WORK & MONEY
GURUS OF THE
BROCCOLI
FOREST
Published May 20, 1996
Previous columns
by
Harry Goldstein
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"...firms need a 'Guardian of the Mission' whose role as a disinterested interested party is to kill off half-baked proposals or excursions into the broccoli long before they sap energy, growing hairs, and inexorably leading to a costly abortion or an inevitable (and expensive) lose-lose situation."
-- B.L., management consultant
One of my duties at the Society is to edit the "Journal of Management", which is composed of PR fluff pieces and reviews of hot management books along with feature articles and peer reviewed papers, and is sprinkled throughout with lot of buzz words, like Total Quality Management (TQM).
Today's management concepts are all pretty much common sense: by involving employees in the decision making process, management encourages investment by the employees in the venture. Responsibility for projects is spread throughout the company. Authority is delegated again and again until it diffuses through the organization like laughing gas, with everyone smiling and not really knowing why.
But common sense doesn't sell books or land you high-paying consulting gigs. So management gurus transform common sense into buzz words which they demystify back into common sense via The Process -- for a steep fee, of course. TQM is tailor made for consultants who play on the fears of American corporate execs shell-shocked into desperation by media coverage of Japanese and German corporate cultures that portrays American business as slovenly in comparison.
The Process rides to the rescue. The first step is to convert a "vision" for the company into a "mission statement" with a focus on "quality". These are intentionally vague concepts with just a hint of new-age about them to make them easily adaptable to any corporation and palatable to any executive with even the slightest fervor about the holy destiny of his or her enterprise. Next, management needs to figure out what the company's customers need. It seems like a company should know what its customers need before it tries to fill those needs, but The Process has needs too, and one of them is to get management to question its assumptions about everything, thereby perpetuating a demand for the consultant's advice.
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After management knows where it's headed and why, it needs a strategic plan to get the ball rolling. Once the plan is conceptualized and implemented, middle managers (the same aliens who populated Douglas Adams' Earth in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, along with hairdressers and the like) are trained in the various analytical techniques that got the company on the TQM track to begin with: checksheets, Pareto charts, cause-and-effect diagrams, and brainstorming.
Once everyone is equipped with these tools, they need something to analyze, so consultants generally encourage companies to do internal and external customer surveys to make sure that everyone's needs are being met. After all this hard work, team players need to be recognized and rewarded so that enterprise-wide improvement continues unabated. Finally, The Process, once implemented, needs to be constantly re-evaluated to make sure The Process never stops.
So what does TQM mean for the average employee? Dr. Richard Hodgetts, a professor of strategic management at Florida International University, ends his book "Implementing TQM in Small and Medium-Sized Organizations" with this quote taken from Zytec (one of the companies whose managers he interviewed for his book), which the company uses "to help emphasize the continuous improvement challenge":
Every morning in Africa,
a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must outrun
the fastest lion
or it will be killed.
Every morning in Africa,
a lion wakes up.
It knows it must run faster
than the slowest gazelle
or it will starve.
It doesn't matter whether
you're a lion or a gazelle --
when the sun comes up,
you'd better be running.
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To the average employee, TQM translates to BYA: "Bust your ass" and keep on busting it, lest your slacker performance impact the "quality" of the work the company does and prevents it from realizing the goals set forth in the "mission statement," which will make your company's self-appointed Guardian of the Mission so blind with rage that his "vision" will blur as he stalks you through the office corridors, like a starving lion hunting down a defenseless gazelle in the thick of the dark Broccoli Forest.
Harry Goldstein is a writer and editor living in Manhattan. His work has appeared in Utne Reader, American Book Review, Promethean, AltX, word.com, and other periodicals.
© 1996 Harry Goldstein, All Rights Reserved
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