Werner spin
Posted by:
corboy
()
Date: December 31, 2004 08:18PM
Members are quite happy to share online material/URLs when these are available. If they do not, it may be that the article in question is only available by subscription.
Werner spin
Posted by:
SL1993
()
Date: December 31, 2004 10:59PM
Quote
corboy
Members are quite happy to share online material/URLs when these are available. If they do not, it may be that the article in question is only available by subscription.
Yes. But they don't have to be rude or evasive about it.
Werner spin
Posted by:
glam
()
Date: December 31, 2004 11:32PM
Quote
Why are you acting like this, Glam? Do you have a url for the article or not? I'd really like to see it. If you don't want to post it, then say so.
I'm just curious: why are you posting here? Looking back over your posts, I can't seem to tell why you're here. Have you been involved in a destructive group? Has one of your loved ones?
Why, of all the information available about cults and the like, are you so interested in this one article that mentions Werner Erhard only in passing?
Glam
Werner spin
Posted by:
SL1993
()
Date: January 01, 2005 01:37AM
Look. [b:6b11a60799]You[/b:6b11a60799] opened up with
So, I said I'd like to see it. And then you started attacking me. I definitely don't need this at this point of my life. F**k you.
Good bye.
(Note to Moderators: Is this behavior acceptable????)
Quote
If anyone would like to see the article in its entirety, I'd be glad to email it to you.
So, I said I'd like to see it. And then you started attacking me. I definitely don't need this at this point of my life. F**k you.
Good bye.
(Note to Moderators: Is this behavior acceptable????)
Werner spin
Posted by:
rrmoderator
()
Date: January 01, 2005 05:20AM
Please let's try to treat each other with courtesy.
Werner spin
Posted by:
Cosmophilospher
()
Date: January 01, 2005 11:48AM
WINNING IDEAS IN MANAGEMENT
FORTUNE
Monday, May 15, 1995
By Brian Dumaine
Management must be one of the most unnatural activities in the world. Why else would managers sustain a vast publishing and consulting industry with a huge component of blather whose main function is reassurance rather than the transmission of knowledge? Like diet and golfing books, the hundreds of management guides that come out every year really function as corporate security blankets. Managers, like obese people and duffers, feel so perpetually anxious about themselves that they will tolerate an almost incredible torrent of balderdash in the hope of self-improvement.
Managers can spend an eternity searching for panaceas in the pages of such books, but they won't find them. They may for a few months or even years think that they've found a piece of the true Cross, but eventually the advice, trend, or tool will devolve into just another fad or folly. Yet if you look hard at the history of the Fortune 500 over the past 40 years, there emerges through all the static a set of golden management rules that have surviving power. They don't have labels--once you stick a name on something, it's fast on its way to becoming a flavor-of-the-month disappointment--but are broad management principles. They are (1) Management is a practice. (2) People are a resource. (3) Marketing and innovation are the key functions of a business. (4) Discover what you do well. (5) Quality pays for itself.
Still, the question nags: Is any of this real? Has it actually generated wealth? As with golf and dieting advice, some fundamentals have proved themselves over time. While no one can measure the precise financial impact of these ideas, the argument that they paid off can be made with confidence. Stanley Gault, who has been to the Fortune 500 over the past decade what Joe Montana is to football, says that basic management principles like empowerment, strategy, and quality contributed greatly to his successes at GE in the 1960s and 1970s, and to his turnarounds at Rubbermaid and Goodyear in the 1980s and 1990s.
The very idea of management as a practice, like medicine or navigation, didn't even exist when Fortune published its first 500 list in 1955. Until Peter Drucker published his classic The Practice of Management the previous year, management had been seen largely as the expression of rank and power. People managed subordinates; they didn't manage businesses. Says Drucker: 'When my book came out, nobody had even thought of managing a business. It led to the whole idea of objective, of what is the mission of a business.'
Drucker's insight has had nearly endless ramifications. Once companies like General Electric, Du Pont, and Sears started thinking about management in this way, everything needed to be redefined. What, for instance, was the appropriate role of top management? Rather than trying to control everything, Drucker taught, senior executives should focus on strategy and let the rank and file carry out their objectives. With Drucker's help, General Electric in 1956 opened its now famous Crotonville, New York, training center and has since taught generations of managers this philosophy.
