<story><title>Deming Paradox: Operationally rigorous companies aren&apos;t nice places to work</title><url>https://commoncog.com/deming-paradox-operational-rigour/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bnegreve</author><text>Do organizations really pretend they are not made of people? How&amp;#x2F;when?</text></item><item><author>rcthompson</author><text>I call it the Soylent Green Principle: companies and other organizations often try to pretend otherwise, but they&amp;#x27;re actually all made of people. I have to remind myself of this regularly.</text></item><item><author>numbsafari</author><text>If you don’t include some measure of employee satisfaction, retention, wellness, etc, then you will optimize the system at their expense. As awful as this sounds, it’s no different than operating a piece of machinery above its capacity, or without adequate maintenance, because doing so improves some short term measure. If you can absorb the cost of doing so, then you might happily burn through lots of machines and that might be acceptable. But people aren’t machines, and you will either find yourself having retention issues, hiring issues, or like Amazon, literally running out of people willing to work for you even as they literally kill their employees.&lt;p&gt;The most important thing I take from my reading of Deming, is that there comes a point when you have to put the charts aside and deal with people. If you push people over and over and over, eventually they’re going to snap. Even if they don’t, can you live with yourself at the end of the day?&lt;p&gt;You also have to consider more factors than just P&amp;amp;L. If you push sales people to the point they start breaking the law, or you push machinery and operators to the point of a massive oil spill, you could jeopardize the whole business, or worse. You need to know where the limits are, and that only comes from understanding the people, and the process, beyond just the charts.&lt;p&gt;Classic map v territory stuff.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavlov</author><text>A lot of organizations operate as if they are made of headcount slots, and heads to fill those slots are some interchangeable commodity.</text></comment>
<story><title>Deming Paradox: Operationally rigorous companies aren&apos;t nice places to work</title><url>https://commoncog.com/deming-paradox-operational-rigour/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bnegreve</author><text>Do organizations really pretend they are not made of people? How&amp;#x2F;when?</text></item><item><author>rcthompson</author><text>I call it the Soylent Green Principle: companies and other organizations often try to pretend otherwise, but they&amp;#x27;re actually all made of people. I have to remind myself of this regularly.</text></item><item><author>numbsafari</author><text>If you don’t include some measure of employee satisfaction, retention, wellness, etc, then you will optimize the system at their expense. As awful as this sounds, it’s no different than operating a piece of machinery above its capacity, or without adequate maintenance, because doing so improves some short term measure. If you can absorb the cost of doing so, then you might happily burn through lots of machines and that might be acceptable. But people aren’t machines, and you will either find yourself having retention issues, hiring issues, or like Amazon, literally running out of people willing to work for you even as they literally kill their employees.&lt;p&gt;The most important thing I take from my reading of Deming, is that there comes a point when you have to put the charts aside and deal with people. If you push people over and over and over, eventually they’re going to snap. Even if they don’t, can you live with yourself at the end of the day?&lt;p&gt;You also have to consider more factors than just P&amp;amp;L. If you push sales people to the point they start breaking the law, or you push machinery and operators to the point of a massive oil spill, you could jeopardize the whole business, or worse. You need to know where the limits are, and that only comes from understanding the people, and the process, beyond just the charts.&lt;p&gt;Classic map v territory stuff.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mirekrusin</author><text>He means they drive decisions based on some arbitrary, often flawed, short sighted, partial picture metrics (revenue, number of clicks, all kpis) forgetting that there are real people with ambitions, talents and feelings that are not accounted for behind it.</text></comment>