In Search of Excellence

In Search of Excellence
(Tom Peters & Robert H Waterman Jr)

chapter - 2 The Rational Model

Accepting that professionalism in management is regularly equated with hard-headed rationality, the authors aver that it doesn’t tell what excellent companies have learnt, doesn’t teach us to love customers, and doesn’t instruct the leader to make an average Joe a hero and many others things that make a company excellent. The authors are in fact against wrong-headed analysis that is too complex to be useful and too unwieldy to be flexible. They are against analysis that strives to be precise about the inherently unknowable and especially analysis done to line operators by control-oriented hands-off staffs.
“Those who implement plans must make the plans”.

The authors introduce the “paralysis through analysis” approach where action stops while planning takes over and express their abhorrence for it.

The authors rue the fact that there aren’t many managers who are hands-down and will go ahead to make and market a product if it’s good enough even when the payoffs mayn’t be clear. There aren’t any such managers now.

The Japanese have excelled in manufacturing and the main reason behind it is that they treat people – not money, machines, or minds – as the natural resource.

Coming to planning, the authors tell that once a plan is made it should be put on the shelf and company should take up action and should not be bound by the plan. It shouldn’t be used as a major input to the decision-making process. Planning is important but should not be an end in itself.

Refuting the traditional assumptions, the authors tell that under those assumptions, cost became the priority number one and revenue enhancement takes a back seat, and quality is given no value. Numerical analysis is done without any feelings and is heartless philosophy. An anti-experimentation of traditional assumptions leads to over-complexities and inflexibility. The rational model causes us to denigrate the importance of values and leaves little room for internal competition.