 I first encountered management improvement in 1964. It was the zero-defect program that was intended to enliven management to intentionally prevent errors by doing things right the first time. Even as an inexperienced industrial engineer, I found that strange. Had management actually been allowing defects? Apparently I was not the only one. Another asked about the purpose of the program's intensive records-keeping requirement. The most unsatisfying and almost insulting answer was that it was the way the program would be justified. I asked whatever efforts were underway to make the benefits of the program available to the design community, minimizing design errors. Again, it seemed that those promoting the program were only interested in justifying the program by application to production. The only actions I ever saw concerning this program were those of intensive records-keeping. Another young engineer in our office handled quality control inspection process. I did not see where his office was even involved in this program. It appeared to be limited to its own program management and administration. To understand why this program was initiated, there must be some historical perspective. It was a long-term result of our basic business environment and how it was exported to other nations following World War II. The industrial foundation of both Germany and Japan had been destroyed, as had many other nations. The United States, being the people we are, had stepped in to help them get back on their own feet as self-sustaining nations. We exported our business model, how we did things. As noted earlier, those nations were not only accepting of the United States industry and what it had been doing, and also looked to other business knowledge sources, such as quality-driven messages from Dr. Deming mentioned in our earlier presentations. Higher quality industrial product imports grew rapidly. Quality cameras and timepieces were actually eating into our domestic markets. We were being outproduced and domestic products were losing in favor with our customers. Business leaders felt compelled to act. It was casting American business acumen in a very bad light. Our business model, the privileged leadership running things with workers in a separate production effort, was not competing well with the newer systems being developed in Germany and Japan and other rebuilt economies. The challenge was even being felt in government. They too were faced with the challenge of being customers. Were the military leaders to buy domestic materials that politically supported American industry or less expensive imports? They were spending public money. Leadership in government did its best to support privileged leaders in our industry. But not so much as to interfere with citizens' private decisions. They instituted a bi-American policy. This was an unofficial directive to accept where it did not threaten some sort of backlash from citizens, the American products in place of any foreign ones. The problem was government employees who insisted that the policy was the right way to do things and started complaining of Swiss chocolate being offered in the vending machines and food products that got sold to military members in their post-exchange stores. The policy died a quiet death and was soon simply ignored. Customer decisions, the real economic power source, was putting the squeeze on domestic business to do something. Management improvement was the obvious answer. It was relief for the management challenges. Even the name was obviously selected for the purpose of selling the idea that these were addressing the needs that were highlighted by important products in local stores. It was the privileged-based answer to the real problems of the cost of management rising in American industry. It was running things in terms of improving what management was doing. But by then, American business leadership had 50 years of experience with efficiency and production, and every time they tried to interfere, production dropped. And so their new direction was administrative and did little to interfere with that part of American business model that was doing well. It was largely cosmetic, but that cosmetic improvement was good administration. It was how the leadership was improving management. The very concept of the program was built on justifying the efforts in terms of what could be demonstrated as the success of business leadership. I may not have been seeing the differences, but the program was declared to be a wonderful success. The records that had been kept documented the improvements gained. If there were improvements, in fact, I was not in any position to see them. I was working as an efficiency engineer, and there were no production changes in either what was being done or how it was being done from the application of this program. We already had quality control programs, and it was designed to balance quality and quantity of production for the best results in terms of the output from the production effort. That early application of management improvement was otherwise relatively innocent. He used local assets by reassignment to the program effort, and the only major additional expense was program training, learning what to do to properly document the benefits being realized. I did not learn of any cost reduction in management from the application of that program, and there was none in production at all. Everything seemed to continue much as it had before the program was initiated. It was declared to be a successful program, and then allowed to slip into the past. I was not in any position to see what impacts this program had in private industry, but assumed that it had to be more effective there than what I saw. Soon it was the lean program. This was an intensive look at management systems to find inexpensive ways to fix management programs that were burdensome, inhibiting, or otherwise challenging to those who had to apply them. It is hard to find any better statement of the difference between administration and performance than this program. It is those who are running things, attempting to make things better for the people they hired to do management and support efforts. First, it involved an efficiency expertise that was not common to management system employees. They had to be hired from outside the business, and the employees needed training to take effective part in the effort. Administration hired other people to do the job of those they had originally hired to do the job. Again, the focus was to improve things, but had no performance goals that would increase the value the organization produced or reduce what it cost. They actually added some costs. Needless to say, the program was declared a success. It met or exceeded the management goals that were set for it. Then it was reorganization as a program, looking at how the management effort was arranged. It looked at the quality of missioning to assure that goals and objectives could support the individual parts of the business working together. And there was clarity, consistency in the application of management systems. There appeared to be some companies that were spared pending failure by radical reorganization, reducing the cost of management by releasing a significant number of management employees