Title: Message
Phil wrote:
Bill
Phil
wrote:
There's a good amount of growth these days based on trying
to improve efficiency,
workflow, best practices, processes, etc. Part of the quality movement
is about gains
made in eliminating waste and eliminating reviews, and instead having
quality as an
up-front and intrinsic effort.
[PH] That's good and bad. Refinement is
wonderful in itself in lots of ways, but it's inherently a diminishing
return endeavor, like polishing. You do the easy gains first and then
successively smaller gains take increasing work.
Wow, that's a pretty low expectation for efficiency and
quality. In some ways it sounds like
the complaints about Total Quality Management from the Six Sigma crowd -
that the former focused on the easy gains in a localized area
(technical only, say),
while ignoring the organizational needs as a whole. So you might have a
spruced
up assembly line that runs really well but the organization needs a
better sales force.
Combine this with an approach that gets IT focused on business
processes with
enterprise systems, improved supply chain, better mobile access to
sales support in
the field, better customer ability to configure and order...
[PH] Well our scenarios are different. You seem to be
describing a constant resource being used to enable growth produced
by creating emergent levels of reorganization. I was assuming that
the difference between growth (positive exponent increase) and
refinement (negative exponent increase) was clear and you seem to
be using good English in a way that makes it unclear which we're
talking about. My description was meant for the later.
I think the growth and refinement are very closely coupled in many
processes.
China's spewing out steel. Will it grow till it stops? or refine,
target new markets, find new
uses, cut costs, leverage the technology and factories onto something
else?
I'd bet the latter. Most innovation is incremental, not disruptive, but
both types
are useful - 2 products can look almost identical, but one flies off
the shelf and
one stays. I can't be sure that refinement means negative exponent
increase
unless you're defining the two tautologically - that refinements are
negative exponent
increases. Otherwise, a refinement can possibly lead to exponential
growth with
little to no extra effort.
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