「華人戴明學院」是戴明哲學的學習共同體 ,致力於淵博型智識系統的研究、推廣和運用。 The purpose of this blog is to advance the ideas and ideals of W. Edwards Deming.

2009年2月27日 星期五

David S. Chambers

David S. Chambers 是Dr. Deming 的重要朋友

WWS著作中引
Amazon.com: Understanding Statistical Process Control: Donald J ...
... Understanding Statistical Process Control: Donald J. Wheeler, David S.
Chambers: Books. ... by Donald J. Wheeler (Author), David S. Chambers (Author)

OOTC 中

Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World-Order

Out of the Crisis 四處提到
Clarence Irving LEWIS, 133, 277, 317, 351

Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World-Order (Scribner's, 1929; Dover, 1956), Chs. 6-9. ...

Sample Design in Business Research (Wiley Classics Library) (Paperback) by W. Edwards Deming

Chapter 12
Field Procedure for the Creation of Segments and for the Selection of People within Families

There is no knowledge of external reality without the anticipation of future experience. ... what the concept denotes has always some temporal spread and must be identified by some orderly sequence in experience. ... There is no knowledge without interpretation. ... Thus, if ther is knowledge at all, some knowledge must be a prior. -- C. I. Lewis, Mind and World-Order (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), p.157 (Author's note: knowledge a priori means theoretical description--the statistician's probability model.)

2009年2月26日 星期四

The Economist 周刊提到 Deming博士 (2009等)

The Economist 周刊幾篇(部分 因為在1990年代也有) 提到 Deming博士的文章
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Chinese business

Time to change the act

Feb 19th 2009 | DONGGUAN
From The Economist print edition

Business in China, like business everywhere else, is being walloped by the global crisis. The slowdown is also exposing some deeper flaws


Illustration by Claudio Munoz
A SMALL stretch of land, a two-hour drive from end to end, reveals much about the economic transformation of a vast country. This slice of southern China runs from Guangzhou, the old treaty port reserved for foreigners before Mao expelled them, to Shenzhen, the city established after Mao’s death as an experiment in private enterprise. Over the past decade it has become one of the world’s fastest-whirring economic engines—a global hub in the manufacture of clothing, shoes and electronics—serviced by tens of millions of migrant workers.
Now the region is undergoing an equally remarkable contraction. In the past year thousands of factories, perhaps one-third to one-half of the total, have closed. Reliable statistics are hard to come by, not least because many factories operate in a legal netherworld, but the severity of the slump is plain. The flow of migrants has gone into reverse. Some of the newly unemployed have stuck around (and a few have started a new industry: street crime). The lucky ones have found work at factories that moved inland, although at lower pay.

On the road through Dongguan, a sprawling industrial city roughly halfway between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, building after building—residential as well as industrial—displays red banners advertising its availability. Local agents say there is no interest from buyers. A lack of demand for whatever a factory might make is part of the explanation. So is concern about the quality of properties for sale: a lot of factories were put up in a hurry and have been maintained poorly if at all. And so is the nebulousness of Chinese property laws. Purchasers cannot be sure that what they buy they will truly own.

Oh, for yesterday’s problems

The rapid collapse of economic activity around Dongguan indicates that China’s private companies are being subjected to the same battering as their counterparts in many other countries. Yet it also raises questions about the long-term survival of many of these companies. They have been among the most dynamic components of China’s fast rise towards prosperity. Their turmoil may be transient. Then again, there are also worries that it is in fact tied to profound flaws in the Chinese economy.
Six months ago Chinese manufacturers were being pounded by increases in all manner of costs, from wages and the prices of materials and energy to interest rates and taxes. Just about every type of skilled labour was in short supply. Annual results for 2008, due to be released in the next couple of months, will show that these forces did much to hold back Chinese business for a large part of the year.
Now those manufacturers are taking a different sort of pounding: a dramatic falling-away of orders. December’s official industrial-production data, for what they are worth, showed a marked drop in annual growth; January’s are delayed (see article). Exports, on which the figures are more reliable, were 17.5% lower in January than a year before. Imports were down by 43.1%.
The slowing economy has sent all those costs in the other direction. It has brought the prices of materials and energy down sharply and slackened the labour market. After years of steadily pushing up interest rates and increasing banks’ capital requirements, the financial authorities in Beijing began to cut both in September, and lending has been vocally encouraged.
Fearful of the social consequences of widespread unemployment, both local and national governments have backtracked on policies put in place between 2006 and 2008 that raised private companies’ costs. Exporters’ tax rebates have been restored, for example; and new laws on wages, work rules and benefits that added costs a year ago are turning out to be more flexible than they at first appeared. Around Dongguan, local officials no longer seem bothered about pushing the region towards higher-value-added products. Makers of labour-intensive goods, such as apparel and toys, find that they are no longer under pressure to move away. A strike that the municipal government would have all but encouraged for much of 2008, it would now help to settle. None of this has come anywhere near offsetting the decline in orders. Worse, the malaise may go far deeper than the short-term effects of a slump in demand.