as part of the action. I was a senior industrial engineer when I again was involved in management improvement. It was several iterations later with the latest program being a combination of Lean and the Six Sigma, a follow-on to the old zero defects program from the 1960s. This program had been codified to the extent that there were recognized levels of expertise that were declared appropriate for various program activities, headed by a black belt generalist in the operation of the program. As a senior efficiency engineer, I was not terribly impressed. I received what they addressed as yellow belt training for a relatively low-level involvement. My first effort was to look at the program's operating process, what the program was to do. The obvious challenge was that it did not cost itself. It rather used extensive operations as a program cost. It only looked at what was a cost before and after application. That was strange as part of the program was permanent increase in employment for ongoing operation of the expertise in the improved organization. It did have a cogent and consistent program process for improving management activities. My early effort was to apply this process to its own improvement process. By its own criteria, the program improvement process was in serious need of improvement. I did publish an article on this, but there was little that came of it. The military organization I was working for quietly hopped it out of the program as it was being urged by higher headquarters. We do have a few basic management improvement themes. These are repeated on the program level. The program names change, but the principles remain the same. They are generally applied in iteration by name change and increasing the intensity of application. We have been doing things right the first time and it is pretty much limited to management and does not seem to have much effect on organizational performance. I still find it difficult to address this program's accomplishments. Just what were our management people doing wrong that they are no longer going to be doing wrong? The very concept addresses incompetence in either subordinate managers who are hired into position or incompetence in senior leaders who hired people who are not working properly. Which hand should I use to slap them? We have the lean effort that improves management processes, simplifying them and removing barriers to people who are trying to get things done. Just where do these barriers and unworkable management systems come from? Are these lean efforts just doing a competent job of setting up programs to run the business? The primary reason that senior leaders claim for their employment? Reorganization is not really a change in what is being done. So much is changing who is responsible to who for doing what it does. It has had positive effect when it shakes excess management people out of their jobs. But that was the exception. And this does not even address the deeper problem for American business leadership. All these management improvement efforts address improving what senior management is responsible to do, but has apparently been unwilling to or unable to do on its own. All of these programs hire people from outside the organization to do the improvements, begging the challenge to what senior leadership has been doing. Is it that effectively operating management is not any priority to these leaders? Are they simply unable to do the basic management functions that are the natural responsibilities of those in authority? Are they effectively incompetent or otherwise unable to do management? And then with Lean Six Sigma, the process leads to hiring new LSS specialists to supplement the managers who you have just disempowered to do the jobs by giving some of their duties to the new specialists. In this environment, measuring management by how much it costs to gain performance through those who do performance is not so much a tool as an active rebuke. The cost of management continues to creep up. If anything, these programs spur growth and organizational costs without beneficial effect on what the organization accomplishes. But there is an even greater challenge, and it is in vision. If application of any of these techniques had actually worked and actually changed management for the better, the reason for the application would have been satisfied. Repetition of the program just indicates its earlier failure. I can address this presentation as a source of value for the student. It is not that the programs do or do not work, but that there is consistency in the administrative handling of improvement efforts. It yields a reasonable certainty in how privileged leaders will react to actions initiated by others. The principle is for managers to do the right things and do them correctly. For application, if a leader is doing the right things in his or her understanding and that is not working, the process is to do the same right thing with greater force and intensity until it does work. Declaring the effort to be a success does not change reality, nor does it address the matter of how much intensity and effort should be committed to the effort. The study of performance is, at heart, a study of how we got things done in the past. It is learning what worked for us and what did not, so that we can be the ones who get things done in the future. We have two upfront and challenging examples of a general success in performance. The first is family, a common human experience. We all have in becoming who we are. Families are remarkably effective at assuring things do get done. The second was the establishment of performance management in the early 1900s. The increase in what people could get done by the introduction of intentional performance orientation was thrilling in its own quiet way. There is an obvious reason for the close and repetitive review of this later development, as it was the basic codification of our knowledge of performance to establish a body of performance knowledge. The first application was elimination of unproductive effort, the use of human time, skill, and effort that did not contribute to achieving the valued result. It seems such a simple thing, but the results were startling. Workers were suddenly getting twice as much done and were putting before less of their time and effort to gain that result. The second application was to measure what a worker could reasonably accomplish. It was the initiation and performance standards. It was satisfying that all important management requirement for something to gain through the efforts of those who were performing. It provided a whole new concept for planning human work. The contrast is in the management concept that came with applying master and servant legal concepts to employment. Leadership accepted this as buying the time and effort of workers for direction to work efforts. Under this concept, the greater the effort of the worker, the better they were as employees. The worker who slacked off was to be replaced with someone who would work harder for his pay. The worker who went home exhausted was valued by leadership. The new performance manager with the industrial engineers technical support challenged the legal understanding by having workers ease off on work, even as they generated a lot more productive