Odd as it may seem in an age when downsizing has depopulated entire office towers, one of the most important and enduring ideas about management is that managers should treat workers as a resource rather than a cost. Says PepsiCo CEO Wayne Calloway: 'It seems to me that over the last 40 years the biggest idea is the notion that management doesn't have the monopoly on brains or judgment. It's this idea of utilizing all the strengths of a corporation.'
The shift away from command and control didn't happen fast. It has taken decades to get people--at least some people--to take initiative, to learn, to change constantly. True, in the 1970s, self-realization movements like est got out of hand. PacBell had to abandon its costly leadership program after employees complained that it was a 'dress code for the mind.' But more recently companies have put 'empowerment' to better use. Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s used it to reduce cycle times, requiring employees to team up and design, develop, and market products and services at record speeds. For instance, in 1988 H-P developed the DeskJet printer in just 22 months--a job like that used to take twice as long.
In the early 1990s books like Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline took empowerment a step further, arguing that people are more than cogs; they are individuals with feelings, thoughts, and insights that need to be aired and understood. What Senge and others articulated was that motivated people are good for business. Says Goodyear's Gault: 'The empowerment revolution . has allowed our nation to record unprecedented progress in the areas of productivity, creativity, technology, product development, and overall competitiveness in a global market.'
This notion has exerted a powerful effect on corporate structure. If people were to have more autonomy, they didn't need as many middle managers looking over their shoulders. Thus, a company could shed organizational layers. Lincoln Electric started experimenting with the flat, or horizontal, organization in the 1950s, but it wasn't until the restructuring movement of the late 1980s that corporate America really began to see the light.
In the management of products, as opposed to people, a similar change has turned out to be a winner. In the Fifties and Sixties, with Japanese and German industry still in ruins, U.S. industry could make virtually whatever its engineers or marketers pleased, the customer be damned. But in the 1970s, especially in the auto industry, global competition began to intensify. American corporations slowly realized they would have to start organizing around the idea of serving the customer. Says Theodore Levitt, Harvard business school professor emeritus and marketing expert: 'We call it the marketing concept. It made us run businesses around the principle 'Put the customer first, and then profits will follow.' '
A strong customer focus led companies to adopt disciplines like test marketing, surveys, and focus groups that helped them keep in touch with customers and create new products. Says Andrall Pearson, a partner at the New York LBO firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice: 'The idea of a marketing discipline was revolutionary. Before, we had no scientific focus. We were just pissing money away on the market.' That attention to marketing detail spread in the 1970s and 1980s and helped build such service giants as L.L. Bean, Nordstrom, and Federal Express. Drucker sums it up best: 'You get paid for creating a customer, and you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation. Everything else is a cost center.'
OUR FOURTH nominee for a great management idea, strategic planning, took a wrong turn for a decade or so. Although the Pentagon had been doing strategic planning through the 1950s and 1960s, not until the 1970s did the idea gain broad currency in corporate America. Before strategic planning, executives essentially sat around and played what-if: What if our competitors did this or that? Then, starting in 1969, GE began to teach strategy as a discipline. The new idea was to conduct a comprehensive analysis of competitors--their past, present, and anticipated future. GE's strategy course also taught managers to allocate resources based upon how you would categorize your business: Is it a growth business or a harvest business?
The beauty of this kind of planning was that it helped managers focus on what they did best, on competencies (although they didn't use the word at the time) that gave them a competitive advantage. Obvious, perhaps, but the point got lost in the conglomeration-mad Sixties and Seventies. Seeing the inefficiencies that resulted and realizing--with the help of Wall Street raiders--that their best strategy was to focus on what they did well, companies in the Eighties began deconglomerating.
Implicit in the idea of jettisoning the unnecessary was focusing on the essence. Thus it was that corporate strategy came back full circle to one of today's most popular ideas: core competencies. Consultants Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad argued that every company has a core strength--be it marketing, manufacturing, or R&D-and that it should focus resources on what it does best. Nike, for instance, concentrates on marketing and design, farming out the manufacture of its athletic shoes.
