增長﹐這個增長幅度比沃爾沃(Volvo)的全年總銷量都還多。

在外姓人掌權的這15年期間﹐豐田公司還取得了其他一些突破:營業利潤率達到了行業領先水平8.6%。2008年﹐豐田取代通用汽車(GM)成為世界上銷量最大的汽車生產商。

奧田碩根據自己的戰略﹐爭取弱化豐田家族的作用。據接近他的經理人稱﹐奧田碩認為創始家族佔據主導地位是一種過時的概念﹐特別是在創始家族在這家上市公司當中持股不足2%的時候﹐更是如此。

在權力達到頂峰的時候﹐即使是在公開場合﹐奧田碩對這一觀念也並不諱言。他在2000年接受《華爾街日報》採訪時說﹐豐田家族最終將成為紀念公司創業時期的神龕﹐我們每年都會對著這個神龕敬上一次。

當時豐田章男43歲﹐擔任的是一個總經理的職位。在那次採訪中被問到豐田章男的前途時﹐奧田碩回答說﹐群帶關係根本不屬於我們的未來。他具體地說﹐像豐田章男這種水平的人才在豐田公司各個地方滾來滾去﹐就像是很多的土豆一樣。

在當時﹐豐田章男似乎是坐著冷板凳。他於2001年被指派負責豐田的中國業務時﹐在公司的全球戰略中﹐中國還是一片蠻荒之地。在《華爾街日報》2003年的另一次採訪中﹐當時已是豐田董事長的奧田碩形容說﹐這份工作就像是“拖地板”﹐適合培育一棵野心大於經驗的苗子。

但豐田章男修復了困難重重的中國子公司﹐將它推上了增長軌道。2005年﹐他晉升為執行副總裁﹐擁有廣泛的職責﹐包括質量、產品管理、採購和全球銷售。

據一些外姓經理人說﹐即使是在豐田章男往上爬的時候﹐他在高層會議上也是少言寡語。幾位外姓經理人說﹐隨著豐田公司取得進步﹐外姓經理人們開始不重視豐田章男﹐把他看做是一位智商不那麼高的富家子。

與 豐田章男關係密切的高管駁斥了認為他被高管層壓制的看法。雖然豐田公司的財報有所好轉﹐但多起車輛召回事件表明豐田的高質量聲譽正在下滑﹐豐田章男也開始 敲響警鐘。2005年12月5日﹐在奧田碩10年願景即將實現的那一年年末﹐豐田章男發表了不公開的內部講話﹐對這個新的方向提出質疑。

豐田章男對公司的工程師和中層管理人員說﹐這種迅速擴張超越了公司確保每款汽車質量和可靠性的能力。《華爾街日報》所見的講話概要顯示﹐在豐田全球總部禮堂內﹐他要求在坐的工程師們轉變思想﹐實現從注重產量到注重質量的重大轉變。

當時的豐田公司高管說﹐豐田章男從未直接向他們提出這類意見。

2008 年渡邊捷昭準備從首席執行長的位置上退休時﹐家族管理還是非家族管理的問題浮出了水面。當時任董事會成員的奧田碩試圖讓與他關係密切的一名副手接任﹐此人 也非豐田家族成員。豐田高管說﹐曾任豐田總裁、當時仍擔任頗有影響力的公司顧問的豐田章一郎(Shoichiro Toyoda)則支持其子豐田章男。

2009年1月﹐豐田公司宣佈豐田章男將於當年6月接替渡邊捷昭任首席執行長一職。53歲上任的豐田章男成為繼他的祖父之後最年輕的首席執行長。他的祖父於1941年47歲時當上總裁。

豐田章男宣佈他的首要任務之一就是取消前任的諸多政策。他開始是向手下暗示﹐他並不苟同渡邊捷昭定下的年度營運收入達到兩萬億日圓或以上的非正式目標。他的助手說﹐他立即否定了“全球利潤管理”計劃。

豐田質量問題的真實情況有些曖昧不明﹐這正是豐田公司內部當前的主要矛盾所在。

消費研究機構J.D. Power & Associates分別進行的兩項調查顯示﹐從車主投訴率下降來看﹐過去十年間豐田品牌質量實際上有所提升。這種情況也剛好是豐田公司在全球召回汽車的數量不斷飆升之際。

調 查還顯示﹐豐田的競爭對手提高更快。2000年﹐豐田的豪華車品牌雷克薩斯(Lexus)在二手車主的質量評級中排名第一﹐豐田品牌則排名第四。2009 年﹐雷克薩斯的冠軍位置不保﹐排在了別克(Buick)和捷豹(Jaguar)之後﹐豐田品牌再度排在第四位。在新車車主的質量評級中﹐豐田品牌2000 年與寶馬(BMW)並列第四﹐2009年豐田排第六。