A footloose business

Much of the remarkable success of Chinese business has been based on low-margin, low-technology activities. Broadly speaking, China is a net exporter of goods with a low technology content and a net importer of more sophisticated wares. In richer countries, not surprisingly, the reverse is usual (see chart 1).
Many Chinese businesses have been built on using cheap labour to produce cheap, commoditised goods such as clothes and shoes for export. Lots of others produce higher-grade stuff, such as electronics goods or branded sportswear for Western companies. The trouble is that other countries can also do this, sometimes more cheaply.
Granted, China has plenty of important companies which do not need to worry about their business disappearing to other emerging economies. More than 30 of the 100 firms anointed by the Boston Consulting Group in January because they are “contending for global leadership” are Chinese. No other country can boast so many. However, almost all of these are owned at least in part by the government and benefit from protective barriers in their home market. China Mobile, for example, is the world’s largest mobile operator, but its competition is limited, by ministerial decree, to just a few other domestic rivals. The same goes for steel, aluminium, energy, finance and a host of other areas that the government deems “strategic”.
A more durable model for less privileged companies would involve more higher-margin activities, based on innovation and higher quality, with their home-grown brands to the fore. So far, however, Chinese companies have been plagued by an actual or perceived lack of quality. Only a few have built respected brands. The underlying causes of this are a weak system of property rights (including intellectual-property rights) and a financial system skewed in favour of big, state-controlled companies. They will not be easy to fix.
The downturn has shown much of Chinese business to be remarkably footloose. It is as if the companies that died simply evaporated without leaving a tear or a trace. There is more to this than the eradication of excess capacity or the shift of production inland. Buyers in Hong Kong who a year ago drove over the border to buy clothing in southern China now take flights to Dhaka in Bangladesh. Nike will produce more trainers (sneakers) in Vietnam this year than in China, its leading source for 15 years.
In 1988 a small, secretive, Taiwanese plastics manufacturer named Hon Hai opened a factory in Shenzhen that has since grown to the size of a city, with more than a quarter of a million employees. Little of what its Chinese subsidiary, Foxconn, produces is directly disclosed by the company but it is broadly believed to include iPods, Nintendo and Microsoft games consoles and laptops, either in whole or part, for most leading brands.
Because of the sheer number of people it employs, Hon Hai’s every move generates huge interest in local newspapers, although the firm itself says little. In 2007, presumably for much the same reason that it moved to China 20 years ago, it opened a facility in Vietnam which is said to be undergoing a large expansion. Last summer the Taiwanese press was abuzz about production moving back home. Now reports from Taiwan say that the Shenzhen workforce will be cut from 260,000 to 100,000 and that there will be more jobs inland. Whatever the figure turns out to be, Hon Hai is a nimble transnational company, able to move production around as circumstances change. And it is not alone.
Admittedly, there are still good reasons to remain in China. Vietnam, Indonesia and other countries have only a finite ability to expand quickly without overloading their infrastructure or sparking wage inflation. China still has lots of cheap labour. Perhaps most important, it has a vast domestic market, much of which is protected from foreign producers. But as the frailty of the southern Chinese manufacturers demonstrates, these virtues have their limits.
Higher margins are often linked to higher quality. In a recent survey of 700 international business professionals by Interbrand, a consultancy, 80% of respondents cited low quality as an important barrier to the sale of Chinese products abroad. Two-thirds said “cheap” was the chief attribute of Chinese goods. Only 12% believed quality was improving.
Judged by the struggles Chinese companies have had operating abroad, such impressions are well founded. With rare exceptions, notably Lenovo, which purchased IBM’s laptop business, and Haier, the maker of cheap, small refrigerators that furnish the rooms of numberless students, Chinese names have failed to make much of a dent. Where they have thrived is either in cost-conscious emerging markets or in cost-sensitive areas of developed markets defined by clear specifications and minimal innovation. The greatest examples of this have been ZTE and Huawei, makers of telecoms equipment.
The poor external reputation of China’s products hurts not only Chinese companies but also Western firms known to be selling Chinese-made goods. Last year, in response to a series of scandals, buyers’ complaints and lawsuits over Chinese toys, America passed laws requiring elaborate certification. This is costly for good manufacturers, but American toy distributors found themselves incapable of judging the safety of products they imported from China. Out of similar concerns, India has imposed restrictions on Chinese-made toy trains and cars, dolls and puzzles.
Why, then, have Chinese manufacturers not done more to improve the quality of their goods? The benign explanation is that China is undergoing the same problems as Japan once did, but in a litigious, consumer-centred age in which every flaw is magnified.
There is something to this, but Japan’s national obsession with quality was apparent early in its post-war industrialisation, when it adopted the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, an American quality-control guru. Companies such as Honda crushed the British motorcycle industry by offering higher quality as well as lower prices; Sony and Panasonic did the same to American makers of radios and television sets. Almost all the successful companies began by producing at least some components for others (Sony still does) but were equally determined to carve out names for themselves by making distinctive products. To say these companies had long-term visions is an understatement. Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Panasonic, drafted a 1,000-year corporate plan.
There is no equivalent in China yet. However, many Chinese companies are aware of the pervasive criticisms of their quality. Some big firms have begun employing Westerners with long experience in the best American and European facilities. The Chinese authorities are also awake to lack of quality, because of its deadly effects in the (heavily protected) domestic market, where it has been all too easy to succeed by being shoddy. Last year, after poisoned dairy products killed six children, the chairwoman of Sanlu, the most notable producer, was sentenced to life in prison. Two suppliers were condemned to death.
To be sure, lots of high-quality things are made in China, from sporting goods and MP3 players to luxury clothing. China has become the world’s largest exporter of information and communications technology. Local markets and trade fairs are awash in aspiring brands. In transport alone, there are a dozen sizeable carmakers, 300 tyremakers, 1,000 bicycle-makers and several thousand scooter-makers, all hoping to make an impression. More than 3,500 watchmakers list their services on Alibaba, a sourcing website, as do 8,000 razor-makers. And myriad companies churn out the fake Gillettes and Rolexes sold on street corners.
That very little of this effort has been converted into strong brands is something of a puzzle. Foreign companies account for most high-tech exports (see chart 2). The simplest explanation is that anonymity suits many Chinese companies. In Dongguan, Yue Yuen, a subsidiary of Pou Chen, a Taiwanese company with a similar model to Hon Hai’s, produces sports shoes for leading Western names. Smaller firms make everything from tennis racquets to European luxury goods. Because wide publicity of the common origin would do those brands little good, the Westerners usually insist on contracts with clauses blocking disclosure.
Anonymity also spares Chinese companies from official and press scrutiny of labour conditions, which can be abysmal. But there are limits to this strategy, in as much as margins on undifferentiated production have proved low. Retaining customers means holding off competition from any country with lots of cheap labour, and, as southern China is finding out, businesses of this sort are vulnerable to being wiped out in a slump.
In Taiwan many of the companies that once were leaders in anonymous production have slowly developed high-quality products under their own names, notably Acer, Asus and HTC. The most glaring impediment to creating the same kind of operation in China is the country’s weak intellectual-property protection. Why invest in design or innovation when the results can be knocked off by competitors? Aware of this barrier, the government has passed new laws and has been vocal in supporting greater protection, but settlements remain trivial and enforcement patchy. Most Chinese patents granted to domestic applicants are still of a type known as “utility model” patents, mainly awarded for incremental improvements, rather than for innovation or new designs (see chart 3).
The weakness of intellectual-property rights can be seen as part of a deeper problem: the weakness of private property rights in general. Before China’s reopening in the late 1970s, says a recent study on Chinese innovation by the OECD, this issue did not arise: innovation and technological development were assigned to government institutes; factories received work orders. Even today only the rarest company can claim unfettered independence. According to Yasheng Huang, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explicitly state-controlled firms make up half the economy. That probably understates the true effect, because even private firms understand that their existence depends on their relations with the state.
In state-controlled companies, senior managers are rotated at the behest of government. China Mobile is said to have 100,000 suppliers. One reason is that with its management and operating franchise subject to frequent government intervention (it was reorganised last summer), technological innovation must be done outside. Leading managers have low salaries and often let stock options expire even when they are in the money, which suggests that rewards are not closely tied to creating value for shareholders.
Medium-sized companies have their own conflicts. Factories inevitably occupy land that was once state-held. As a consequence, their shareholders often include local government. Officials have little interest in industrial efficiency: mergers, for instance, are unattractive if they mean losses of local jobs. Invariably, if there is a photograph on a wall at a corporate headquarters, it features a visit by a senior government official—showing who matters.
Blurred ownership distorts finance, management structure and long-term planning. To insulate themselves from the vicissitudes of China’s state control, companies go through all manner of legal contortions when they list shares. Haier, for example, is incorporated in Bermuda. Securities offerings must be approved by the government and the bulk of legal financing comes from state-controlled banks. With all these political ties, lack of innovation is hardly a surprise.
Theoretically, the smaller, private firms are more flexible. But raising money is hard: loans to such firms account for only a small part of the total lending by those state-controlled banks (see chart 4). The source of small firms’ money is one of China’s great mysteries, but there are hints. China is filled with grey-market financiers, including pawn shops, “credit-guarantee” firms, and small industrial companies that lend to other small industrial companies. Because finance from such sources is informal, however, it is short-term, changing the nature of investment. It often depends on the personal relationships of the firm’s owner; that too can distort managerial decision-making.
None of these impediments has prevented China from growing. Indeed, the extraordinary way in which money, people and companies seem to come and go illustrates the country’s adaptability. But they are impediments all the same.
Two years ago, on one of his frequent trips to China, Bill Gates said he was often asked where the next Bill Gates and the next Microsoft might emerge. To the delight of his government hosts, he predicted Asia, because of the changes he had witnessed, the level of education and the impact of technology. It is easy to imagine that someone from China might follow in Mr Gates’s footsteps. In today’s conditions it is, alas, hard to imagine that someone from a Chinese company might do so.
在中國南方的某處開兩個小時的車程,可從當地市 街面貌約略看出一個大國經濟的變遷。這個區域從廣州 ─清末時期為外人開放直到毛時期關閉的通商口岸,延 伸至深圳─毛時期決定成立的特區。近10年來它成為帶 動世界經濟運轉的引擎之一,出口服飾、鞋類,以及電 子產品至全世界,同時也聚集了數以千萬計的外移勞動 人口。
《Economist》 報導,對照過去幾年的快速發展, 這個地區目前也正面臨同樣幅度的顯著工業萎縮。數以 千家工廠近幾年已關廠,比例約佔全體的 1/3至 1/2。 由於還有許多仍持續經營的廠家同樣遭逢困境,因此上 述數據可能不真確,不過,景氣衰退的陣痛確實明顯。 外來移民潮已轉成為返鄉潮。新近失業者一直待業 (新 聞報導甚至指出一小部份的人淪落黑幫求生) ,幸運者 則是在遷移內陸的工廠中找到工作,不過所得較低。
從廣州到深圳途中,所經過東莞這個櫛比臨次的工 業城,不論是在住宅區或工業區,都可見到紅布條廣告 高掛,內容寫著某某廠房待售待租。當地仲介商表示買 家目前對此地段沒有興趣投資。無需求致使買家對廠房 產能產生懷疑是部分原因。另外,待售中的廠房許多是 倉促建成的,而且沒有被好好維持。還有,在中國,相 關房地產法律條文予人字眼含糊的印象,買家並無把握 可否買到真正持有產權的標的物。
東莞經濟活動的急遽放緩代表的是:中國私人企業 的經營,與世界各地的同行對手一樣,正遭逢打擊。然 而,關乎這些企業是否可以永續的問題也浮上台面。在 中國快速發展的前幾年中,中小企業是最具驅動力的鏍 絲釘。目前,中小企業的關停風潮也許是暫時的,但也 有人憂慮:這個風潮其實就是中國經濟本質的暗流?
中國製造業在 6個月以前的困境是各種經營成本高 漲,其中包括工資、物料、能源、匯率、稅費。當時, 各行各業都在短缺技術人力。即將於未來幾個月發布的 年報將會顯示,這些情況其實是抑制中國經濟過熱發展 的一大助力。
目前,中國製造業所面臨的挑戰則又是另一個面向 :急遽萎縮的訂單。中國商務務所公布12月的數據反映 出當月產能大幅衰退 (今年1月份的的數據尚未出爐)。 至於 1月份出口數據同比衰退 17.5%則更加明顯,而進 口數據則同比衰退43.1%。
低迷的景氣對於企業經營的成本造成另一種壓力。 物料和能源價格遭到打壓,勞動市場幾近停滯。中國政 府過去幾年都在逐步調高央行利率與增加銀行資本適足 率,但自去年 9月起,北京財政當局者開始進行降息, 同時聲明鼓勵融資。
為了防範高失業率帶來社會不安,中國中央與地方 政府收回了過去 3年來可能增加中小企營運成本的政策 。例如,調高出口退稅率減輕企業負擔、對勞動合同法 採取彈性相對放寬的執法態度。東莞官員目前關切的重 點並非企業須製造出高附加價值的產品。諸如成衣和玩 具這類具有高度人力成本的產業,其業者發現,他們面 臨遷廠的壓力不再。地方政府在面對工人罷工時,也選 擇以安置政策加以解決。不過,這些努力目前尚未能夠 改善生產訂單銳減的情況。較糟的是,景氣可能還會更 陷低迷,不僅是短期內的需求衰退而已。
多數經營有成的中國企業是以低邊際、低技術的生 產活動起家。廣義來說,中國是一個低技術含量產品的 淨出口國,以及較精密產品淨進口國,這與已開發國家 的外貿特質剛好相反。
許多中國企業的發展是從出口低價人工產品開始打 根基,這些產品如服飾、鞋類。至於電子零件、或為西 方品牌代工的休閒運動用品,其人工成本則較高一點。 但西方國家也能生產這類產品,甚至其成本更為低廉。
今年 1月被Boston Consulting Group(波士頓顧問 公司) 評選為「具有全球領先能力」 (contending for global leadership) 的百家企業中,超過30家為中資 ,但多數為大型的國家企業,或受惠於國內保護扶持的 行業。例如中移動是全球最大的行動通訊運營業者,但 其競爭者有限。其它國內大型企業如鋼鐵、鋁、能源、 金融等行業亦為政府規畫中的「重點」行業。
在西方,可持續發展的企業型態較多是屬於生產高 度創新與質量,邊際應用效益較高的產業。此外,這種 產業的自創品牌可以領先市場。然而,目前的中國企業 在持續發展的過程中遇到的問題是:形象不佳,予人品 質不良的觀感。只有少數中國品牌可建立起較佳的口碑 。根本原因為包含智慧財產在內的產權體系不夠堅固, 以及金融機構對於大型國企較為優待。這些情形欲加以 調整並不容易。
經濟衰退的情況可從較多中國企業無預警倒閉明顯 看出。這些企業的關閉過程彷彿人間蒸發一般,未留下 一絲線索痕跡。其嚴重性大過於因產能過剩而縮減工時 或將廠房遷移內陸。香港的採購商 1年前還可跨境進入 中國南方洽訂布料,現在則須飛到孟加拉的 Dhaka。全 球運動品牌Nike今年在越南生產的運動鞋數量,預計將 超過在中國的製造數量。而中國為Nike過去15年來的原 料供應地。
1988年,鴻海 (2317-TW)以一家小模具台資廠誕生 於深圳,現已成為擁有超過25萬名員工的中國大陸製造 業頭富士康 (Foxconn)集團。市場普遍的認知是,消費 電子品牌iPod、任天堂和微軟的遊戲機,以及相關零件 皆由這家代工廠包辦生產。
鴻海集團由於雇用員工數量龐大,它所批露的消息 都引起地方媒體的關注,儘管該公司發布的聲明低調。 2007年鴻海集團在越南開設第一家子工廠,聲稱該集團 將擴大營運。去年台灣媒體則密集報導富士康集團即將 回台投資。近日台灣媒體則傳出其深圳工廠26萬人將裁 10萬人,表示內陸廠將有更多職缺釋出。不論這些傳聞 的結果為何,經營手法靈活的跨國企業如富士康集團, 有能力因應環境丕變而採取遷移生產基地的動作。但富 士康集團不是唯一這麼做的企業。
誠然,中國大陸仍具有優勢。越南、印尼,以及其 它國家,既可快速擴增產能、又不使其基礎建設負荷過 重或者工資飆漲承壓的能力有限。中國大陸擁有大量的 廉價勞工。也許,重點是中國大陸擁有腹地廣大的內需 市場,目前多由外商主導。但南方中國工廠所面對的處 境可以顯現,這些優勢的背後也有限制。
較高的邊際利潤與較高的品質有關。全球品牌顧問 公司Interbrand針對 700名跨國企業經理人調查顯示, 80%受訪者指出,較低的品質是中國貨行銷海外的重要 障礙。2/3 受訪者則表示,中國貨的價格「便宜」是其 競爭優勢。但只有 12%受訪者認為中國貨的生產品質已 經改善。
由中國企業在海外銷售所遭遇的處境可以判斷出, 上述的評價極為普遍。不過,幾家知名中資企業最近的 外貿斬獲則表現出罕見的意外,例如買下 IBM個人電腦 部門的聯想、以價格優勢攻佔學生宿舍小冰箱製造商海 爾。它們成功打下的江山不是具有成本意識 (cost- conscious)的新興市場,就是已開發市場中的屬成本敏 感性 (cost-sensitive) 區域,此區針對產品標準配備 要求高、創新質量要求低。中國通訊設備製造商華為科 技與中興通訊優勢產品亦屬上述特點的範例典型。
「中國製」產品在國際市場間的風評不佳不僅對中 資企業,也對西方國家中販售中國產品的通路商帶來虧 損。去年美國政府通過立法來提高玩具安全認證規制, 以因應一連串黑心貨在美販售所引發的消費爭議與訴訟 。這為良好的玩具製造商增加成本開銷,同時,美國當 地的分銷商也無能力判斷自中國進口的產品是否合於安 全質量。印度政府亦是基於相同的考量而在最近禁止包 括火車、汽車、玩偶和拼圖在內的中國玩具進口該國。
為何如此?難道中國廠商都沒有進步嗎?比較正面 的解釋是,中國大陸目前所經歷的情況,日本也曾經歷 過,只是在現今消費者至上、興訟風行的時代,每一件 產品小缺失都有可能會被放大。
舉例來說,美國現代品管之父 W. Edwards Deming 的學術理念,在日本二次戰後工業化時期掀起全國仿效 的風潮。汽車巨頭Honda Motor Co.(7237-JP)是以高品 質、低價格的產品扣關英國摩托車產業。現今為消費電 子大廠的 Sony Corp.(6758-JP)和Panasonic Corp. (6752-JP)成為美國收音機與電視製造商的途徑亦是循 此模式。
這些成功的廠商幾乎均以為他廠代工幾樣零件產品 起始(Sony目前仍如此作),同時也自創品牌研發出色的 自家產品。欲以經營目光長遠來說明這些企業經營者的 理念似嫌不夠充分。舉例來說,Panasonic 的創辦人松 下幸之助甚至擘畫了1000年的企畫藍圖。
當然中國企業目前還無法與這些日企相比。但已有 許多中國企業意識到外界對於中國貨的風評普遍不佳。 有些大型企業已開始雇用曾長期任職於歐美標竿企業的 西方經理人。中國大陸當局也察覺到中國貨品質低劣到 出人命的程度,是由於仿冒品氾濫的國內市場強烈受到 保護所致。去年三鹿毒奶事件爆發導致 6名嬰兒死亡, 中國大陸執政當局便將製造黑心毒奶的頭號女要犯,以 及另外兩名供應商判處死刑。
其實,有很多高品質的商品是在中國製造的,諸如 運動休閒產品、MP3 播放器,到珠寶服飾。中國現在已 是世界最大的資訊與通訊科技產品輸出國家。中國本地 市場與貿易展充斥著卓越 (aspiring) 品牌。單就運輸 工具相關產業而言,汽車製造廠商約有12家,輪胎製造 廠商則有 300家,自行車製造廠商有1000家,機車製造 廠商有數千家,這些業者都期待有一番作為。阿里巴巴 商務網上登記的鐘錶製造商有超過3500家,刮鬍刀製造 業者則有8000家。至於量產仿吉列與仿勞力士這類假貨 ,然後舖到路邊攤叫賣的製造者則不計其數。
中國生產的規模如此之大,竟無法打造強勢品牌是 令人不解的。最簡單的解釋是,許多華人企業的經營屬 於代工模式。台資寶成工業 (9904-TW)旗下的裕元集團 在東莞設廠,是為歐美領導品牌製造運動鞋用品的一家 代工公司,其發跡過程與鴻海相似。小代工所製造的產 品無所不包,從網球球拍到歐洲奢侈品都有。西方客戶 認為代工供應者的名稱曝光無益於商品行銷,通常與代 工廠簽約堅持加註保密條款。
代工模式 (Anonymity)也讓中小企業得以免除政府 與媒體對其人力調度的監督,特別是在生產環境極度惡 劣的情況下。這種策略的限制在於,機械式生產的邊際 利潤已被證實是低度的。爭取客戶意謂著必須在他國同 業在大量廉價勞力攻勢下仍然維持競爭力,以中國南方 的產業現況來看,這種經營模式是脆弱,不堪景氣放緩 的衝擊。
台灣有許多知名廠商曾是代工生產的龍頭,但都已 漸漸發展出旗下自創的品牌產品,例如Acer、Asus、 HTC。在中國大陸,欲培植類似這樣的企業最突出的障 礙,是其國內對於智財維護的無能。在一個智慧結晶可 能遭受同業泡製的大環境下,企業為什麼要在此投資研 發和創新的領域?中國政府在察覺到這層障礙後,已頒 布新法令,聲明即將賦予智財權更大的維護。不過中國 政府目前所能做到的部分是有限度的,同時執法的力道 也分散不均。大多數被核發下來的中國專利認證書顯示 ,中國境內申請專利的商品類別屬於加值改良型的「實用模式」 (utility model),較少為創新型的設計。
智慧財產權的申張無力凸顯出一個較深層問題:公 眾維護私有產權意識薄弱。OECD(經濟合作發展組織)的 報告指出,中國在70年代末期重新開放時,這個問題尚 未浮現,當時的創新與科技發展成果均屬國家機構所有 ,而工廠則專司接單生產。即便今日也只有極少數的企 業自主經營。 MIT(麻省理工學院)的經濟學者 Yasheng Huang指出,半數的中國經濟成果是由國營企業創造而 成。這個說法或許是低估,因為在中國大陸,就連中小 企業也認知到它們與國家的關係是非常密切的。
在國營企業中,高層人士的異動是由政府指派。中 移動擁有10萬家供應商。有一項理由是由於經營運作的 特權歸是由政府部門來指導,科技研發須委外進行。領 導高層支薪不高,個人所持股權即使在可拿紅利時也不 願兌領,他們認為拿到花紅與為股東創造利益並無密切 關係。
至於中型企業則有自己的矛盾。它們在設廠時必須 取得國有土地。也因此,中型企業的股東常包括地方官 員在內。地方官員對於產能管理的認知較不敏銳,除非 企業經營發生整併這類意謂失業率將會提高的大事。幾 無例外的是,假若這類企業總部牆上出現了人物照片, 那代表了某位政府高官來訪視察,不過平心而論,就管 理層面而言,地方官員入股的意義,實在是不大的。
還有,歸屬權不清將會扭曲企業的財務、管理組織 和長期規畫。企業為了適應政府管理風格的變遷,在公 布股權時會嘗試各種折衷方法,例如海爾電器集團於百 慕達註冊成立有限公司,以便在香港借殼上市就是一例 。這是因上市證券的核發權隸屬於政府,鉅額融資的合 法途徑則來自國營銀行。由於政治上的因素,中國企業 經營中的研發環節較弱就不難理解。
理論上說來,較小型的私人企業較具有彈性。不過 籌資則具有難度。根據相關統計數據顯示,中國國家銀 行借貸予小型私人企業僅佔其放款比例的一小部分。中 國小型企業融資的來源是不能說的祕密,但還是有線索 可追溯。中國境內有許多從事透過非正式管道 (grey- market) 進行融資放款的業者,當中包括當舖、「信用 擔保」公司、以及專門借貸給小公司的私人銀行。這類 放款管道特色為非正式,但融資時效屬於短期,投資性 質具有可變性,時常取決於與放款人的關係。同時,這 種情況也會使管理階層的決策失真。
這類障礙在中國正在蓬勃發展,還未受到防堵。這 些關乎財源、人力,以及企業的特殊動向的確能展現出 國家的適應活力,但它們同時也是國家發展的障礙。
兩年前,Bill Gates在一次例行性造訪中國大陸的 過程中向接待他的官員表示,他經常在問:下一個Bill Gates和微軟會在哪裡。當時Bill Gates的預測將是出 現在亞洲,因為他看出了亞洲社會經歷了教育程度的提 高和科技力量的變遷。中國未來如果真能出現下一個 Bill Gates,也是理所當然。
不過,《Economist》 在結語中指出,以目前的中 國企業所面臨的處境而言,要培養出下一個Bill Gates ,是很難的。
(邱勤美)
****
Guru

