Re: Odd Survey explained [LONG!]

[Dan BRINEGAR <vr2link -at- VR2LINK -dot- COM>]

Mary Joan Deutschbein <Mjmoongold -at- AOL -dot- COM> asked:

>Is anyone else besides me offended at this belief that the creative human
>mind is unnecessary for technical projects?
>

Umm, yes.....

I think a large number of techwhirlers would agree that work that doesn't
depend on any creativity just isn't worth doing well... we might do it to
keep the lights on, but we don't hafta like it... or put a whole lot of of
"extra" effort into it.

There's Process Automation, Life Cycle- and  Task-Analysis, and Electronic
Performance Support Systems to take some of the dull routine out of work so
people (users, customers, engineers, teachers, secretaries, etc. ) can
concentrate on whatever it is they do best, rather than just keeping the
system going;

...and then there's just bureacracy.

I *almost* got a gig last month doing business process documentation for a
client who was just wild about Michael Gerber's _The E-Myth (Why most small
companies don't work and what to do about it)_.

Gerber's first principle is that most small companies are started by
"technicians" so that they have a place to go to work, while really
successful small companies are started to create innovations.

He says that to the Entrepreneur, the "Business is the Product."

Great! Wonderful! I love these ideas!

The he spends the rest of the book using McDonald's as the exemplary group
of small-businesses grown wildly successful... "providing a uniformly
predictable, consistent service to the customer" by reducing every step in
the businesses' processes to the *lowest possible level of skill and
DISCRETION* required to perform the work.

Huh? I worked at McD's for two years, kinda liked it, but there's no
innovation... Arch Deluxe? McDLT? McChicken? Now *there* are a couple of
successful products....[not!]

Here's where Gerber's methodology  breaks, and offends me: it concentrates
on the lowest possible level of skill required to perform the work; rather
than minimising possible system-related disruptions to the performance of
creative work. People involved in the work under the McDonald's model have
*NO DISCRETION* in how they do their work, how they deal with customers, or
anything else.

People in such situations aren't technicians, and they aren't innovators;
they're just operators and tenders.

This was Ray Kroc's Great Business Innovation?

The Assembly Line had been used in other industries for 100 years before
McD's got ahold of it..

Organizations that depended on discipline and the absolute lowest level of
skill and discretion were perfected with the British Square (a military
formation which served admirably from the Napoleonic wars to the 1870's) --
in all that time no one broke a British Square until a tribe of
undisciplined, creative, innovative Afghans did it in 1879... they did it
again against the Soviet Army almost exactly a hundred years later (not
surprisingly, the Red Army was built on a model they called "trained bears
in chains").

Gerber peppers his book with such gems as:

"Discretion is the enemy of order, standardization, and quality."

Did you *really* enjoy the last Big Mac you had? Was it as exciting, tasty,
and delightfull as the first one you had in the 70's? Do ya think the
restrooms at yer local franchise are as clean as I kept 'em in 1979?

Me neither... but I'm wild about Subway sandwiches.... for now: They
haven't told me I "couldn't have it that way" yet.

Bureacratizing an innovation, and turning it into a commodity is certain
death for any opportunity to delight customers, or get really good work
done...

We learned as the Industrial Age ground to a halt (late 70's) that once
everything was standardized and bureaucratized, no one within
industrial-age organizations had any motivation to take any initiative or
do anything different: customer service policies and shop-rules became
loaded down with things customers and workers *COULD NOT* ask for or expect
to receive. They spent so much effort defining what *couldn't* be done that
their competitors who realized it was easier and cheaper just to give the
customers what they wanted, or workers their creative "heads" beat the
pants off 'em in the 80's and 90's.

Well, at least we know there's a few more links in the food chain we won't
have to compete over....

>"This new process integrates and streamlines the workflow elements and it
>provides all the features that documentation
>     and manuals need to be attractive, impressive, easy to use and control,
>and inexpensive to maintain."
>
>This reminds of something .... This model (process) doesn't require
>any brains, just bodies to do the tasks.
>

-----------------------------------------------------------
Dan BRINEGAR, CCDB Vr2Link
Performance S u p p o r t Svcs.
Phoenix, Arizona

vr2link -at- vr2link -dot- com
http://www.vr2link.com
"Show up, be there, think it up and do it, exceed your job-description,
 control your own means of production (that's yer brain)! "

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