豐田章男的支持者將相關的質量排名下滑以及召回數量大幅增加歸咎於公司此前非豐田家族的管理者。開發一款新車需要兩到三年時間﹐因此出現問題的車型是在豐田章男去年6月執掌大權之前開發的。

以前的管理者們承認他們犯了一些錯誤。其中一位說﹐質量問題增多至少有一部分原因是從外面的中介招聘大量沒有經驗的合同工程師﹐這一舉措是為了在提升工程產能的同時節省成本。

但那些管理者也同樣指責豐田章男對內對外的管理風格﹐認為其導致了故障從可修復的問題發展成全面的危機。

豐田公司內部對豐田章男有意見的人士說﹐他創立了一個非正式的效忠者團隊﹐令管理人員很難通過正式渠道溝通。一位非豐田家族的管理人員說﹐當前的管理架構就像“影子管理團隊”﹐令信息溝通和管理變得重復。

在應對美國公眾、政治家和媒體方面﹐他們認為豐田章男對爭議作出公開反應太過遲緩。而當他最終公開發表意見時﹐他的講話被普遍批為模糊空洞。

相反﹐豐田章男的支持者認為﹐他清楚自己想要前進的方向並直截了當。在上個月的一個新聞發佈會上﹐豐田章男說﹐此前的擴張舉措或許導致豐田犧牲了質量﹐危及其高效的生產體系。豐田章男說﹐我想確保我們重新接受那些基本的原則﹐重建豐田以及其產品體系。

Norihiko Shirouzu

(更新完成)

Toyota Delayed a U.S. Recall, Documents Show


DETROIT — The sense of frustration — and urgency — in the e-mail message was palpable.

Mark Blinch/Reuters

From left, the Toyota executives Yoshimi Inaba, Irving A. Miller and James E. Lentz III at an auto show in Detroit in January.

“I hate to break this to you,” a Toyota executive wrote, “but we have a tendency for mechanical failure in accelerator pedals of a certain manufacturer on certain models.”

The message continued: “The time to hide on this one is over. We need to come clean.”

break a story, come clean


The message was written in January by Irving A. Miller, then a group vice president for Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., to another Toyota staff member. Three days later, the carmaker, bowing to pressure from Congress, federal regulators and consumers, issued a recall on sticking pedals affecting millions of vehicles.

The cry for action by Mr. Miller, disclosed in documents made public for the first time last week, came at the end of an extraordinary four-month period for the Japanese automaker. In that time, federal regulators say, there had been deliberate efforts by company officials to keep information about possible defects from the government.

While Toyota’s pattern of dragging its feet over the years on safety issues has drawn recent attention, the decision by transportation authorities last Monday to seek fines against Toyota provides an unusual close-up look at the company — well known for its opaque corporate culture — as it handled its biggest safety crisis since it started selling cars in the United States in 1957.

In announcing that he would seek the maximum $16.4 million fine over the sticking pedal recall, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who has repeatedly called Toyota “safety deaf,” zeroed in on the months between late September and mid-January for particular criticism.

New details about the company’s actions — based on government timelines, 70,000 pages of Toyota documents and interviews — show the degree to which regulators say the company stalled in fulfilling its recall pledges and treated safety concerns in the United States differently from those in Europe and Canada.

The documents Toyota provided to Congress and the Transportation Department are still being reviewed by federal investigators for possible additional fines. On Friday, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a letter to Toyota indicating that it might seek a second fine related to the recall for sticking pedals.

The materials outline the company’s efforts to juggle two sets of recalls, one for the sticking accelerator pedals and the other for floor mats blamed for sudden acceleration problems.

On Monday, Sept. 28, a warm early autumn day in Washington, officials at Toyota met with the safety agency and said the company would recall cars whose floor mats could become entangled in accelerator pedals. The agency pressed Toyota to also announce how it would repair the cars, which Toyota did not do until Nov. 25.

The discussions on floor mats began the four-month period in which the carmaker and the agency were repeatedly at odds over Toyota’s handling of its mounting safety issues related to both recalls.

Along with Toyota’s tardiness, that period has raised questions about whether the traffic safety agency was remiss in not pushing the company to act sooner. While it has become the norm in Washington to let automakers recall cars voluntarily rather than order safety measures, which can require years of investigation and a formal finding of a defect, some lawmakers suggested that the federal government shared the blame.

“The bottom line is that both industry and regulators failed,” said Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Representative Darrell Issa, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Toyota officials in Japan, who are responsible for recall decisions, declined to comment for this article.

