CHANGE FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE OR FINE TUNING FOR QUALITY

CHANGE FOR THE SAKE OF CHANGE OR FINE TUNING FOR QUALITY

By Domenick J. Maglio PhD., Traditional Realist

The more our society moves towards service and away from an agricultural and manufacturing economy, the less we appreciate the effort it takes to retain a quality operation. The consumer approach of getting our needs and wants met by hiring others is becoming more prevalent. In the recent past it was more common to do things ourselves. We are losing practical knowledge of the time, effort and ability it takes to do a quality job

Many Americans have too little time and too much available credit to avoid doing mundane activities that their parents had learned to do. These modern day consumers have high standards and expectations for what they want others to do. The consumers have become “experts” in telling others how to do their jobs without understanding the intricacies and complexity of doing the project themselves.

The Hope and Change philosophy is becoming more prevalent in our culture. Media, corporate and political promises, have inflated people’s expectations. Most of us no longer appreciate the difficulties of developing structure and systems in an organization. This ignorance of what it takes to operate a business is a formula for failure or decline, not perfection or utopia.

Change for the sake of change is often a function of a person’s ego. The person who has promoted or made the change happen will know the untested new approach. The more drastic the change in the approach, the more difficult it will be to reach an immediate high level of efficiency and the easier it is to make excuses. A significant wholesale change in approach takes a great deal of preparation and ongoing revisions to have it work effectively.

It is easier to be a sidewalk superintendent and tell others what is the best approach in getting something done but it is another to accomplish it. There have been many generals who have gone through the military academies throughout our history who talked a good game, had great political and intellectual credentials but could not produce on the battlefield.

There are other leaders sometimes rising through the ranks who could not or would not promote themselves although they inspired others through their ability to grasp the whole picture and were able to persevere until victory.  They learned by doing, making the little necessary changes and seizing upon opportunities to out maneuver the enemy. The success they achieved was based on time tested previous methods with necessary mini changes to meet the specific conditions at that moment.

We see the same scenarios in other endeavors. Over the past half century public education has grown through consolidation of local community schools. Every three to five years a new fad educational approach is introduced at great expense to revolutionize our schools.

Yet the quality of this educational approach has stagnated or has declined.

The pendulum swings one-way and then another. Teachers have to be retrained stifling their knowledge and creativity, which they had learned from classroom experience. Instead they have to become robots often doing what they do not believe, frustrating themselves and confusing the students.

It is not the recommendations made from intellectuals of the ivory tower without real world experience that has led our nation to be the envy of the world. Individual initiative by creative doers has shaped our greatness. These people work hard at turning out a better product. They tweak the system that they developed over time, not change it willy-nilly on the whim of a so-called expert.

If it is an effective and efficient operation do not “fix it” by rushing into an untested speculative program.

These doers know a radical change affects everything in the organization. They know their system and think it through making only an experimental gradual change to see the overall impact in their actual operation. They may make changes to increase the quality by making small, calibrated tweaks.

People throughout the country have developed quality businesses. People seek them out. The quality results of these doers are learned through modeling from others in their lives. They take this knowledge and focus it on a particular area. It is commitment, hard work, learning from others and a large dose of perseverance until they get it to work right.

Like any winner the hard part is to maintain a high level of performance. These individuals are the real experts on how to continue to have a quality product by making reasonable and well thought out, gradual changes. This approach is done to keep the organization viable by fine-tuning it for quality rather than as grandiose schemes that lose the essence of the operation.

Domenick Maglio, PhD. is a columnist carried by various newspapers, an author of several books and owner/director of Wider Horizons School, a college prep program. You can visit Dr. Maglio at www.drmaglio.blogspot.com.