--- Lawrence de Bivort wrote: > My sense is that everyone does the best they can - all the time. It is perhaps the greatest tragedy of mankind that we can see better ways of doing things...
One the contrary, Lawrence, I strongly believe that this is absolutely wrong... so wrong that it is "not even wrong" ! ...even through in fairness, let me say for the record that I have truncated Lawrence's complete sentence from his posting, in order to make a point that the shorter sentiment which posted above (which is not exactly what he meant) is perilously misguided, and terribly counter-productive to the USA in the long run. One wonders if the those dedicated manufacturing engineers at GM were "doing the best they can" when they killed the EV-1 ? ... or when they went out of their way to proclaim- when Toyota introduced the Prius, that Detroit would never make that kind of foolish mistake. Over and over, Lutz and Company (also Ford) tried to denigrate Toyota's visionary effort as little more than a "money losing gimmick" Don't get me wrong - it takes lots of manufacturing engineers to make things work well and at the lowest cost, but those engineers are often in that particular job position because they are willing to forego the cutting edge, or lack creativity, but are adapted best to focus on the mundane, and the tried-and-true. In reality - if you want to grow a company to its maximum potential, especially in a competitive industry, it takes both "camps" - the manufacturing engineer and the visionary creative types, and in equal measure, to succeed. Toyota has that. Ford and GM, in contrast, are companies which are dominated by manufacturing engineers who are "Peter-Principled" into the required creative or visionary slots, and in which they cannot serve well. The results take are now becoming evident. Toyota is reaping the benefits of its balanced vision, risk-taking and creativity. And its best factories, by its own admission (interms of quality) are in the USA. Therefore, it is my contention that it is not our (USA) workers who are slacking, or our unions, but it is our short-sighted upper level management, dominated by too many accountants, MBAs and "manufacturing engineers" and too few creative visionaries, who are to blame. GM and Ford are sinking fast, and will be lucky to survive the next decade, if they cannot rectify this upper level management problem fast enough. Jones