But the documents and chronologies show the company had ample knowledge of incidents of sticking pedals well before its recall. They also show that Toyota treated consumers in the United States differently from those in Europe and Canada when it came to fixing the problems of sticking pedals and floor mats.

On Sept. 29, the day after regulators say Toyota had pledged to order a floor-mat recall, the company issued a safety advisory — a step short of a recall — to the owners of 3.8 million vehicles in this country, warning them that their floor mats might become entangled in the pedals.

Rather than say how it would fix the problem, as regulators wanted, Toyota told those owners to remove the floor mats until the company could come up with a remedy. Toyota said a recall would come later.

Yet on that same day, Toyota told dealers in European countries that it was changing the way it would build cars sold there, and outlined the repair procedures the dealers should follow in the event of sticking gas pedals, sudden engine surges or unexpected acceleration, the documents show. And a week later in Canada, Transport Canada, the Canadian regulator, issued a recall of more than 378,000 vehicles for the floor mat issue. It told owners there how those vehicles would be fixed: by changing the shape of the pedal, and in some cases, reconfiguring the floor. Some Canadian cars also might get brake override systems, meant to stop the car if it accelerated unexpectedly, the agency said.

All the while, the complaints about acceleration problems continued in the United States. From October through January, Toyota told the traffic safety agency that the company had received field reports about the same sticking pedals issue it had warned dealers about in Europe.

James E. Lentz III, the president and chief operating officer of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., told Congress in February he did not know of the reports of sticking pedals in Europe until January. But Toyota’s own chronology shows that engineers in the United States were told about those pedals as far back as April 2009.

A spokesman for Toyota in the United States, Brian Lyons, said on Friday, “Back in that time frame, they had felt that this was a uniquely European market issue.”

Meanwhile, Toyota issued its recall for floor mats in the United States on Nov. 2, but it did not outline the remedy for several more weeks. By mid-December, traffic safety officials were so frustrated with the back-and-forth over the issues that they decided to fly to Japan to urge the company to act more quickly.

Still, it took another month for Toyota to acknowledge to the agency that its pedals might have a “dangerous” sticking defect, according to the agency. That acknowledgment came on Jan. 16, the same day as Mr. Miller’s plaintive e-mail message.

“We are not protecting our customers by keeping this quiet,” wrote Mr. Miller, a tireless defender of Toyota who for years was its public face in this country.

It would require one more meeting, on Jan. 19 at the headquarters of the Transportation Department in Washington, before the company reached a decision to order the recall.

Toyota executives, including Mr. Lentz and Yoshimi Inaba, the president of Toyota North America, left that meeting without agreeing to take action, agency officials said, but they agreed to a recall during a telephone call that evening. Two days later, on Jan. 21, Toyota recalled 2.3 million vehicles in the United States for sticking pedals, and issued a similar recall in Canada.

Appearing before Congress a month later, the company president, Akio Toyoda, said his company had “pursued growth over the speed at which we were able to develop our people and our organization.”

He told lawmakers, “I am deeply sorry for any accidents that Toyota drivers have experienced.” Since then, Toyota has shifted its public posture toward blaming miscommunication for its problems.

“Once we thoroughly explored and tried to identify the root cause, we came to realize the problem was rather with communications than with quality itself,” Mr. Toyoda told investment analysts on Wednesday.

In a statement later that day, responding to questions about the e-mail message by Mr. Miller, who has since retired, Toyota said much the same. “We have publicly acknowledged on several occasions that the company did a poor job of communicating during the period preceding our recent recalls,” the company said.

2010年4月1日 星期四

台灣戴明圈 310-319

台灣戴明圈


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Toyota faces record fine in car recall
U.S. regulators plan to fine Toyota $16.4 million for allegedly hiding gas-pedal problems from safety regulators, in what would be by far the largest civil penalty ever imposed against an auto maker.


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我希望可以有一本年刊或半年刊或季刊
暫取名為 台灣人行道
希望2011年春/夏可出刊

主要記些台灣的人 事 情
希望每位朋友都可以貢獻一些短文
(如果能類似 不夠知己 那樣精簡最好 可能有酬勞 不過還不知道如何計算)



譬如說 上周 聽Peter McCormick短期講學 舉的一些台灣詩歌和詩人 利氏學會

Taipei Lectures by Peter McCormick

International Academy of Philosophy Peter McCormick教授短期講學:Modernity, Poetic Art, and the Hermeneutics of Language

又譬如說

上回陳忠信先生說黃信介仙如何在雜誌會議中處理他在雜誌上照片事
或川瀨先生說吳念真的金門苦戀

我自己當然可以或想寫的是很多 很多的
譬如說 年前介紹網路電視台給原住民學院等三校的董事長 陳巨擘

今天早上無意中找到1981年曹興誠先生企畫的一場2天電子所會議
趕快打些下來



洋客
中午買些二手書 其中一本為Too Good To Be Forgotten
作者David Obst 在60年代下葉來台灣 寫了幾章台北花蓮台南高雄等的趣事
加上Formosa : 一座島嶼的故事 = A short story of an island / 羅斌


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W. Edwards Deming would sum up this paradox by saying "How could they know?" Dr. Deming was referring to management's ignorance...



