The state of affairs

Well, if there was ever doubt about why I am here (and there was), I may have finally found my place in the evolutionary process of Yanfeng China. 

The more I learn and the more I discover, the more I see parallels between this society and our society of the 1980’s.  I guess this should not be too surprising but it was to me.  When you survey the town of Shanghai it gives the outward appearance that it is one of the most advanced cities in the world; and from an architectural standpoint, it is. But upon closer investigation you notice that the intent is there, the materials are excellent, but they seem to stop short of making the most of these two elements.  It seems that the detail gets lost in the fury of activity. For instance, the buildings are visual candy but to work in one is another story.  It seems that they forgot to learn about insulation and sealing techniques.  In the winter, the buildings remain cold and drafty because they are not insulated and the wind blows through the gaps in the windows and floors.  But it doesn’t end here; this seems to be a cultural attribute.  We see it in the beautiful new metro system where the floors and walls and beautiful marble but before laying the stone they let them become water stained and it really spoils an other wise perfect execution of the subway station.  You see this flaw everywhere. 

And as you can guess, it doesn’t end with the construction trades; it permeates our organization as well.  Surprisingly enough, the company seems to have found ways to plug holes effectively enough to actually produce high quality products.  They seem to use a method of try something until you get it right.  They also have a good system of peer (or expert) reviews in which the experts point out flaws (over and over again!) and the team fixes them.  I assume this type of development process has evolved from the fact that the labor rate is low and the education process, until recent years, has not been up to world standards; So just throw labor at it!  This is what I call the “Trial and Error” stage of development.  It has only been in the past few years that management has had time to take a break from “expert reviews” and move into the prevention phase.    As Issac Newton said: “intelligent people fix problems, geniuses prevent them”.  So , although the company seems to have developed a way to “get things done” when it comes to a production program; the opposite is true when it comes to developing new innovations.  I attribute this to the fact that in a production program the deliverables and time tables are well defined and therefore some sort of process evolves to enable the team to deliver.  But unlike the production program, the development of new ideas does not come with a timetable nor deliverables to which people are expected to perform.  So maybe this is where I came in.

As I mentioned earlier in this ramble, I compare this state of evolution to the USA in the 80’s; before Demming’s design of experiments, before Kaizan, before Six Sigma and before process control.   So in the past 30 years the Japanese and the Germans have helped the USA move from complacency to world class competitors. They have forced us to do this by paying attention to the customers and to the execution of the details (or a focus on craftsmanship).  In order to do this, the US implemented what I will call “Process Control”  So I do I fit into this picture? 

So over the past three months I have struggled to understand the current state of development and figure out how I can be of the most help and support to my colleagues.  Although my ultimate task is to deliver innovations, my real task is to instigate an organizational culture change.  The problem here is that, as mentioned above, there are no rules and no guidelines as this happened naturally over time in the USA.  But like everything else, the Chinese are evolving at an un-natural rate (or trying to).  This is obviously enabled by the financially enabled culture (thanks to the USA).  So, where do you start?  For me, I decided to force evolution to happen.  I set up plans for development just to have a place to focus our efforts.  And so far, it seems to be working; but this is unfortunately because they were looking for someone to just tell them what to do (back to the normal state).  But one day recently it became obvious as to why I was really here:  During one of our many discussions, one of my colleagues hit the nail on the head when he said:  Please teach us how to do THINGS! Because you know how to do THINGS!  After delving into this statement a bit further, I discovered the real issue: They really don’t know how to DO THINGS!  What things you might wonder,,.. just things.  So this is where I am really helping the organization take the next step in the evolutionary process.  It has been great to see how hungry they are for this discipline.  So I gave them just three basic questions to answer before they DO ANYTHING! 

1) What do you want to learn?

2) How are you going to learn it?

3) How will you apply what you learn?

And remember: You don’t know what you don’t know!

So with these simple questions in mind, they are starting to create work plans to support there programs…… WA_LA!  We are off to a good start.

To Be Continued:::::::::::