This article from yesterday’s UK Daily Telegraph (Thursday 16th Feb) “Boot Camp Tactics Won’t Win the Battle” is an interview with Management Consultant / Guru, John Seddon of Vanguard Consulting. It’s right from my own manifesto, summarised in the header – things go wrong when management mistakes itself for a science.
… so much management time wasted doing “the wrong thing righter”
… so much game-playing,
… producing inaccurate and even meaningless numbers.
… origins of this [TQM] approach lay in the work of FW Taylor,
… so-called “scientific management” influenced subsequent generations …
He goes on to outline his preferred holistic “systems thinking” approach. Worth a read.
Personally, as my dissertation conclusions attest, TQM itself is not wrong, just its application to a misplaced focus on things that can be measured objectively with numbers, rather than things that can be assessed more qualitatively in the round.