Why Toyota Should Go Open Source
BusinessWeek
Toyota embraced the teachings of quality guru Dr. W. Edwards Deming and instilled a collaborative culture of "see something, say something, and do something ...


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***

What happened at Toyota?

Over the last couple of months many people have asked me for my views on what is going on in Toyota. Two of the articles I have written on the subject (for the CQI and Customer Engagement Club) are available at: http://www.systemsthinking.co.uk/6.asp. One is titled ‘Has Toyota lost its way?’ and the other is ‘How lean became mean’.

***

Lean is falling off the rails

As I mention in the above articles, Toyota is not immune from the ‘lean tools’ problem – assuming tools are universal and failing to first of all understand what problem you have. A reader tells me she watched a presentation by Job Centre plus people on their ‘lean’ programme. Apparently they have been doing lean for two years, had some ‘small wins’, but are now struggling to achieve more.

Two years! If you can’t change a service organisation in less than six months you are doing something wrong (as indeed they are).

***

Lean is mean for wheelchair users

A reader sent me an example of the customers’ experience of the recently ‘leaned’ Wheelchair & Seating Service operated by NHS Scotland:


1. User: I can’t make the appointment you sent out. Can we make a different one over the phone?
2. Appointments secretary: That’s OK, we’ll send you out another one.
3. User: But what if I can’t make that one? Can’t we agree one now?
4. Appointments secretary: Sorry the technician keeps the appointments book.
5. User: Can I speak to the technician then?
6. Appointments secretary: No you need to go through the appointments secretary. The technician doesn’t make the appointments we send them out.
7. Repeat from 1.

He tells me management were following lean management principles. You couldn’t make it up.



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田汽車公司(Toyota Motor Corp.)週二公佈了加強質量控制的措施﹐其中包括2010年7月之前在所有主要地區開設客服培訓中心﹐力圖在召回事件後挽回消費者的信任。

豐田週二首次召開了全球質量特別委員會會議。這家世界產量最大的汽車生產商表示﹐將把位於北美的技術辦公室從一處增加到七處﹐從而讓更多的工程師檢測汽車故障。豐田還表示要在歐洲、中國和其他國家建立新的技術辦公室。

European Pressphoto Agency
豐田公司總裁豐田章男(中)與公司其他高管在週二的一個記者會上就質量問題回答提問
豐田在日本豐田市舉行了一場為時一天的媒體參觀活動。在從全球召回850萬輛汽車後﹐豐田大張旗鼓地強化質量控制﹐這在一定程度上是為了回應說它對近期安全問題反應過慢的批評。

分 析人士說﹐豐田的措施可能還做得不夠。顧問公司Mizuno Credit Advisory分析師水野達也(Tatsuya Mizuno)說﹐豐田的品牌形象已受到破壞﹐能不能回到召回事件以前的水平還存在疑問﹔顯然他們是希望增強在設計和技術方面的本地市場權威﹐但分散運營 也將給他們帶來巨額成本。

在新的組織結構中﹐豐田日本總部的安全管理人員將和每個地區的安全管理人員一起決定如何處理質量問題﹐各個市場 的質量負責人將分享本地客戶投訴方面的信息。以前是總部的人告訴每一個區域該怎麼做。豐田公司總裁豐田章男(Akio Toyoda)說﹐我們將能夠以一種更理想、更迅速的方式決定如何反應。

約50名來自北美、歐洲、中國和其他地區的豐田管理人員出席了這次質量會議。豐田還計劃從每個市場邀請第三方專家來評估各種質量改進措施﹐並將邀請四名外部專家來評估特別委員會採取的措施。四位專家的首份評估結果將在6月份公佈。

與會人員包括被任命為北美質量負責人的聖安傑洛(Steve St. Angelo)﹐歐洲質量負責人勒羅伊(Didier Leroy)﹐中國、日本和其他地區的10名質量負責人以及豐田章男和其他豐田高管。

豐田一位發言人表示﹐下次特別委員會會議將在9月份召開。

Yoshio Takahashi
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Few to Count in the Census, but All Eager to Get It Done
By MONICA DAVEY
In Wolford, N.D. — a speck of a town surrounded by fields of wheat, barley, soybeans and flax — every person who received a census questionnaire has sent it back.