Henri Fayol

Feb 13th 2009
From Economist.com
While American manufacturing processes were being revolutionised by Frederick Winslow Taylor (see article), France’s were being overturned by Fayolism, a system devised by an engineer, Henri Fayol (1841-1925), who became something of a hero for rescuing a troubled mining company and turning it into one of France’s most successful businesses.
Though born in Istanbul, Fayol spent all his working life as a manager at Compagnie de Commentry-Fourchambeau-Decazeville, a big French mining conglomerate. For the last 30 years of his working life (1888–1918) he was managing director of the company. He is the founding father of what has become known as the administration school of management. At its heart was Fayol’s five-point breakdown of managerial responsibility into planning, organising, co-ordinating, commanding and controlling, a division which has pervaded much management thinking since.
“Command and control” became the slogan for the authoritative style of management fashionable through the 1950s and 1960s, though Fayol’s method was more nuanced than this. His “commanding”, for instance, included energising employees, while controlling included adapting the overall plan to changing circumstances.
Fayol’s theory stood in stark contrast to that of Taylor, his great contemporary. Fayol himself said: “Taylor’s approach differs from the one we have outlined in that he examines the firm from the bottom up. He starts with the most elemental units of activity—the workers’ actions—then studies the effects of their actions on productivity, devises new methods for making them more efficient, and applies what he learns at lower levels to the hierarchy.” Fayol’s approach was top-down, he looked at the organisation from the point of view of senior managers.
He also looked for general management principles that could be applied to a wide range of organisations—business, financial or government. He was a great believer in the value of specialisation and the unity of command, that each employee should be answerable to only one other person. Like W. Edwards Deming after him he distilled his thinking about management into 14 principles, ranging from specialisation to unity of command (one worker, one boss).
Fayol was scarcely known outside his native France until a quarter of a century after his death when his most important work, “General and Industrial Management”, was finally translated into English. His influence then spread rapidly, and persisted. As late as 1993, he was being listed in one poll as the most popular management writer of all time.

Notable publication

“General and Industrial Management”, 1916 (in French); Sir Isaac Pitman, London, 1949 (in English)

More management gurus

This profile is adapted from “The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus”, by Tim Hindle (Profile Books; 322 pages; £20). The guide has the low-down on more than 50 of the world’s most influential management thinkers past and present and over 100 of the most influential business-management ideas. To buy this book, please visit our online shop.


