Re: den.list-d Digest V2001 #95

["Mike A Woolbert" <mawoolb@ppco.com>]

I was struck by what John wrote.

"I live in a Third World Country, which is not different of what Hernan
DeSoto described about Peru, not different at all.  And what I think is
that
our local political leadership is far from undestanding what kind of
transformation is needed.  Even more, I don´t think they care at all.  You
can see it from all the weight they´ve gained, all the trips they´ve done
and all the material things they´ve bought been in the Government.  They´ve
made it their way of living.  And I´m not talking of a particular
Government, Latinamerica has lived that way all their lives.

The worst thing is they (the political leadership) don´t have a systemic
vision at all.  They can´t see that while they´re optimizing their lives,
they´re suboptimizing the nation.  There is this side of my country where
people is starting to die from hunger.  They´re dying because it has not
rained and their crops couldn´t grow.  And they´re not dying because they
couldn´t sell their crops, they are so poor they grow corn and beans just
to
survive..."

If you substitute "top management" for "the political leadership", see the
insurgent changes agents in corporations (mostly Demingites) as the middle
and upper class feeding the poor, and the poor as worker about whom the top
management cares little, you have one definition of the crisis from which
Deming thought we should emerge.  Our corporate landscapes are not much
better than the third world country's.  The crises are very similar.
Concentration of power and wealth at the top, disconnected and
self-centered leadership is ugly in the third world and the business world.
Consider the losses in human capital.

Thanks, Mike

"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find
themselves equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."