I was instrumental in introducing some rudimentary processes for the business unit that I have been leading since 2002. After it had been in place for sometime, my CEO visited a prospect in Japan, along with one of our senior engineers. The engineer had adopted the practices and was a role model. The prospect was a large semiconductor house. The presentation by the senior engineer included actual artefacts produced by the process. That gave some authenticity to the presentation. The president of the company was so impressed that he decided to visit us. The visit resulted in the company outsourcing work to us.
Needless to say my CEO became a convert to the process that I had been advocating. He used to tell everyone that the reason why we got a new customer was because of the process that was demonstrated. That indeed we were walking the talk.
Now that had an interesting side-effect. In subsequent presentation we started talking our process with great pride. But we forgot that good practices have to be re-inforced everyday and deviations have to be corrected. More importantly processes have to be evolved after due deliberation. Not by random variations caused by "practical" problems. We were no longer walking the talk. We had started talking the talk. We forgot: 6-pack abs need hard work to keep them that way
Has Toyota too fallen prey to talking the talk?
More on that in a subsequent post.
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