Gene,
In your reply to Hal H Steinbeigle LO14910, who was asking for reference
information to scholarly articles on LO, you replied:
"When you are looking include companies that have adopted Deming ideas.
There is very little new in Senge's approach other than the diagrams to
help us think about systems and perhaps some emphasis. Companies adopting
Deming have been learning and improving for decades now. Senge's writing
is more clear and more interesting but underneath it is very much the same
ideas."
Agree with you on Senge's work and I believe it applies to Deming's as
well, i.e., the basics packaged with new tools with a little mystery
thrown in. It seems to me sometimes that when folks like Deming, Senge,
Covey, Wheatley, etc., share their experiences with others, many of their
fans/critics spend more time talking about the ideas/topics than they do
validating the respective tools and principles. Application and analysis
usually strips away the mystery or uncovers new ones.
Josh Hammond and James Morrison, in their book, Stuff Americans are Made
Of, identify seven cultural forces that define Americans. These are:
Insistence on Choice; Pursuit of impossible dreams; Obsession with Big and
more; Impatience with time (we want it now), OOPS! -- acceptance of
mistakes which is how we learn; Urge to Improvise and a Fixation with
What's New.
I believe their theory helps to explain the motivation and interest in the
development of new ideas and concepts that appear to be based on
principles that are not new.
Tim Clark
tjclark@aol.com
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>