output. When management tried to use the new performance standards to demand even more from hours they had paid for, it ran into resistance from these new managers. Tired workers did sloppy work or made outright errors that required re-work. The new and remarkably more effective managers did not support leadership in this, but teamed with the hired help. Business leadership tried to support these managers as best it could. It authorized them to issue assignments and collect results on behalf of the business. It empowered them to reward or punish workers who excelled or slacked off. It provided a competent set of support services that could be used to make them even more a part of the larger corporate effort. The more management tried to get involved, even in support, the less it received in response. Every attempt to take active roles in production under a foreman seemed to lower what the workers were able to do. It was like these workers no longer worked for them, but had their own purposes directed to productive results. They resisted corporate goals and objectives and seemed totally fixed on what they could accomplish. They honored the work standards that production management generated. The answer was isolation. It was recognizing and honoring a barrier between leadership and performance. It was quarantining the brash and unruly production area workers in their own little world. Corporate management acted to harvest the benefit of the foreman-based work efforts, but kept it bottled up. It was not really part of running the organization. Management still considered its duty to support the productive efforts as it could, and sought management efforts that would improve production. It became normal for a business to put its stamp on productive efforts by making improvements to their work processes. Then along came Dr. Deming, insisting that their improvement efforts were actually damaging performance. He taught that letting a working approach continue to produce without interference would have beneficial results in terms of performance. Dr. Deming's approach was not given effect until it was received by the ruined industries following World War II. The result was foreign competition for American business management, and changes were forced. Now in this course, we are addressing the performance of management. The operation of management and support systems of modern organizations is still under that boss mode, with leaders setting work requirements and receiving the results from assigned management and support efforts. With our performance orientation, we are the ones who are called to question this arrangement, noting that the size, cost, and complexity of management has continued to grow under this theory. While the production area has remained in the cost-effective performance orientation. We are the ones who are learning to see the waste and the new potentials for performance of management in terms of taking part in the larger operation of the business. With what we are studying here, senior business leadership is going to face the same challenges it did in the production area. This time it will be remarkably greater organizational performance from teaming management and support with the production effort that earns business income. It is a whole new area of business performance application. This time it will be even greater challenge to stay separate from that performance effort. It will be the senior leadership that will be isolated and quarantined from the rest of the organization. It is senior leadership that will be given the choice of joining with organizational performance or being seen as a source of waste. We are addressing the very challenging time for leadership and the reaction of those who deal in privilege is not going to help them do intelligent choices. Their constraints will be in their loss of privilege if they go up against the very organizations they are hired to lead. We are not addressing some gentle and unassuming change. Before any of you decide to take action on improving management or setting up a business in competition with those who have privilege foundation in their management, you must consider the cost associated with competitive hostility. Privileged leaders always resist change and they have proven fairly effective in doing so. The benefit you generate by your action, teamed with the actions of others, will have to be sufficient to overcome this cost. You may well find support among business owners and investors who will also so value the result that they will join in the effort. Next, we need to see the same basic understandings from the viewpoint of the worker. It is key to remember that Frederick Taylor was threatened by his own people when he started to act based on his developing scientific management principles. There is a lesson here that is consistent with early English feudal history and the signing of the Magna Carta that upset the basic structure of a feudal monarchy. It was not the peasants who revolted against the king. It was the barons whose privilege was threatened by the king. Things do work in a privilege based system. That is not the basis for change. We are addressing massive empowerment of workers through increasing what people get done. It is not going to be easily accepted even by those who benefit most from it. In addressing changes in management and the way it brings people together, there is going to be a resistance to even real improvements. This resistance has, if anything, been enhanced by management improvement programs that do not seem to improve much of anything for the management workers. We are looking at the potential to have management and support systems replaced with duties to support organizational performance. It challenges the comfortable position of a stated job with a process to be completed. It replaces this with a duty to seek out and satisfy the support needs of internal customers. It is like the change from being pushed for every bit of effort a worker can give to taking breaks in work to refresh oneself for the next effort. Even that was resisted. We also have knowledge of what people will value, what these management workers will have to replace it if they are to support and or promote the changes. It is that universal human value of trust relations, of being the one who is trusted to do something that is valued by others. It is being part of the team whose effort assures the income of the business that keeps people employed. It is having a support effort appreciated by those who receive it. I would introduce another principle here in support of your empowerment. It is the importance of communication. People who do not see the benefit of what you seek are not going to join in the effort. Our first reaction to redirection, our human reaction, is resistance. Enlisting others, empowering them, is going to require communication of cost and benefit to such effect that they will support or even take part in the effort that promises change. This is where tools such as the black box and simple visualization of value cycles can serve you in your efforts. A vision as to improvements in organizational management can include the challenge of our existing management improvement programs. Our first challenge is the leader belief that using its