Sometimes a truly good idea needs an apostle. Before the 'quality revolution' of the 1980s and 1990s, managers basically thought that investing in high quality was a cost that couldn't be recouped. More than anyone else, consultant W. Edwards Deming disabused them of that notion. In the 1960s and 1970s, Deming worked in Japan and taught the Japanese that by continually improving the quality of a product or process--kaizen, as it's called--a company could save time and money, reduce waste, and give the customer better products faster. For years Deming couldn't sell his message in the U.S. Then, on June 24, 1980, at 9:30 p.m., he appeared on an NBC show about Japanese quality called If Japan Can, Why Can't We? A manager at Ford happened to be watching and brought Deming and his ideas to Ford. The result was Team Taurus, a quality-driven project that helped Ford turn itself around and eventually led to the development of the company's best-selling car.
After that, quality spread wildly throughout the rest of corporate America. Yes, there were abuses, as some companies like Florida Power & Light got carried away in the 1980s and turned their quality programs into self-sustaining bureaucracies. But overall it works. Stressing high quality makes lots of money for companies. Some 15 years after Deming appeared on NBC, Motorola, one of the great disciples of the quality movement, makes such good pagers that it is now a formidable player in the Japanese market.
[BOX]
1955
1955 Corporations start adopting ideas in Peter Drucker's new book, The Practice of Management.
1956 GE opens Crotonville training center, identifying management as something to be taught.
1958 Lincoln Electric experiments with flat management, pledging not to lay off workers and obtaining flexible work rules.
1960 Douglas McGregor publishes The Human Side of Enterprise, which outlines Theory X (employees are machines) and Theory Y (employees are extended families).
1963 Harold Geneen embarks on course of acquisitions that will make ITT one of America's largest conglomerates.
1969 GE, struggling to cope with a raft of acquisitions, becomes one of the first big companies to adopt a strategic plan.
1971 Werner Erhard launches Erhard Seminars Training, the taproot of touchy-feely management.
1975
[BOX]
1975
1980 Rand Araskog becomes ITT chairman; to reduce debt, he begins selling some of the 250 businesses acquired by Geneen.
1980 W. Edwards Deming appears on NBC TV documentary; Deming is hired as a consultant by Ford.
1980 Japan overtakes the U.S. as the world's leading producer of automobiles.
1982 T. Boone Pickens, chairman of Mesa Petroleum, makes his first hostile takeover attempt, for Cities Service Corp. It fails.
1985 Ford introduces Taurus, one of the first American automobiles to be designed and built using cross-functional teams.
1987 Manpower becomes largest private employer in the U.S., with over 465,000 temporary workers.
1988 Hewlett-Packard develops DeskJet printer in just 22 months.
1990 C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel publish 'Core Competence of the Corporation' in Harvard Business Review.
1993 Michael Hammer and James Champy publish Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.
1995
FORTUNE
Monday, May 15, 1995
By Brian Dumaine
Management must be one of the most unnatural activities in the world. Why else would managers sustain a vast publishing and consulting industry with a huge component of blather whose main function is reassurance rather than the transmission of knowledge? Like diet and golfing books, the hundreds of management guides that come out every year really function as corporate security blankets. Managers, like obese people and duffers, feel so perpetually anxious about themselves that they will tolerate an almost incredible torrent of balderdash in the hope of self-improvement.
Managers can spend an eternity searching for panaceas in the pages of such books, but they won't find them. They may for a few months or even years think that they've found a piece of the true Cross, but eventually the advice, trend, or tool will devolve into just another fad or folly. Yet if you look hard at the history of the Fortune 500 over the past 40 years, there emerges through all the static a set of golden management rules that have surviving power. They don't have labels--once you stick a name on something, it's fast on its way to becoming a flavor-of-the-month disappointment--but are broad management principles. They are (1) Management is a practice. (2) People are a resource. (3) Marketing and innovation are the key functions of a business. (4) Discover what you do well. (5) Quality pays for itself.
Still, the question nags: Is any of this real? Has it actually generated wealth? As with golf and dieting advice, some fundamentals have proved themselves over time. While no one can measure the precise financial impact of these ideas, the argument that they paid off can be made with confidence. Stanley Gault, who has been to the Fortune 500 over the past decade what Joe Montana is to football, says that basic management principles like empowerment, strategy, and quality contributed greatly to his successes at GE in the 1960s and 1970s, and to his turnarounds at Rubbermaid and Goodyear in the 1980s and 1990s.
