Quality over Quantity

Former Citigroup chief Chuck Prince commented last week that the firm needed to

“install better leaders within top management rather than break up the various businesses”

Restructuring is an unsettling time for both the management team and its people. It often the case a new person steps into the shoes of his/her predecessor, the reporting lines and the business landscapes shifts from decentralised to centralised and vice-versa.
Todd Thomson ex Citigroup noted at the NY Reuters Finance Summit that “I fundamentally don’t believe the issues at Citi are ones of strategy. I fundamentally don’t believe the issues at Citi are ones of being in too many products and too many businesses. I fundamentally believe it’s an issue of execution.” He futher added: “If you look at every other significant bank out there today, they do exactly the same thing Citi does. There’s nothing that Citi does that JP Morgan doesn’t do, that Bank of America doesn’t do, that UBS doesn’t do, that HSBC doesn’t do. They all do the same things.”

Its true, its not how many product lines you have. It comes back to leadership and execution, having the right person at the top of the company who can look down and see what's happening on the ground level, listens to people, has a management team that works as a team.

Source: Financial News Online

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Deming A Pioneer in Quality Management

American Economist, William Edwards Deming quote ...

“If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing”

Much of the credit for Japan's flight to quality and the making of its world-class reputation goes to quality guru W. Edwards Deming. Deming urged companies to concentrate on constant improvements, improved efficiency and doing it right the first time.

Deming was a professor of statistics at New York University when he was invited to Japan in 1950 to run a seminar for business leaders. Since the 1930s, Deming was interested in using statistics as a tool to achieve better quality control. Essentially, his idea was to record the number of product defects, analyze why they happened, institute changes, then record how much quality improved, and to keep refining the process until it is done right.

Deming owes at least part of his legendary status in Japan to a professor named Genichi Taguchi, Japan's home-grown quality management expert, who credited many of the American's ideas for his so-called Taguchi method. Taguchi and others would go on to influence a generation of Japanese engineers who would become the backbone of the nation's growing manufacturing prowess.

Did you know Deming composed music, while his main focus was on liturgical pieces, he also wrote a rendition of the Star Spangled Banner using the same words with different music.

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