*****
Idea

Management by walking about

Sep 8th 2008
From Economist.com
Correction to this article
This is a style of management commonly referred to as MBWA. It is variously lengthened to management by wandering about or management by walking around. MBWA usually involves the following:
• Managers consistently reserving time to walk through their departments and/or to be available for impromptu discussions. (MBWA frequently goes together with an open-door management policy.)
• Individuals forming networks of acquaintances throughout their organisations.
• Lots of opportunities for chatting over coffee or lunch, or in the corridors.
• Managers getting away from their desks and starting to talk to individual employees. The idea is that they should learn about problems and concerns at first hand. At the same time they should teach employees new methods to manage particular problems. The communication goes both ways.
One of the main benefits of MBWA was recognised by W. Edwards Deming, who once wrote:
“If you wait for people to come to you, you’ll only get small problems. You must go and find them. The big problems are where people don’t realise they have one in the first place.”
The difficulty with MBWA is that (certainly at first) employees suspect it is an excuse for managers to spy and interfere unnecessarily. This suspicion usually falls away if the walkabouts occur regularly, and if everyone can see their benefits.
MBWA has been found to be particularly helpful when an organisation is under exceptional stress; for instance, after a significant corporate reorganisation has been announced or when a takeover is about to take place. It is no good practising MBWA for the first time on such occasions, however. It has to have become a regular practice before the stress arises.
By the turn of the century it did not seem extraordinary that managers should manage by walking about. The technologies of mobile communications made it so much easier for them to both walk about and stay in touch at the same time. But in the 1950s many white-collar managers turned their offices into fortresses from which they rarely emerged. Edicts were sent out to the blue-collar workforce whom they rarely met face-to-face. The outside world filtered through via a secretary who, traditionally, sat like a guard dog in front of their (usually closed) office door. Even in the 1980s such practices were not uncommon, as demonstrated in the film “Nine to Five”.
MBWA was popularised by becoming an important part of “The HP Way”, the open style of management pioneered by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the two founders of the eponymous computer company. Many of the practices of The HP Way became widely copied by corporations throughout the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The idea received a further boost when Tom Peters and Robert Waterman wrote that top managers in their “excellent” companies believed in management by walking about. In his second book, “A Passion for Excellence”, Peters said that he saw “managing by wandering about” as the basis of leadership and excellence. Peters called MBWA the “technology of the obvious”. As leaders and managers wander about, he said that at least three things should be going on:
• They should be listening to what people are saying.
• They should be using the opportunity to transmit the company’s values face to face.
• They should be prepared and able to give people on-the-spot help.

Further reading

Peters, T. and Austin, N., “A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference”, Collins, 1985

More management ideas

This article is adapted from “The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus”, by Tim Hindle (Profile Books; 322 pages; £20). The guide has the low-down on over 100 of the most influential business-management ideas and more than 50 of the world’s most influential management thinkers. To buy this book, please visit our online shop.

Correction: when this article was first published, it wrongly referred to “Bill Packard”, rather than “Dave Packard”. This error was corrected on September 9th 2008.
*****

  1. SPECIAL REPORT: Toyota

    The car company in front Requires subscription

    Toyota makes lots of money and is overtaking General Motors to lead the world's car industry. What is the secret of its success?Jan 27th 2005

三頭六臂 集 182-93

193

最可惡的是台灣某財經月刊不久前才出專刊說什麼杜拜奇蹟
如今成"鬼城" (這稱呼在新東陽機車转進中國時聽過)
Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down
As layoffs hit Dubai’s foreign workers, their departure is making parts of the city look like a ghost town.



192
某洛杉磯市長競選者的第一強勢條件

David 'Zuma Dogg' Saltzburg: L.A. mayoral candidate

February 11, 2009

With the March 3 primary election drawing near, The Times asked all candidates for Los Angeles mayor to respond to questions about key issues facing the nation's second-largest city. Here are the responses from candidate David "Zuma Dogg" Saltzburg:

1) What distinguishes you from the other candidates in the race?

First of all, I consider my extensive training of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's 14-point management philosophy the single most important qualification that distinguishes me from the other candidates.

I am a firm believer that until the city of Los Angeles embraces these 14 points (methods for management of quality and productivity) under the leadership of the mayor's office, the city will continue to trip all over itself and waste immeasurable amounts of money; just when we need to do more with less.

My interpretation of Deming's 14 points was praised by Deming himself and published internationally in Quality Digest. So the fact that I have an actual 14-point plan (method) in which to operate the mayor's office distinguishes me as a candidate. As opposed to just pointing out problems with no method to achieve the goal of improvement.


updated

Los Angeles Mayoral Election: David Saltsburg
The UCLA Daily Bruin - Los Angeles,CA,USA
I have a knack for leadership, and I’ve also learned compassion and learned from Dr. W. Edwards Deming’s 14-point plan, which reduces bureaucracy and ...


191

Quote

"I love fools' experiments. I am always making them."Charles Darwin

Competing on Analytics

這些文章和書by Thomas H. Davenport
說明企業"自古成功在科學地試驗"
HBR.org > February 2009 How to Design Smart Business Experiments
我過去與 HERBERT SIMON 討論羅斯福總統的優秀施政
SIMON也認為他了不起之處在
"精打細算" 實驗
愛迪生採用土法練鋼方式

Spotlight





Where would our spotlight be without Thomas Edison? Edison was a man who didn't believe in giving up; he said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Born on this date in 1847, the "Wizard of Menlo Park" received over 1,000 patents for things we consider indispensable today, such as the incandescent light bulb, the phonograph and the stock ticker. He created the first motion picture camera and the first copyrighted film, Fred Ott's Sneeze. Edison was hearing impaired from when he was young, and had only three months of formal schooling. But, luckily for us, he loved to tinker.

190

Tech Innovation in Tough Times: Q&A with Scott Anthony
BNET - San Francisco,Ca,USA

BNET: That reminds me of what W. Edwards Deming, one of the originators of statistical quality control, said: Quality is meeting the expectations of customers.

當然 這一引言還是很膚淺的



189
記兩次無法參與之盛會

"高先生
我將你的通知寫入三頭六臂 集 182-88
不過我自己當天辦一場讀書會 生命之歌 所以不克參加貴會盛會
祝開會成功
--
鍾 漢清
"

*****
諸君:
報名人的數量 沒增加
不過
我們可以神交

我出門前2008年傅斯年講座 2009年2月11日13日
接到 卡洛玲子 (胡女士} BLOG之通知
http://blog.roodo.com/michaelcarolina/archives/8280955.html


我 (Blogger King) 的相關 BLOG 嗎 就選 三頭六臂 集 182-88

*****
為SPENSER 先生的演講會 我近八點就去台大 才"發現"首班是九點多
我去文學院前排隊 約第十位 心想大概可掛車尾
就讀些 The Meaning of ACT
沒想到車子是滿座
所有的等車者 就多轉捷運昆陽站 再 TAXI
我則天人交戰一番 看如此人潮 還是回家blogging 算了

現在是窮
主要是沒浪漫心
昔日在英國為看一部電影 可以花一整天交通


188
"Dear 大舅舅:

我今天有打給李小姐,她說她不知道此書一事,因此需請您提供朋友之姓名,我再請她可轉交。
跟著小亨利去旅行 存好心,說好話,做好事。
"
HC: "李小姐買過它書
台灣戴明圈一書則是要免費送她們的"


187

美國德州的讀者投書 說報紙如何保持品質業績的十大要事
其中談到戴明博士的學說與人人都切身相關
Your Turn
The Tribune - Kingwood,TX,USA

Monday, February 09, 2009

Here’s looking at you

Dear Editor:

I hope you receive lots of compliments on the Page 1 layout (Feb. 4). It’s a real winner and quite eye catching. Good work.

Mike Sullivan

Kingwood

Read all about it!

Dear Editor:

Lynn Ashby’s article (Feb. 4) on big newspapers’ decline poses an interesting management problem. Top executives of big newspapers must find a way to attract readers and advertisers.

My view is that all newspapers¯not just the big ones¯can and should do a better job of educating readers about (1) human anatomy and human health (diet, exercise, etc.), (2) computer hardware and software, (3) writing well, (4) real estate, (5) investing, (6) taxation, (7) the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, (8) radical Islam, (9) the ideas of W. Edwards Deming on management (his ideas have implications for everyday living) and (10) energy-efficient living. That list is not exhaustive, but it’s a good start. I am not advocating the elimination of current-events reporting. Everyone wants to know what is going on in the world, but people want and need more educational material that will help them live better, longer and healthier lives. Nearly every letter I submit to newspapers is designed to be educational.

The Wall Street Journal does a pretty good job of educating its readers. It definitely has an Adam Smith economic philosophy (or bias), but it presents alternative points of view on a range of topics, and the letters to the editor contain thoughtful comments from around the world. But I have yet to see a newspaper article that explains simply and clearly the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My test of acceptance of an article submitted to me as newspaper editor would be “Will this article help our readers to understand the topic discussed?”

The educational focus that I recommend might not be enough to save big newspapers, but it would be my strategy if I owned a newspaper.

Bill Bailey

Kingwood



186

「安全・安心の追求」

「安全・安心の追求」這是日本社會的目標
在食品和汽車產業等經常可見

「 味 全 牌 」 嬰 幼 兒 奶 粉 驗 出 阪 崎 腸 桿 菌 超 標

2009.02.09

味全公司銷往大陸嬰幼兒奶粉疑似檢出阪崎氏腸桿菌,衛生署檢驗結果今出爐,在台銷售三款嬰幼兒奶粉裡,均未檢出阪崎氏腸桿菌。

衛生署食品衛生處表示,這次抽驗的是味全公司雲林斗六廠製造的「味全嬰兒奶粉S─1」、「味全較大嬰兒奶粉S─2」,以及「味全S─3幼兒成長奶粉」,包括成品、原料共六個檢體。

食品衛生處說,阪崎氏腸桿菌致病性低,目前僅有歐盟針對嬰兒奶粉訂定檢測標準,國內也擬比照辦理,但仍要經專家委員會討論。

大 陸 驗 出 3 款 台 灣 奶 粉 含 菌 超 標

11日獲悉,國家品質監督檢查檢疫總局2月2日向內蒙古自治區品質技術監督局發出公函,要求該局責令蒙牛公司禁止向“特侖蘇”牛奶添加OMP物質。著名學 者方舟子認為IGF-1含量高,患多種癌症的風險會增加。而蒙牛集團已經向衛生部提交了相關材料,等待衛生部的批准。(2月11日《每日財經新聞》)

啊 ——啊——當筆者看到這條新聞,第一反應是,我家的那箱剛買來的“特侖蘇”該如何處理?國家品質監督檢查局的“禁止添加”;又有著名學者方舟子可能是非權 威的言論:100克特侖蘇奶中添加的IGF-1含量高達5.65~16.8mg,為一般牛奶的數萬倍。果真如此,就很值得消費者擔憂了:患多種癌症的風險 會增加。你還敢喝嗎?一位母親網友說:孩子一直喜歡喝特侖蘇,看到這個消息,作為母親來說我只能欲哭無淚……

仍然生活在“三聚氰 胺事件”陰影下的老百姓,只能“寧可信其有,不可信其無”。就目前情況看,到底有害無害、是否致癌還不清楚。質監部門通知蒙牛公司,如該企業認為OMP和 IGF-1是安全的,請該企業按照法定程式直接向衛生部提供相關材料,申請衛生部門做出是否允許使用OMP及IGF-1的決定。據悉,蒙牛集團已經向衛生 部提交了相關材料,等待衛生部的批准。

一些奶業企業喝下了自己製造的“劣質奶”,不僅重創了自己的品牌,整個奶業都面臨著前所未 有的信任危機;與此同時,其他食品產業甚至更多的行業也遭遇信任危機。受傷的、脆弱的消費心理再也經不起折騰了。今又聞“特侖蘇或含可疑致癌物”,再次重 創了民眾的消費信心與消費信任。“信心比黃金還重要。”消費信心的建立,尤其需要商品過硬的品質和安全為支撐。產品品質過硬、安全過關是提升消費信心的重 要途徑。

從一個民族品牌從建立到發展壯大是多麼不容易的角度來看,從蒙牛差一點落入外資“虎口”的角度來看,也從我們曾經喝下去 多少的特侖蘇的角度來看,我們期待著特侖蘇是安全的。此前,蒙牛自己做了實驗證明‘特侖蘇’中添加的OMP是沒有問題的,又曾把“OMP”送到過國家質檢 總局進行鑒定,並沒有得到對人體有害的答覆。這說明一個問題:認定食品安全,國家哪個部門說了算?