Finding That Elusive One Person in Every 116 Acres for Part of Census in Mississippi
By SHAILA DEWAN
In 2000, Issaquena County, like the rest of the Mississippi Delta area, contained some of the most challenging and undercounted census tracts in the state.

Door to Door, City Volunteers Try to Break Down Resistance to the Census
By FERNANDA SANTOS
Thursday is the day by which the Census Bureau wants every resident to complete the 10-question form.


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Ilkhanid Art in Iran during the Reign of Great Khan Qubilai
心得 (私房)

用 simurgh(神鳥)查Google的圖 有約14000項
不過沒有古書的問題和學習
動物之利用一書之插圖 胡亂畫一通
等到 征服世界 列王
就以中國的鳳凰為底

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One half of one's sensibility is in a cast of mind that comes from belonging to a place, an ancestry, a history, a culture, whatever one wants to call it. But consciousness and quarrels with the self are the result of what Lawrence called ' the voices of my education'.--Belfast, Seamus Heaney PREOCCUPATIONS: Slected Prose 1968-1978, London:Faber and Faber1980, p.35


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成语解释

  盲人摸象 ( máng rén mō xiàng )
  解 释:比喻看问题总是以点代面、以偏概全.
  出 处:《大般涅盘经》三二:“其触牙者即言象形如芦菔根,其触耳者言象如箕,其触头者言象如石,其触鼻者言象如杵,其触脚者言象如木臼,其触脊者言象如床,其触腹者言象如甕,其触尾者言象如绳。”
  用 法: 主谓式;作宾语、定语、分句;含贬义
  示 例: ·刘献廷广阳杂记》第四卷:“广收杂物,金矢一囊,四呼如~,仅得一肢,以为全体。”
  近义词: 管中窥豹坐井观天
  反义词: 洞察一切、仰视观察
  灯 谜: 舜父抚爱幼子

原文出处

  《大般涅盘经》三二:“尔时大王,即唤众盲各各问言:‘汝 见象耶?’众盲各言:‘我已得见。’王言:‘象为何类?’其触牙者即言象形如芦菔根,其触耳者言象如箕,其触头者言象如石,其触鼻者言象如杵,其触脚者言象如木臼,其触脊者言象如床,其触腹者言象如瓮,其触尾者言象如绳。”
  

译文概要


  从前,有四个盲 人很想知道大象是什么样子,可他们看不见,只好用手摸。胖盲人先摸到了大象的牙齿。他就说:“我知道了,大象就像一个又大、又粗、有光滑的大萝卜。”高个 子盲人摸到的是大象的耳朵。“不对,不对,大象明明是一把大蒲扇嘛!”他大叫起来。“你们净瞎说,大象只是根大柱子。”原来矮个子盲人摸到了大象的腿。而 那位年老的盲人呢,却嘟嚷:“唉,大象哪有那么大,它只不过是一根草绳。”四个盲人争吵不休,都说自己摸到的才是真正大象的样子。而实际上呢?他们一个也 没说对。后以“盲人摸象”比喻看问题以偏概全。
  寓言讽刺的对象是目光短浅的人。
  “盲人摸象”的寓意是不能 只看到事物的一部分而应看全局才能了解事物的全面和真实情况 。

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Deming's 7 Deadly Quality Diseases

Dr. Deming wrote and spoke of Seven Deadly Diseases that infect an organization’s culture and prohibit it from truly succeeding in achieving quality for the customer.
  • Lack of constancy of purpose: You must remain focused on doing the right things because they are the right things to do for your customer and to achieve quality. ITSM is not a fad it is a way of behaving.
  • Emphasis on short-term profits: Cutting costs can bring short-term profits and are easy to achieve. But cutting costs can only go on for so long, before you have cut to the bone and have nothing left to cut.
  • Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance: Management by objectives ends up focusing on the objectives and not on the management. It is about “hitting the numbers” and not improvement.
  • Mobility of management: When management changes jobs constantly there is no continuity or constancy of purpose. Each time a new leader comes in, the efforts of quality go back to square one.
  • Running a company on visible figures alone: Everything that can be counted does not count, everything that counts cannot be counted—look for hidden information
  • Excessive medical costs: Ensuring that workers are healthy to help deliver quality helps control costs.
  • Excessive costs of liability: Lawyers are part of the problem not part of the solution according to Deming

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