internal support is required just because you can employ people to work doesn't mean that they join your team. The challenge includes that only people who work in supply can buy things for the organization. The only people who can automate your management information are those in the corporate office. A competent support person will work to assure that you want to use their services. But that is not a given. That requires a level of trust that is beyond employment. And then we have our management improvement programs. And we ask what effect they have on the relationship that makes our internal support efforts valuable to their internal customers. Programs like LEAN simplify these support systems. Keeping them focused on doing what serves the larger organization. Programs like Six Sigma may add consistency to what these support efforts do. The challenge is that these do not address their performance. These affect changes in their assigned responsibility. And service to others remains at best little affected by what they do to accomplish it. Again, it is people who team, not the systems. Our general observation is one of the continuing growth in the size and cost of management, which is not even addressed to what it accomplishes. Where the value is, as we have learned, determined by the needs and wants of those who receive and those who have not changed. The growth in size and complexity does not generate value for the organization. There is potential for the ones who promote change, to enlist these management system employees to support changes. It is an increase in ability to focus on delivery of value to others. Lessening that insistence that support work has been assigned in terms of using a support system. Our challenge has always been learning from the past. Being human, we tend to repeat anything that we believe will work. And have a remarkable capacity to believe things, to trust in other people. Science has been an application to get beyond the limits of this capacity, and what it would put on us. It is the organization of knowledge so that we can sort out what beliefs are simply accepted on faith. The application of this work is generally one of seeing what has been accomplished as valuable results in the past and separating these out as a science of human performance. It yields knowledge based on the repeatability of reality. In the case of our ongoing management improvement efforts, such as eliminating errors and simplifying process. We have that most uncomfortable witness to there being declared to be a success, and then being repeated. With the tools we have developed here, if any of these had worked in the past, we would see a measurable improvement in the operation of management. If we cannot see that measurable improvement, then it has not really been accomplished. Claiming improvement, while the general cost of management continues to rise, puts these programs firmly into the category of belief. If they fail to improve management, attempting to try them harder and more intensely is unlikely to improve management in the future applications. That is the nature of reality. From the engineering approach, we have a few general rules that can be applied to effect. We know, for example, that there have been some success stories and applications of radical reorganization. This tells us that the problem that these organizations suffered was a matter of a lack of intelligent organization. For the rest, it is not easy to address any successes except for the operation of the programs. The valued result of gaining through the efforts of those who are managed has not been a result. The observation is that these efforts are not focused on gaining improvement. They are attempts to solve the wrong problem. From our basic management studies, we are able to identify the changes in more definitive terms. We need to address either an increase in the productive output that gets sold to customers or a decrease in what it costs to operate the organization while it continues to provide its products. This is our black box model that defines improvement. If some effort ends up costing more without corresponding increase in earning ability, it is not an in fact improvement. The challenge we face as people who are able to see this is not one of the performance at all. It is a problem of people in positions of privilege over what they own who do not accept that they have to act for our benefit. It has ripened in our business environment into a firmly held leader belief that what they are doing is for our benefit, even though we never see any benefit from what they do. Our true potential is in discovering our corporate potency, that people are the only party in interest. Leadership can be directed to actions that serve our interest. And we do not have to accept their benevolent leadership in place of our own choices. We, the people of the United States, are the in fact owners of this nation. We own its government. We own its economy. We own its legal system. We own its industries. There is no other party in interest. If there is a challenge, it is our own learned and enforced belief that someone else is separately entitled or empowered to represent us to the point where we have to accept it. This just highlights two personal challenges that each of us has to face in becoming effectively empowered. The first is that we are dealing in an area of human belief rather than what is real. We, and that would be all of us, are human. And it is on our nature to trust another person to do things. The other is that we, and that is all of us, are the ultimate source of both political and economic power and authority in our nation. What we are able to decide as a people becomes what our leaders are to do for us. It is where they gain our real support instead of having access to our resources with the illusion that they will do what they feel is best for us. Beyond that, we are also addressing the management of government, not just of industry or individual businesses. Our concentration of business organizations is a matter more of convenience than necessity. It was where the challenge to performance in terms of output was most visible, where the value could be reduced to simple measures of cost and benefit. With this, we already have one foot in the following section of the course. We will be more directly addressing unstructured gatherings of people. I start by noting that the United States as a nation is not a structured gathering of people, even though it was the obvious intent of those who wrote our initiating documents. There is no accepted purpose by modern government leaders beyond running the nation. Humanity is not a structured gathering of people for any specific purpose. In this study, we will be looking at the potential for unstructured gatherings to come to focus and directing the operation of our economy, our nation, and even humanity as a whole. What you will come to see is that you are not alone in this, but only talk to believe that you are somehow isolated and opposed by others. What this course has to offer you next is that empowerment is a choice. It is a capacity of humanity that you may choose to accept or to replace with the personal potency that is available to individuals. Even seeing where you have that choice is true empowerment.