特侖蘇添加高含量的IGF-1 是否有害尚是未知數,但是生產特侖蘇的蒙牛最需要添加“道德血液”。2008年7月20日,在廣東與企業家座談時,溫家寶總理說:企業家不僅要懂經營、會 管理,企業家的身上還應該流著道德的血液。蒙牛想必沒有忘記自己的“萬言書”。蒙牛一落淚,資本就伸手。從蒙牛虎口脫險,我們看到了國內資本的責任與良 知。蒙牛等奶製品生產企業和流通企業曾聯合發佈“中國奶製品產銷企業品質誠信宣言”。是否兌現了自己壯嚴的承諾?

此外,相關職能部門也要反思自己的“職業道德的血液”。質檢總局如今的“叫停”,與之前的“鑒定”,前後矛盾,作何解釋?衛生部門為何到今天才開始履行職責進行鑒定?職責不明,分工不清的食品品質監管機制性問題再次暴露無遺。

185

許多事情必須有朋友等相互激勵

theme : 戴明如是說
"HC
根據在新春聯誼會中所聞
戴明現象這篇文章似乎反應很好
這可要歸功於你丟了一好球給我
我覺得似乎可以乘勝追擊
用兩個月一次的頻率針對變異等課題用戴明說的型態寫文章
你意如何?
三呆"


"
王老師

我贊成你乘勝追擊
我因為對他的(含學生們)的作品很熟 反而眼高手低
不過我十月應該還會出版 "世界戴明圈" 一書
所以我可作最好的讀者
--
鍾 漢清
Hanching Chung (or HC/ hc)

台灣戴明圈: A Taiwanese Deming Circle
http://demingcircle.blogspot.com/
若謂戴明堪繼踵 只應緣木可求魚



184
八日李安國兄來訪
他在中原大學兼任建築系的畢業設計等課
他提出的一些看法如下
台灣的各種國家獎應該將頻率改為三四年頒一次
以確保質量 目前台灣沒那樣多的一流人才
他說去法國和瑞典等歐洲國家
其人民都很重視他們的建築之美和相關之知識豐富


他去哈佛大學讀書前在李祖原和陳其寬等事務所做過事
在美國也在一家約有一百五 十人之事務所工作過
他說台灣的
都無法累積經驗
所以作品可能數十年如一日



183
任何事情都可以持續改善
譬如說 我再收到台北市東海大學校友會
第三屆第二次會員大會暨新春團拜
會 議 通 知2/15會員大會開會通知(簡約版)
換句話說 它將原先的兩附錄檔都簡化並搬到正文

182
台灣主計處的數字品質究竟如何呢
待查
中國的 一向讓許多專家"疑神疑鬼"

wsj的說法
霧裡看花的中國GDP數據
2009年02月09日15:58



中國的經濟增速究竟有多快?或者,它是否還在增長?

許多經濟學家和投資者越來越迫切地希望找到這些問題的準確答案,他們試圖據此判斷這個全球第三大經濟體的發展趨勢。目前尚不清楚中方的統計數據是否像部分經濟學家長期認為的那樣普遍不準確,甚至是受到刻意操縱。但至少可以說,這些數字有點讓人拿不準。


中國國家統計局說,2008年第四季度中國國內生產總值(
GDP)比上年同期增長6.8%。這個增幅大大低於一至三季度的10.6%、10.1%和9%。

採用年度對比數據是中國的慣常做法,這樣可以避免經濟短期波動帶來的混亂。但年度對比數據也掩蓋了近期的波動,無法將剛剛發生的變化的相關信息更多地傳遞出來。這也是許多發達國家按季度變化公布GDP數據的原因之一。

季度對比數據通常要經過季節性因素的調整,以考慮特殊時間段(比如聖誕節期間)的影響,並折合成年率,以顯示如果這種趨勢持續一年的變化情況。由此計算出的數據能夠顯示出明顯不同的趨勢:比如,美國四季度GDP比上年同期下降0.2%,但經季節性因素調整後折合成年率卻較上季度下降了3.8%。

對中國而言,6.8%的年增幅對應的季度增幅應該是多少最近存在很多爭議。估計值的范圍從下降1%到增長4%出入很大。而且也沒有官方答案:國家統計局說,它一直在計算較上季度的增長率,但因為還有許多技術性工作要做,因此尚未公布這些數字。

顯然,對中國經過季節性因素調整的季度數據應該是多少並未形成一致意見,而且理由也很充分。正如卡內基國際和平基金會(Carnegie Endowment)的阿爾伯﹒特凱德爾(Albert Keidel)不久前在華盛頓的一次演講中所指出的,季度GDP中不僅存在大量的季節性變量,而且這些變量的模式也隨時間推移變化很大。因此,很容易做出不同的季節性調整,相應產生了迥然不同的最終結果。

這種分歧的後果是什麼?雖然很難將某一預期作為權威性結論,但似乎存在一個大體上的共識,即至少四季度經濟仍在增長。高盛公司(Goldman Sachs)經濟學家宋宇說,我認為我們可以很有信心地說,經濟仍在增長,而且我們很有信心地認為,四季度較上季度的增幅折合成年率約在2%-4%之間,至於在這個范圍內具體有多高就仁者見仁、智者見智了。

人們還可能難免得出數據來源存在問題的結論。凱德爾說,使用這些數據真的要冒風險。我認為,在我們能真正依賴經季節性調整的季度數據前還有很長的路要走。

各機構對中國第四季度GDP環比變化估算值(
經季節因素調整後的年度增幅)
花旗-1.1%
中金1.2%
摩根大通1.5%
匯豐2.5%
瑞銀2.5%
高盛2.6%
野村証券3.1%
渣打4.1%
平均2.1%
最終,得到季度增長數字的收獲可能不會比年度數據已得出的結論──2008年四季度中國經濟增長動力明顯放緩──要多很多。經濟學家可能對放緩的程度存在不同意見,但他們的困惑卻是共同的。

渣打銀行(Standard Chartered)的王志浩(Stephen Green)最近在說明其計算結果的報告中說,至少可以說,數據有些奇怪。國家統計局這樣做沒有好處。缺乏經過修正的季度GDP數據且對2008年數據計算方法不作解釋只會更讓人懷疑這些數據受到故意操縱。

國家統計局局長馬建堂反駁了這些猜疑。他在不久前接受《人民日報》專訪時說,中國的統計制度盡管還需要完善,但在亞太地區已算先進的了。

馬建堂說,在中國去年第四季度GDP增長6.8%的數據公布後,我聽到了國際上的兩種聲音:一是認為中國宣稱的增速比實際情況高,因為“四季度用電量是負增長,故而GDP不可能有6.8%的增長”。持這種觀點的人實際上對經濟運行各種因素的內在關聯不是很了解。另一種說法認為這一數據被故意壓低了,他們認為,中國政府故意壓低2008年的數據,借此為2009年實現“保八”目標做舖墊。這完全是一種主觀臆測,沒有任何依據。

Andrew Batson



2009年2月24日 星期二

Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason, ManagementWisdom.com

Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason
兩位是著明的 1980 年起重要電視節目主持人
他們兩本書的首章如下
網路上還有更多的醫護界的品管等作品

Those of us who are running the race are too busy running the race to spend a lot of time in dissecting the minute differences between Deming, Baldridge, Juran, Crosby...etc. p.109


Welcome to ManagementWisdom.com

We are a group of individuals—journalists, producers, writers, and students of management—whose attention was captured years ago by the profound implications of the ideas of W. Edwards Deming and other pioneers in systems thinking and its application to management. This revolutionary way of thinking is seen as the foundation of a new approach to leading and managing organizations of all kinds—corporations, schools, hospitals, service agencies, even families. Its appeal lies in the recognition that cooperation yields better results than competition. Its economic utility consists of developing people to be most effective and enjoy their work; this is the surest means to sustainable success.

We continue to work on a series of documentary television reports for public television and an educational outreach service that will assist cooperating institutions and associations to explain and teach these principles and practices.


The Revolution in World Business accompanied the PBS series Quality华r Else! Chapter 1, Building Good Ships, recounts the history of quality development in Japan after World War II as Dr. Deming and others taught the Japanese to produce better and better quality goods at lower and lower cost.
QUALITY Or Else Chapter One: Building Good Ships

For most of the last 50 years the United States was the agricultural and industrial supplier to the world. At one point after World War II, the U.S. controlled a third of the total world economy and made half of all manufactured goods sold anywhere in the world. Now Americans buy more from other countries than they can sell to them; no one particularly wants the products that used to be the envy of the world. If there is any single person who caused that turnabout, it is General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers in Japan after World War II. He did not do it on purpose; Japan's economic success is the unintended consequence of a logical decision. MacArthur wanted reliable radios, a lot of them, so that occupation forces' orders and propaganda programs could be heard in every town and village in occupied Japan, and when Japanese manufacturers in the 1940's couldn't give the General what he wanted, he sent for Americans to teach them how.

Think of that: One man wanted a radio that worked, and the world economic order changed.

One of the Americans MacArthur sent for was 29-year old Homer M. Sarasohn, a systems and electronics engineer with experience in physics, radio, and radar. He agreed to go to Japan for nine months to survey communications problems. He stayed more than five years and learned to speak Japanese so he could teach more effectively. Charles W. Protzman, a 48-year old engineer from Western Electric, joined him in 1948. One year later, those two got a new and more sympathetic boss, Frank Polkinghorn from Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. With his blessing, Protzman and Sarasohn started teaching the Japanese how to manage modern manufacturing firms. It was not a general, theoretical course; it was, according to Kenneth Hopper, who studied what happened, "a concentration of how to manage technology, and in particular, how to manage a factory." Sarasohn and Protzman quoted on the first page of their instruction manual an American industrialist named Collis P. Huntington. He had been one of the tycoons who built the transcontinental railroad, and at an age when most men retire, Huntington built the Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company along the James River in Virginia. He wrote the company motto that Sarasohn and Protzman quoted to help the Japanese understand what quality meant:

"We shall build good ships here; at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always good ships."

When the war ended, it's doubtful the Japanese could have built ships at all, good or bad. American bombing raids had reduced Japan to rubble. No port city was less than 70 percent destroyed, no industrial city less than 40 percent destroyed, and many were much worse than that. Tokyo had been all but burned to the ground by an American incendiary air raid in March, 1945, and in August atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The late Paul Connolly, a Washington attorney, was the first American into Hiroshima after the bombing. A young Naval officer on the destroyer John Pierce, Connolly led a landing party into the city to assess damage. In an interview with the authors in 1976 he said, "We weren't prepared for the devastation that we saw en route. The countryside was almost deserted. I don't know what the weather was, but I have an abiding impressing everything seemed gray .... We were appalled at the final scene. We saw a desert stretching maybe three, four-miles in diameter where there was literally nothing above your shoe tops."