The very idea of management as a practice, like medicine or navigation, didn't even exist when Fortune published its first 500 list in 1955. Until Peter Drucker published his classic The Practice of Management the previous year, management had been seen largely as the expression of rank and power. People managed subordinates; they didn't manage businesses. Says Drucker: 'When my book came out, nobody had even thought of managing a business. It led to the whole idea of objective, of what is the mission of a business.'
Drucker's insight has had nearly endless ramifications. Once companies like General Electric, Du Pont, and Sears started thinking about management in this way, everything needed to be redefined. What, for instance, was the appropriate role of top management? Rather than trying to control everything, Drucker taught, senior executives should focus on strategy and let the rank and file carry out their objectives. With Drucker's help, General Electric in 1956 opened its now famous Crotonville, New York, training center and has since taught generations of managers this philosophy.
Odd as it may seem in an age when downsizing has depopulated entire office towers, one of the most important and enduring ideas about management is that managers should treat workers as a resource rather than a cost. Says PepsiCo CEO Wayne Calloway: 'It seems to me that over the last 40 years the biggest idea is the notion that management doesn't have the monopoly on brains or judgment. It's this idea of utilizing all the strengths of a corporation.'
The shift away from command and control didn't happen fast. It has taken decades to get people--at least some people--to take initiative, to learn, to change constantly. True, in the 1970s, self-realization movements like est got out of hand. PacBell had to abandon its costly leadership program after employees complained that it was a 'dress code for the mind.' But more recently companies have put 'empowerment' to better use. Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s used it to reduce cycle times, requiring employees to team up and design, develop, and market products and services at record speeds. For instance, in 1988 H-P developed the DeskJet printer in just 22 months--a job like that used to take twice as long.
In the early 1990s books like Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline took empowerment a step further, arguing that people are more than cogs; they are individuals with feelings, thoughts, and insights that need to be aired and understood. What Senge and others articulated was that motivated people are good for business. Says Goodyear's Gault: 'The empowerment revolution . has allowed our nation to record unprecedented progress in the areas of productivity, creativity, technology, product development, and overall competitiveness in a global market.'
This notion has exerted a powerful effect on corporate structure. If people were to have more autonomy, they didn't need as many middle managers looking over their shoulders. Thus, a company could shed organizational layers. Lincoln Electric started experimenting with the flat, or horizontal, organization in the 1950s, but it wasn't until the restructuring movement of the late 1980s that corporate America really began to see the light.
In the management of products, as opposed to people, a similar change has turned out to be a winner. In the Fifties and Sixties, with Japanese and German industry still in ruins, U.S. industry could make virtually whatever its engineers or marketers pleased, the customer be damned. But in the 1970s, especially in the auto industry, global competition began to intensify. American corporations slowly realized they would have to start organizing around the idea of serving the customer. Says Theodore Levitt, Harvard business school professor emeritus and marketing expert: 'We call it the marketing concept. It made us run businesses around the principle 'Put the customer first, and then profits will follow.' '
A strong customer focus led companies to adopt disciplines like test marketing, surveys, and focus groups that helped them keep in touch with customers and create new products. Says Andrall Pearson, a partner at the New York LBO firm Clayton Dubilier & Rice: 'The idea of a marketing discipline was revolutionary. Before, we had no scientific focus. We were just pissing money away on the market.' That attention to marketing detail spread in the 1970s and 1980s and helped build such service giants as L.L. Bean, Nordstrom, and Federal Express. Drucker sums it up best: 'You get paid for creating a customer, and you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation. Everything else is a cost center.'
OUR FOURTH nominee for a great management idea, strategic planning, took a wrong turn for a decade or so. Although the Pentagon had been doing strategic planning through the 1950s and 1960s, not until the 1970s did the idea gain broad currency in corporate America. Before strategic planning, executives essentially sat around and played what-if: What if our competitors did this or that? Then, starting in 1969, GE began to teach strategy as a discipline. The new idea was to conduct a comprehensive analysis of competitors--their past, present, and anticipated future. GE's strategy course also taught managers to allocate resources based upon how you would categorize your business: Is it a growth business or a harvest business?
