Regarding Michael Skapinker’s management piece on Boeing “The perils of speaking up at work too often deter staff from voicing concerns,” (Work & Careers, March 25), the lessons of not listening to workers should have been learnt decades ago, especially in America, the birthplace of quality control.
When Armand Feigenbaum published his book Total Quality Control: Engineering and Management in 1961, he was doing the manufacturing world a great service, explaining how product quality is an individual as well as a team commitment, but only the Japanese got the message.
After the second world war, Japan’s industrialists, eager to learn from the occupying power, drank in the teachings of Feigenbaum, whose book was translated into Japanese the year it was published.
Taiichi Ohno, considered father of the Toyota production system, took up Feigenbaum literally. Since his company lacked the resources to hire teams of quality inspectors, he passed the job on to his production workers, giving them the power to stop the line if they found a fault or defect, so it could be addressed then and there.
As with the teachings of statistical control guru W Edwards Deming, Feigenbaum’s theories have had much more impact in Japan than at home.
When Americans returned to Japan, in search of the secrets of Toyota’s alchemy of making profits out of quality, what they found was no mystery, just common sense: a worker empowered is one who will contribute to quality.
Peter Grimsdale
London SE21, UK