A Japanese businessman writing of that post-war period said Japan's industrial capacity had been reduced to "piles of ashes and skeletons of scrap." It was no better in February, 1946, when Sarasohn arrived: "Factories no longer existed, and people were starving. They had no food. There was no public transportation. The Japanese economy did not exist any longer." MacArthur himself wrote later, "Never in history had a nation and its people been more completely crushed."

Sarasohn's orders from General MacArthur were to build reliable radios so the Japanese could listen to American "information and education programs," to take care of the communications needs of the occupation forces, and to use the communications industry as an example of how the Japanese economy could be revived.

Economic revival of Japan was not a universally popular idea in the late 40's. Senator William P. Knowland, a conservative from California, demanded a Congressional investigation of MacArthur's economic policies, which conservatives saw as socialistic, or worse. In Washington, Henry Morgenthau, Truman's secretary of the treasury, resigned when his plan to totally dismantle German industry and occupy Japan for 20 generations was rejected. The idea of punishing the former enemy also existed on MacArthur's staff. The Economic and Scientific Section (ESS), which was essentially responsible for all Japanese industry except communications, opposed Sarasohn's and Protzman's plan to teach Japanese managers how to manage efficiently. The ESS was larger than the Civil Communication Section (CCS) Sarasohn worked for, but neither side would back down. It went to MacArthur to decide.

Each side had 20 minutes, no more, to persuade the General. Sarasohn argued for the CCS and remembers the ESS man arguing that "we would create a monster ... that we didn't know what would be the end result of all this, but we should not give them any more to work with to improve their status than we absolutely had to." Did the ESS man see the future Japanese economic competition with the United States? Sarasohn says no. "We did not look down the road that far .... My own faith, my own belief in the American system was that we could meet any competition .... That same confidence in America is what buoyed my argument." Sarasohn's argument was pragmatic: The United States couldn't stay in Japan forever, so the Japanese economy had to be put back on its feet. "I finished, and during all of this time on both arguments, MacArthur sat in back of his desk, smoking his pipe, no reaction whatsoever. I had no idea how well I was getting, if indeed I was getting over to him. Finally, after a minute or so after I had finished and sat down, he got up and started walking out of the office, and I thought, 'Oh, boy, I've blown it.' Just as he about reached the door, he turned around, and he stared at me, and all he said was, 'All right, go do it!' And he walked out."

Sarasohn and Protzman, sitting in separate hotel rooms in Osaka for 30 days, wrote their own textbook, then Polkinghorn added a foreword praising democracy, equality, and cooperation and condemning "greed, selfishness and other antisocial characteristics." A few copies of The CCS Management Seminar manual, 400 typed pages long, still exist. Later Sarasohn wrote a textbook in Japanese titled The Industrial Application of Statistical Quality Control, although when the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) first asked for a course in statistical quality control, Sarasohn refused. He said JUSE believed statistical quality control was "the real secret" that had let America win the war. "Now, if they could get hold of statistical quality control, then - and this is a quote - they could regain their 'place in the sun.' I put a squash to that movement." Sarasohn wanted to get factories operating before he taught the Japanese any theory. In fact, what he taught them was a complex theory, but to his engineer's mind it seemed simple, practical, and straightforward: "My conception of all of this is that what exists is a system .... You're not looking at one factory ... you're looking at a system, the input of which is your design, the purpose for which you want this item to exist, and everything that it takes to get to the customer and place that item in his hands to his satisfaction."

The idea that making products or performing services was part of a system had been catching on slowly in the United States since the 1920's and essentially was the second step in the search for quality. The first step had been inspection - the master checking his apprentice's work, the buyer checking the craftsman's product. Inspection works well on an individual basis, but in mass production, inspection is expensive and wasteful. An inspector can only separate good from bad after it's already made, and it costs just as much to make it wrong as it does to make it right. That's why typically, the experts say, 20 to 40 per cent of a manufacturing plant's budget is spent to build, find, and fix mistakes. If, however, mass production is viewed as a system, then you can use statistics to analyze what the system is doing and get it under control. By eliminating waste, you drive costs down; at a very minimum you save the money you don't spend fixing mistakes. That was being taught to some American engineers during World War II, but the idea was not widespread.

Sarasohn is not sure where he heard of it before he taught it to the Japanese. "It just seemed natural to me. It was the way things should go, and from an engineering point of view, it made sense." Myron Tribus, former director of the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Studies and president of Exergy, Inc., asked Sarasohn later how at his age Sarasohn had known all that. Sarasohn still doesn't know how he knew, he just knew. Other experts agree that he was right - producing anything from a ton of steel to a megawatt of electricity to a bank loan to an insurance policy to a restaurant meal is a system, and unless you look at the whole system simultaneously and find out what it can do, you can't improve it. The CCS management seminar lasted eight hours a day, four days a week, for eight weeks. "And the people who attended were the senior executives, a president, a chief executive .... They were required to attend; they could not send deputies." American occupation forces could require what they liked, and while Sarasohn says he believes in democracy and individual rights, "at that time, in that position, with our charge to revive the Japanese economy, I became a dictator." Those he wanted to attend were simply ordered to be there. Some of Japan's leading industrialists now were Sarasohn's and Protzman's students then - whether they wanted to be or not.

His first question to the students was, "Why is your company in business?" No one had an answer. "And that was the starting point for my argument that there has to be a purpose, there has to be a reason for a company to be in business. A company cannot be merely a money-making machine; it had to have a purpose that went beyond mere profit." Like building good ships.

When Japanese plants first started working again after the war, it was a good day when 10 out of 100 radio vacuum tubes were made well enough to use, a 90 percent failure rate. Quality was not the American team's first concern. The plan was to get factories running with Americans in charge, then find competent Japanese who had not been managers of war industries to take over, and then get them trained at a CCS seminar. The final phase was to wind down American supervision and get the Japanese managers trained in quality control. Sarasohn wanted quality control to be taught by Walter A. Shewhart, the man who had principally developed the theory of statistical control of quality while working at Western Electric, but Shewhart wasn't available.

Sarasohn remembers that the Economics and Scientific Section then turned to Deming, a friend of Shewhart and a former statistician with the U.S. Census Bureau who had helped the American occupation forces with statistical sampling techniques to get reliable Japanese population figures. MacArthur's headquarters apparently arranged for Deming to be invited to lecture in Japan by Kenichi Koyanagi, managing director of the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers, the same group Sarasohn had originally turned down when it asked for statistical quality control training. JUSE members started studying some of Shewhart's material on their own in 1949, but Koyanagi wrote later that he believed "a lecture course by a famous statistician like Dr. Deming could bring about epochal results." Deming agreed to give lectures to the Japanese; he was going to be in Japan anyway working again with the occupation forces.

What Deming would teach was a new quality philosophy that had evolved as he and others developed techniques for the U.S. War Production Board to help improve American war mat*riel. During the war, at Deming's urging and with his help, 35,000 U.S. industrial engineers and technicians were taught to use statistics to find out how to get better results in manufacturing.

From July 10 through 18, 1950, three months before his 50th birthday and one month after the start of the Korean War, Deming taught "Elementary Principles of the Statistical Control of Quality" to 230 Japanese engineers and technicians. In his privately- published travel diary, "Japan 1950," Deming said, "I've never had better students. I'd describe them as the top five percent of all the classes that I ever taught." The lectures tired him; summer in Tokyo can be broiling and consumer air conditioning was waiting in the future. His shirt was sweat-soaked by mid-morning. What made Deming's lectures a success in Japan was not his willingness to work hard under difficult conditions, but his ability to persuade senior Japanese that he was right. On Thursday, July 13, Deming met for dinner at the Industry Club in Tokyo with the presidents and senior officials of Japan's 21 leading industries to talk about quality. He noted in his diary, "I talked to them an hour. There was a lot of wealth represented in that room, and a lot of power. I think they were impressed, because before the evening was over they asked me to meet with them again, and they talked about having a conference in the mountains around Hakone."

Within five years of the end of World War II, which had for any practical purpose destroyed Japan's industrial capacity, managers were being taught quality management techniques, engineers were learning statistical quality control, and the most senior industrialists were being impressed with the importance of quality.

Americans were teaching all of that in Japan, while in the United States, other Americans were busy ignoring it. Tribus remembers that "at about the time Sarasohn and Protzman were lecturing to the Japanese, I was studying some of the same material, though not very seriously. I can report that the common wisdom in the USA was that quality had to be balanced against the cost of attaining it." That common wisdom prevailed, and the idea that higher quality led to lower cost - what Deming would teach the Japanese - was forgotten or ignored in the United States. "The sad thing for me," Sarasohn says, "is that in my cockiness when we went up in front of MacArthur to argue for this CCS management seminar, I had full confidence in the American capability to keep on growing, to keep on going, and as I look back, I see that did not happen."

Sarasohn and Protzman returned to the United States in 1950, Protzman going back to his work at what is now AT&T. He was still fired up by his work in Japan, and he was trying to teach those same principles of quality management to his American colleagues. For his efforts, his son says, he was demoted.

Deming has said, "Export anything to a friendly country, except American management." He says the greatest mistake he ever made was in teaching quality to American engineers and technicians during the war, but not to their bosses. Engineers and technicians make products; they do not make policy, and the decision to produce quality is a policy decision. The people who made policy in American business in 1945 decided quantity was more important. That decision was neither callous, nor venal; as badly as it has turned out, at that time quantity made sense. Other industrial nations were damaged or destroyed. America had to supply much of the world's needs and equally important, buy the goods other nations could produce. Daniel Yankelovich, president of The Public Agenda Foundation, says, "In the post-war period, the United States was the engine of world growth. It wasn't simply that our economy was growing, but we provided a market for the economies of other countries to sell their goods. If it weren't for the U.S. market, there would be no Japanese miracle." At the same time, U.S. industries had to satisfy the domestic demand, which was incredible.

The Great Depression had led into World War II, so in the late 40's and early 50's, people finally had money to buy what they had done without for more than 20 years. During the war, Americans had saved 100 billion dollars to help finance the war effort. After the war, that money financed the pent-up demand for houses and cars and appliances that politicians and industrialists could not ignore. Quantity was the key. John Patrick Diggins in The Proud Decades says 54 percent of American families owned autos in 1948. By 1956, 73 percent did. Make it in mass, get it out the door, and if something's wrong, someone else will fix it. Cars couldn't be made fast enough. Diggins writes, "But really to fulfill the American dream one needed a Cadillac, or so advertisers informed the arriviste of new wealth with such effectiveness that one had to wait a year for delivery." A year! The concern for quality that had grown during the war all but disappeared as American and world consumers demanded more, and more is what America had learned to make better than anyone in the 20th century.

It was the American economy as much as the allied fighting forces that won World War II. Both Japan and Germany made superior weapons, but not enough of them. When President Franklin Roosevelt announced during the war how many bombers were rolling off American assembly lines, neither allies nor the enemy believed him. Accepted wisdom was that no nation could produce that much, and, in fact, no other nation could.

To understand how different quality management is, you have to understand quantity management and mass production. To mass produce anything you need the parts, a way to put them together, and an efficient way to organize the work. Americans had discovered how to do all three.