The beauty of this kind of planning was that it helped managers focus on what they did best, on competencies (although they didn't use the word at the time) that gave them a competitive advantage. Obvious, perhaps, but the point got lost in the conglomeration-mad Sixties and Seventies. Seeing the inefficiencies that resulted and realizing--with the help of Wall Street raiders--that their best strategy was to focus on what they did well, companies in the Eighties began deconglomerating.
Implicit in the idea of jettisoning the unnecessary was focusing on the essence. Thus it was that corporate strategy came back full circle to one of today's most popular ideas: core competencies. Consultants Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad argued that every company has a core strength--be it marketing, manufacturing, or R&D-and that it should focus resources on what it does best. Nike, for instance, concentrates on marketing and design, farming out the manufacture of its athletic shoes.
Sometimes a truly good idea needs an apostle. Before the 'quality revolution' of the 1980s and 1990s, managers basically thought that investing in high quality was a cost that couldn't be recouped. More than anyone else, consultant W. Edwards Deming disabused them of that notion. In the 1960s and 1970s, Deming worked in Japan and taught the Japanese that by continually improving the quality of a product or process--kaizen, as it's called--a company could save time and money, reduce waste, and give the customer better products faster. For years Deming couldn't sell his message in the U.S. Then, on June 24, 1980, at 9:30 p.m., he appeared on an NBC show about Japanese quality called If Japan Can, Why Can't We? A manager at Ford happened to be watching and brought Deming and his ideas to Ford. The result was Team Taurus, a quality-driven project that helped Ford turn itself around and eventually led to the development of the company's best-selling car.
After that, quality spread wildly throughout the rest of corporate America. Yes, there were abuses, as some companies like Florida Power & Light got carried away in the 1980s and turned their quality programs into self-sustaining bureaucracies. But overall it works. Stressing high quality makes lots of money for companies. Some 15 years after Deming appeared on NBC, Motorola, one of the great disciples of the quality movement, makes such good pagers that it is now a formidable player in the Japanese market.
[BOX]
1955
1955 Corporations start adopting ideas in Peter Drucker's new book, The Practice of Management.
1956 GE opens Crotonville training center, identifying management as something to be taught.
1958 Lincoln Electric experiments with flat management, pledging not to lay off workers and obtaining flexible work rules.
1960 Douglas McGregor publishes The Human Side of Enterprise, which outlines Theory X (employees are machines) and Theory Y (employees are extended families).
1963 Harold Geneen embarks on course of acquisitions that will make ITT one of America's largest conglomerates.
1969 GE, struggling to cope with a raft of acquisitions, becomes one of the first big companies to adopt a strategic plan.
1971 Werner Erhard launches Erhard Seminars Training, the taproot of touchy-feely management.
1975
[BOX]
1975
1980 Rand Araskog becomes ITT chairman; to reduce debt, he begins selling some of the 250 businesses acquired by Geneen.
1980 W. Edwards Deming appears on NBC TV documentary; Deming is hired as a consultant by Ford.
1980 Japan overtakes the U.S. as the world's leading producer of automobiles.
1982 T. Boone Pickens, chairman of Mesa Petroleum, makes his first hostile takeover attempt, for Cities Service Corp. It fails.
1985 Ford introduces Taurus, one of the first American automobiles to be designed and built using cross-functional teams.
1987 Manpower becomes largest private employer in the U.S., with over 465,000 temporary workers.
1988 Hewlett-Packard develops DeskJet printer in just 22 months.
1990 C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel publish 'Core Competence of the Corporation' in Harvard Business Review.
1993 Michael Hammer and James Champy publish Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.
1995
Werner spin
Posted by:
elena
()
Date: January 02, 2005 02:06AM
Quote
SL1993
Look. [b:24b868f66b]You[/b:24b868f66b] opened up withQuote
If anyone would like to see the article in its entirety, I'd be glad to email it to you.
So, I said I'd like to see it. And then you started attacking me. I definitely don't need this at this point of my life. F**k you.
Good bye.
(Note to Moderators: Is this behavior acceptable????)
I think "Glam" mistook you for someone else.
Ellen
Werner spin
Posted by:
glam
()
Date: January 03, 2005 06:08AM
Did I? How quickly did it pop up over on alt.fan.landmark, posted by "Tex?"
Sorry, only registered users may post in this forum.