My wife quizzed me yesterday on general popular culture, and I failed. Her question, pulled from the article she was reading in the Sunday paper, was “who is the hottest new comedian today?” Having recently seen the Kat Williams HBO special (The Pimp Chronicles, Pt. 1) and finding him substantive and slightly outrageous and full of great energy, I of course guessed Kat Williams. Not so, according to the article she was reading. The hottest new comedian today is actually Dane Cook. I also saw his HBO show, the Vicious Circle, laughed out loud not at all, and in fact flipped away from it in search of something funny, which led me to discover a rerun of Arrested Development, a show I’d heard of but never seen before and that immediately made me laugh. So I guess I have Dane to thank for something.
Why is this relevant to a Quality discussion? Because Dane Cook is a good pop culture example of style over substance. Like a boy band, he’s being packaged and marketed and will have a lifespan of the traditional fifteen minutes. In the business world, he’s the organization with a short term planning horizon, concerned with everything other than continuously improving core competencies (think Enron). Dane Cook is relevant to a Quality discussion because he’s responsible for all of the problems facing American business today.
Okay, not Dane personally. But he’s emblematic of what I’ll refer to from here on out as Danian organizations. A business can be great only when its focus is on improving its core competency. By focus I mean that all of its processes are aligned to serve the goal of improving the core competency. Danian businesses routinely neglect to formally identify their core competency or, if they have identified it, forget about continuously improving it for long stretches of time. When Quality systems are used as an organization’s primary building blocks, institutionalized neglect and forgetfulness is not possible. People forget about and neglect things. Processes, however, are incapable of producing anything other than the outputs they have been designed to produce, and quality systems are all about the development of strong and repeatable processes.
[...] If you are running an organization and are paying me to give you one piece of critical advice, I’ll probably choose this one: build your organization around process, not people. Do that and you will have an excellent chance of avoiding a Danian outcome and becoming a Quality-focused organization. [...]
Pingback by Process Focus = Quality Focus « The Quality Geek — November 7, 2006 @ 2:43 am
[...] Okay, let’s get this out of the way – The Wire is by far the best drama on television today, and the best cop show in television history. There, I said it, and I feel better. The show is a triumph of substance over style, featuring a slow-burning, character-driven plot that cares about the issues of the place it lives in. It’s like a great baseball game, or a brilliant chess match, in which seemingly nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens, and then, suddenly, everything happens, and all of the connections become clear. A Wired organization, then, is the opposite of a Danian organization. A Wired organization is so well-aligned that each employee is a critical employee, each function is a critical function. A Wired organization would no sooner eliminate its quality group in a cost-cutting move than it would fire the CEO and executive staff in order to meet a quarterly EBITDA number. Most companies are somewhere between Danian and Wired organizations. But all organizations are in a constant state of becoming, and we would do well to get good at understanding the direction in which our businesses are moving. [...]
Pingback by On the Danian-Wired Continuum « The Quality Geek — November 29, 2006 @ 3:18 pm