The first machine-made, interchangeable parts were introduced at an industrial exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in 1851. An American gunsmith took 10 working rifles, disassembled them, put the parts in a box, mixed them up, then reassembled 10 working rifles. It would be so ordinary now as to border on ho-hum, but then it was almost shocking, an achievement so stunning that Europeans referred to machine-made, interchangeable parts as "the American system of manufactures."

Once you have parts that are alike, or enough alike that it doesn't matter, you need an efficient way to put them together. Henry Ford could sell every Model T he could make, and it occurred to Ford that he could build a lot more cars if he could keep the workers in one place and move the parts past them to assemble cars. His engineers built the first modern assembly line in 1914.

Once you've got interchangeable parts and a fast way to put them together, you have to organize the people who'll do the work.

Frederick Winslow Taylor published a book in 1911 titled Principles of Scientific Management. (Deming says Taylor hated the title, but his publisher insisted on it.) It became a classic, and more than 35 years after its publication, Sarasohn was still teaching parts of it in Japan, but with substantial modification. "Taylor," Sarasohn says, "neglected the personal quotient much too much. He was more mechanistic." Taylor suggested a precise, scientific method of organizing a factory to get the most out of it, but it dealt also with organization of the work force, reducing each job to its smallest parts and assigning each worker to one repetitive task. In a way, that was forced by America's immigrant work force, where on the assembly line, men standing side-by-side often spoke different languages. As necessary as Taylor's method may have been, it meant that craftsmanship gave way to efficiency.

Interchangeable parts, the assembly line, and scientific management were the basis of modern industrial production, but they were also the basis for Charlie Chaplin's classic film Modern Times and for Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World. Both condemned the dehumanizing effects of modern technology. The book was set in the year 632 AF, meaning After Ford.

If Chaplin and Huxley saw social costs, others saw economic benefits. In 1908, before the assembly line or Taylor, a Model T Ford cost $850. In 1925, after the assembly line and Taylor, the least expensive Tin Lizzie cost only $290. In constant 1990 U.S. dollars the difference is even more dramatic - nearly $12,000 for a Model T in 1908, less than $2,100 in 1925. In 1916 there were 3.4 million cars registered in the United States, but there were 23 million by 1930. Whatever else mass production may have done, it turned out modern goods for less money, vastly increased the standard of living in the United States and the industrial world, and completely changed how the world made its money. That first major change in the modern world - the ability to mass produce - happened in only 64 years.

The United States stayed with that system through World War II, then when the Japanese were learning how to use quality systems to build better goods for less money, the U.S. was distracted. There were other, more urgent problems - the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the war on poverty, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, and concern for the environment. It's worth remembering that while the American economy was worsening, the country's social system was changing and environment improving. The country's rivers and air, to name only two, are markedly cleaner than they were 20 years ago. In the United States, hard at work on other issues, the new economic order remains a stunning surprise.

The Japanese had learned how to produce quality from Sarasohn, Protzman, Polkinghorn, Deming, Juran, Fiegenbaum and others. Kaoru Ishikawa and Genichi Taguchi would add their own quality wrinkles in Japan over the years, just as Philip Crosby would in the U.S. starting in 1979. What is interesting years later is that no two of those men - indeed, no two people we've talked to anywhere - agree precisely on how quality is defined.

Chapter One - Thinking about Quality

THINKING ABOUT QUALITY - CHAPTER ONE

"The will to believe is perhaps the most powerful, but certainly the most dangerous human attribute." -John P. Grier

The best way to make people understand that there is a basic problem with the economy of the United States is to state the problem bluntly: American managers, by and large, don't know how to manage; not just in manufacturing, but in the service industry, in education, in health care, and in government at all levels. That is not because American managers are stupid, but because they are smart. They were taught how to manage in school and by experience, they learned it better than anyone else in the world, and they don't want to give it up. They were taught; they learned; they are comfortable.

What they were taught, what they learned, what they are comfortable with Doesn't work. It used to, but it doesn't anymore.

That's hardly shocking. What we were all taught over the last 50 years in all fields is changing so rapidly that it defies our ability to adapt. It's easier to accept the changes in technology because you can see the advantages. In writing, for instance, when you compare manual typewriters with the word processors, no one can miss the vast improvement. Because of the obvious, enormous, and immediate benefit, people go through the frustration and bother of changing and learning new skills, even if they wish they didn't have to. They can see the need!

The concept of quality management, developed since World War II, does not involve technology; it involves thought. You have to stop thinking about quantity and start thinking about quality. What makes that more difficult is that quality isn't a convenient list you can consult or even anything you can look at. Thinking is an invisible process, and what American managers must change if we are to survive is how they think and what they believe. The world is developing a new economic game, and the players who appear to do best are those who know how to think quality methods. American managers have been taught to think quantity. That has to change, but only a fool or a masochist thinks change is easy or fun.

Years of experience demonstrates that persuading people to change to quality methods is not a matter of marshaled fact and cogent argument. Change is so difficult that people must believe it is neceesary. Executives generally turn to quality only when they believe that if they continue to do what they've been doing, their companies will not survive. They may not be in trouble at that moment -- most aren't -- but smart executives can look toward the future and see trouble coming if they don't change. Once they believe survival is at stake, recommending that they adopt a quality management system is simpler.

Getting them to change from the old quantity belief to the new quality belief is the hard and important part, because belief beats fact hands down. If people operated on a factual basis, everyone would have adopted a quality method by now. The fact is that quality methods provide better results. Another fact is that people who work in quality companies are happier, better trained, and more dedicated employees. An even bigger fact is that quality is the standard of competition in the global market.

Those facts don't win converts because people don't operate factually. They operate emotionally, and emotion is controlled by belief. The accepted estimate is that only 10 to 40 percent of the information each of us carries around mentally is fact. All the rest of what is in our minds -- up to 90 percent -- is belief or misinformation we've picked up from popular myths or outdated teaching. Once those erroneous beliefs are in our minds, getting them out is always tough and occasionally impossible. People deeply resent being told that part of what they believe is wrong. Just as perception is reality, belief is truth -- and powerful truth. All the world's religions are based on belief.

Some of our everyday beliefs get between us and quality methods, because we never learned or have forgotten the advice of Harold Geneen, former chairman of ITT: "We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs." We are hampered. Americans can't accept that quality methods work; too many of the quality requirements disagree with what we as a people have long believed to be true. Only a relatively few people oppose quality methods. Most who resist are only clinging to what they believe, unable or unwilling to change no matter what the facts may be. That mind-load of beliefs and myths, many so deeply ingrained we aren't even aware we have them, bogs us in a mire of immobility. We have those beliefs reinforced all the time.*

During the 1992 presidential campaign, on a network evening newscast, then President George Bush said, "Competition never hurt anything." He meant it, and we suspect that the vast majority of Americans who heard the broadcast agreed with him or at least accepted his statement as wisdom. Accepted or not, it's wrong. In his book "No Contest: The Case Against Competition," Alfie Kohn identifies and debunks the competitive myths we so easily accept. We compete and are taught to compete from our earliest days, and we believe that we must compete to succeed. We are told that competition is part of human nature, that it brings out the best in us, that it's fun (for the winners), and that competition builds character (for the losers). None of that is true. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the quality philospher, says, "Competition is our ruination."

We are talking about competition within a company or an organization or competition among groups of people who ought to be working together -- division heads of corporations, students, team members. Anywhere there should be teamwork and cooperation, there must not be competition. What Bush should have said -- although only a handful of Americans would have believed him -- was, "Cooperation never hurt anything." In any quality program, cooperation is a requirement. "What we need to do," Deming says, "is learn to work in the system, by which I mean that everybody, every team, every platform, every division, every component is there not for individual competitive profit or recognition, but for contribution to the system as a whole on a win-win basis."

Cooperation is always productive; conflict, defined as "a state of open, often prolonged fighting" never is; and competition may be productive if it is a conflict with rules and a cooperative aim. Most of what people call competition is really conflict -- the sole object of the exercise is to destroy the opponent. In competition, as Dr. Russell L. Ackoff points out, there may well be a cooperative purpose. He uses the example of a tennis game. It is a conflict because one player will win, the other will lose. It is also cooperation because both players have agreed to play by the same rules. While one player wins and one player loses, that is not the only, and often not even the more important aim. Another aim, among amateurs at least, is to enjoy the contest, get some exercise perhaps, and have fun. If the conflict is uneven -- one player is clearly superior -- then the purpose of "having fun" is destroyed for both players. To have fun, it must be an equal competition played under agreed rules.

The same circumstances can be applied in business. "It's perfectly okay," Ackoff says, "to have parts of organizations compete with one another, providing that their conflict is serving the purpose of the whole more effectively than they could otherwise." As an example, neither tennis player could have as much fun, get as much exercise, or be as challenged by hitting a ball off a wall. What gives the game value is the cooperative competition.

If you want a clear example of the power of conflict (called competition) to do harm, you need look no farther than the competition among the states to lure business and industry. In the process, states give free land, low-interest loans, and billions of dollars worth of tax breaks. Industry plays the states against each other, fishing for higher subsidies with new jobs as bait. One state will win; all the others will lose. No higher purpose is served; there are no agreed rules; there is no cooperation. When states are already getting to be almost as short of cash as the federal government, "buying" industrial development makes no sense, particularly when the "sale" doesn't go through. North Carolina was generous to get RJR Nabisco to build a huge, new bakery near Garner, southeast of Raleigh. When the largest leveraged buyout in corporate history left RJR Nabisco up to its chocolate chips in debt, the new bakery was "postponed" into the next century. Even if the bakery is built sometimes in the distant future, North Carolina may never recover all the money it used to "buy" the bakery, because the tax breaks for RJR Nabisco also applied to other firms and, according to one report, North Carolina loses $30 million a year in taxes.

If the states would cooperate, refuse to compete, all business and industry would still have to locate somewhere and pay taxes that would help states improve their education, health care, and law enforcement to the benefit of everyone in the area, including the new industries. That isn't likely to happen in today's competitive world. A newspaper article reports, "(Governor Jim) Hunt says that other states are handing out wads of cash and that if North Carolina wants to remain in the game, it's got to ante up." He is also quoted as assuring taxpayers that there will not be another "RJR fiasco." Perhaps not in North Carolina, but as long as the states continue to compete for industry, there will be another fiasco somewhere.

Another place where the price of competition is obvious and painful is the Congress of the United States. The country is now deeply in debt and saddled with social problems that are so horrendous they defy description. Members of Congress have not been able to help solve those problems as well as they should have because they are organized to compete, not to cooperate. The members are elected in their districts or states to represent those districts and states, and meeting those local needs is the only way to win reelection. Rep. David E. Price (D-NC) says he spends as much time in his district as he does in Washington, and we doubt he is unique.




