How "Good" Managment leads
to
Bad service

Feb 16 2007

Updated March 9th 2007

Originally this article was going to be used to show that most management goals and efforts often have nothing to do with the real purposes of any organisation, serving customers. I came up with this idea from reading about Dr. William Deming, the man most responsible for the economic powerhouse of Japan. Then I realised that I had read many of the same findings in a book more than ten years before that my father had given me called "The Peter Principle." From there things began to cascade to the point where I have traced a number of resources that I've read over the years and recently that are leading me to be able to prove things that I've always know i.e. people work better if they like and control what they do.

I'll leave what I wrote before below while I find a way to try and condense everything into something more meaningful.

Tying in :

The Peter Principle,
Dr. William Edwards Deming
Freakonomics
Ben Carson (Think Big and Gifted Hands)
Psychology of working alone as opposed to with others e.g. Group Projects, Planning Events etc.
Communism vs Capitalism, more control less success
and Art Robinson's method of having his children teach themselves.

Which one works better?

The economist Dr. Levitt says that incentives and disincentives can mold any system and are the best way to get what you want from people.
Deming says we should drop performance measurements and all attempts of using regular incentives by the wayside because they cause people to fake their results or use CYA tactics to give management what they want and avoid being blamed for problems.

This is all so amazing because it seems to completely tie in together and it seems to suggest that Deming and Art Robinson are correct and Dr. Levitt and other economists are wrong. Why? Because Deming revived a nation of millions of people, Art Robinson seems to have raised six significantly above average children by himself and without any official means of performance measuremens or incentives or disincentives aside from a thirst for knowledge and a desire to succeed. Dr. Levitt though, while by all markers an about average intelligence scientist doesn't have such "hard" evidence behind him. As a matter of fact stories from his book Freakonomics traces many of the same failures in certain systems using incentives and performance appraisals that Deming has listed in his literature.

Dr. Levitt appears to be able to find "cheaters" who abuse incentive systems and performance appraisals for example teachers who change theirs students results to show improvements in performance so they can meet expectations set by programs such as "No child left behind" Or sumo wrestlers who throw fights.

So is it a question of one method being better hands down than the other? If we slap enough band-aids in the form of incentives and methods of performance assesment on a system will we finally plug all the leaks and have an airtight system? I'm reminded of the legal system, does it seem that if we pass enough laws that one day we won't have enough crime or at least have a higher conviction rate which will reduce recidivism and career criminals?

I remember reading somewhere actually this can be my next prize that in the beginning Rome had been a great civilisation based on few laws but an ethic of personal responsibility. In it's latter years of decline the situation became reversed and personal ethics was replaced by a slew of laws which were constantly being broken. This state of affairs, it is suggested led to the fall of Rome.

A study of the rise and fall of empires is in order I believe but off topic, it does however tie into something that Art Robinson has suggested, namely a device, or method of checking for precusors of health and aging in human beings so as to attempt to determine how many years of life we may have left. I would be interested in finding out based on a similar system for society of how many years the present Western Civilization has left but that is another story.