三頭六臂集 213-29

229
這本回憶錄的問題不少 簡體字版可能更糟
孤獨與追尋 : 地質學大師許靖華的成長故事 Aloneness and Search
作者:許靖華 Kenneth J. Hsu 唐清蓉譯 台北: 天下文化出版社:1997年

偉大的科學家 拜PW BRIDGMAN為師 學高壓之實驗
頁195 PW BRIDGMAN 拼錯
頁216 的"讓我了解一個人必須確實知道他自己所說的每一個字 否則便言之無物"

228
"沒做成案子,他並不後悔,他認為,能真心為客戶著想,即使輸了業績,但贏得心安,這也是一種美好經驗。 "
某報的一段 為什麼會有兩逗點系統呢
這是中文的兩難

另外是 BBC將馬英九先生得替死鬼文 轉成
看來文章還作不完 許多人在端說話 ()


227
郵政劃撥 的情況是這樣
每筆手續費通常十五元
通知單三四天才收到
我的便利袋約五十五元
所以現在買書 一定多少是愛心

226

bye bye 前進杜拜:一門全球必修的新顯學

這本書的一年多前出版
至少十八刷
曾幾何時
危机海啸到迪拜


Lex专栏:迪拜有救了?english

迪拜从阿联酋央行得到100亿美元现金注资,缓解了人们对其偿债能力的担忧。此举表明,阿联酋的富裕成员阿布扎比愿意支持“穷亲戚”。但是,迪拜尚未脱离困境。



225
教學中一定要哲學與方法並濟
這是 Deming講他的日本 之旅
注意 當時技師才四百多人
現在台灣任一手機開發團隊或 LCD產業廠房內的工程師之數量都可能是數倍
第 489 頁
Over 400 engineers studied in eight-day courses in the summer of 1950 in Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Hakata, given by this author, on the methods and philosophy ...

224
China is nearing its first deal in nearly a decade to launch a private communications satellite for a major Western operator, France's Eutelsat.
拜侖的 長詩 Don Juan:唐璜 早預知人可登月
現在我們思考一問題 數十年前登月的火箭等發射
其困難應數十倍於今日的氣候衛星
不過 現在每次發射 還是可能遭遇問題而失敗
也許這才是人類世界的本質
凡事非想當然 都要慎行
How?
payload, fairing

NASA global warming satellite suffers launch failure

A rocket carrying a NASA global warming satellite has landed in the ocean near Antarctica after an early morning launch failure. Speaking at a news conference, officials at Nasa called the satellite launch failure a huge disappointment. The mishap occurred shortly after the Taurus XL rocket carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory blasted off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Launch managers said the payload fairing, which shelters the satellite, apparently failed to separate from the launch vehicle.



223
錢的重點不在總數 而是流通與創造價值和文明
美國第一大保險公司重大虧損連連
American insurer AIG looks set to make the biggest quarterly loss in corporate history,
這可能是"賠"股市期貨市場等"蒸發"掉的錢
這些可能只是說重回二十年前的市場規模 不過問題多啦

電視報導一位九十老人重回職場 發廣告傳單賺小錢活下去

222
朋友通知我的學長(數十年未再見)剛動完心臟手術,情況危殆。現住在台中榮總加護病房。
當時只說"哇 可憐"
晚上卻想為他禱告
生命最重要 其他什麼學問都是其次

221

昨夜電視說日本的教育媽媽少了點 婦女出外工作的漸多 可是公私立托兒所容量嚴重短缺

昨天看到兩位小朋友在打架 有點狠 我過去排解 原來是國語實小五年級 因為好有不願意借悠遊卡給他刷 (他自己忘記帶 身上的五十元要搭捷運)

孔子曰、君子有三戒、少之時、血氣未定、戒之在色、及其壯也、血氣方剛、戒之在鬪、及
其老也、血氣既衰、戒之在得、
16-07
仈 Confucius said, "There are three things which the superior man guards against. In youth, when the physical powers are not yet settled, he guards against lust. When he is strong and the physical powers are full of vigor, he guards against quarrelsomeness. When he is old, and the animal powers are decayed, he guards against covetousness."

220

619

談專業顧問:從統計研究、組織經營之顧問師 戴明博士的履歷書說起

鍾漢清

由於要做此報告 我查一下牛津美國辭典
知道 consult 是十六世紀開始用
[French consulter, from Latin cōnsultāre, frequentative of cōnsulere, to take counsel.]The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
consultant 是十七世紀開始用
這是中文字典缺的史料

這字眼現在很常用 譬如說剛剛得到奧斯卡最佳外語片的



219
一家成功的企業之要素千萬種 大東隆行變化多端的在地料理風貌 服務
不過新聞報導都只重視其成果

把餃子變金元寶 年賺台幣200億

218
各先進國家的郵政之"再造" 是政府的大頭痛
英國的官方說法是 退休金之要求是其利益之七十五倍
英國王家郵政沒錢更新其服務 所以要引入私營資本等等

But Postal Affairs Minister Pat McFadden told the BBC the pension fund deficit was 75 times the company's profit and Royal Mail could not afford to pay down the deficit and fund the modernisation needed - such as automating services.

"We will not privatise the company but what we want is to bring in the experience to drive forward that change precisely so we can continue the universal service for the future," he said.



217
座談之 錄音謄寫 是很不經濟的方式
內容由誰來審定呢
譬如說 上次有人提
Juran's Quality Handbook (5th Edition). Edited by: Juran, J.M.; Godfrey, A.B. © 1999 McGraw-Hill. 有2005年新版 這倒是新聞
不過我在網路上找不到啦

216
這統計的問題是 沒說那年的紀錄
臺灣的世界第一

01台灣摩托車密度為世界第一,台灣有2300萬人口,
摩托車的數量竟超過了1400 萬輛。


215

這則新聞可以談論的東西頗多
你的看法在那方面

经济纵横 | 2009.02.22

经济危机下买瓷器投资保值

两把交叉的佩剑是德国迈森手工瓷器的品牌标志,这一标志代表着手工艺术品和手工传统。明年萨克森州的这家公司将庆祝企业创立300年纪念。迈森瓷器未来的 发展战略是担当奢侈品市场的领头羊。但是经济危机蔓延之下,人人都需要勒紧裤腰带。如果能用简单的咖啡杯,谁又会使用昂贵的手工瓷器咖啡杯呢?迈森想出了 新招,让瓷器也成为一种投资保值方式。

迈森瓷器厂的业务负责人克里斯蒂安·库尔茨克说,想保证销售必须重视宣传推广产品的方式。比如说,一套瓷器咖啡餐具的摆放方式应该不同于以往。

里斯蒂安·库尔茨克说:"比如说,众多陈列柜里摆放的一个花瓶标价61欧元,顾客根本不会考虑到这是手工制成的。现在我们只是改变了陈列摆放这些商品的方式,不需要其它的市场营销策略,销售量就已经上涨了40%。"

当然,光是考虑怎样摆放展示这些瓷器是无法让品牌成为奢侈品市场头牌。另外一个不可缺少的营销策略就是创新意识。例如迈森瓷器也可以应用于建筑领 域。库尔茨克说:"居家厨房、浴室、室内室外,装潢摆设都可以使用到瓷器。日本现在正在修建一座出售奢侈品的商店,我们也正在和他们商谈这个项目,把我们 的迈森瓷器摆放到这家商店,衬托商品名贵的特点。"

迈森瓷器厂成立于1710年。从那个时代人们就已经开始制作瓷器首饰。今年公司准备举办一场独一无二的收藏展。届时许多传统物件都可以在收藏展上看 到。库尔茨克以前是波士顿咨询公司的经理人。他希望公司不只能守住老客户,也应该赢得更多的新客户,开创新市场。现在公司销量的50%都是销往海外。

库尔茨克说:"我们聚焦一定的市场,今年是意大利和中国市场。2010年世界博览会将在上海举办,那时候我们也将庆祝企业成立300周年纪念。"

金融危机对手工瓷器业来说也可以清晰地感觉到。去年第4季度迈森的营业额下降了20个百分点。特别是传统类型的瓷器的销售将不可避免地出现回落。对企业来说,重要的是怎样将今年的销售业绩重新搞好。为了实现这个目标也需要对业务领域进行重新思考。

库尔茨克说:"我们很早就认识到发展的方向。在企业管理方面我们想出新的管理措施,我们和员工们一起商讨计划,集思广益。现在我们正朝着成功的方向迈进。"

另一家传统瓷器生产厂家Rosenthal宣布破产的消息让库尔茨克感到很震惊。但是他马上又表示,同一命运绝不能落在迈森的头上。他 说:"Rosenthal是瓷器行业中的一家企业,但是迈森不是。我们属于生产奢侈品的企业。我们的业务领域完全不同于Rosenthal。"

迈森考虑进军名贵钟表制造领域。他们现在正与德国著名的格拉苏蒂钟表制造厂合作,生产超薄型瓷器钟表表盘。手工匠托马斯·汉斯手绘一个表盘需要差不 多一整天的时间。他说:"我们得反复提醒自己注意精准度,不能有丝毫的放松。眼神要好,另外还得随时自我检查。如果这些算是为企业的成功做出我的一点小贡 献的话,那我会感到很高兴。"

在迈森瓷器厂,所有的员工都在辛勤地工作着。库尔茨克认识每一个员工,叫得出他们的名字,跟他们热情地握手,问候员工的健康状况。也许这只是一种做 秀,但也许也是一种管理策略,正是这样员工们才能在经济危机时期同样保持着乐观的心态。也许迈森当上奢侈品市场领头羊的梦想也会由此而实现。

Isabelle Fabian




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"行政院計劃在民國2011年開辦長期照護保險制度,傾向以全民納保方式辦理,粗估保費約為薪水的1%。民進黨認為,長期照護保險只會讓人民負擔更沈重,是草率的政策。他們認為,應該先讓民進黨執政時期提出的「10年長期照護計畫」先上路,再談長期照護保險。 ..."

Don Juan: CANTO THE TENTH

LXXIX


Alas, how deeply painful is all payment!
Take lives, take wives, take aught except men's purses:
As Machiavel shows those in purple raiment,
Such is the shortest way to general curses.
They hate a murderer much less than a claimant
On that sweet ore which every body nurses; --
Kill a man's family, and he may brook it,
But keep your hands out of his breeches' pocket.
唉呀! 凡是付款全都令人心痛!
性命 老婆 什麼都可以任人拿
除了錢袋 Machiavel 對王侯說
這種事最會引起普遍的咒罵

213

官方開會都會說許多"全方位質量管理"的大話
問題是他們是說話單位
不是執行單位
他們眼中只有制度和單位
有人嗎
那些人所受的待遇你們管得著嗎

bbc
“中國醫療質量和醫療安全狀況不容樂觀”

中國衛生部副部長馬曉偉評價說,中國當前醫療質量和醫療安全狀況不容樂觀。 他在昆明召開的中國全國醫政會議上指出,“中國醫政和醫院管理,特別是公立醫院管理依然有諸多領域亟待加強和完善,人民群眾看病就醫問題並未根本解決。” 衛生部長陳竺在會議期間提出,中國必須建立以人為本的醫療質量管理控制體制和體系。 他提出,要把醫療服務的各種要素和每個環節都納入法制管理中,保證醫療服務的結構和環節質量。 陳竺說,當局要對醫療服務提供者的行為、相關要素等各個環節進行控制和檢查,建立執業規則。 另外,他還提出要建立並完善專科醫療質量控制中心﹔加強對醫療服務行為和醫療質量信息的監測預警,及時發現和消除醫療安全隱患,保障醫療質量和醫療安全。

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