Not that there’s anything wrong with contest in the market for ideas – as they say on Seinfeld. It’s right in the right context, but for better or worse (and it depends obviously enough on the context) at least that aspect is quite contrary to the ethos of TQM. TQM methods are an attempt to square the circle – to provide a way of absorbing many perspectives within some unified view that fits in with central planning.

Popper would also have agreed with your post.

I’d suggest as well as boning up on Hayek, people interested in these forms of organisation and knowledge utilisation bone up on the late German sociologist/philosopher Niklas Luhmann.

My two cents.

True TQM is far more than a fad. In the car industry kaizen and other elements of TQM have sent productivity and product quality soaring. (Car buffs who want to follow this further should pick up a copy of Womack and Roos’ The Machine That Changed The World.)

It is true that in theory some of the feedback processes described in The Machine That Changed The World could be implemented outside a market economy. In practice, it seems not to have happened very much at all. The market imposes a double pressure: it pushes you to elicit feedback (often uncomfortable) and then forces you to decide which feedback to act on. (Trying to act on every piece of feedback will slow down product development dramatically.) The market then ensures that those who elicit and act on the right feedback get greater rewards.

You might classify this as a second-round effect of self-interested knowledge utilisation. But it is definitely underplayed. The role of feedback effects has expanded dramatically over the past 60 years, and I suspect its expansion is actually accelerating as the Internet makes it easier to gather a much richer, more continuous stream of feedback.

(Note to self: Bone up on Hayek. Bone up even more on Smith, whose merits Nick continues to reveal.)

Maybe a new industry for lateral economics?

Feedback a little understood or appreciated human attribute? Until recently, we didn’t appreciate the practical utility of telling each other what is going on eh? So the question becomes how can we encourage people to do more of the stuff that makes people human, in order to extract even more of the stuff that makes some people rich.

I can’t help but think the word ‘feedback’ could be replaced with ‘feedbag’, and the whole concept would still hold together and wouldn’t lose its meaning. Both are necessary in life, oftentimes compulsory and even impossible to avoid or do with out.

I think Ansett went belly-up not because they were nice to their staff, but because they got shafted by an even uglier beast,Qantas. Who are, by all accounts, horrible to their staff.

‘TQM’ has to be about human psychology and what’s considered valuable by humans. And that’s my point. I was making no criticism about your wording (well I was). No, they are good words, there are just too many of them and they state what I would have thought was obvious. But then I’m not an academic and like to get to the point quickly. The language used and concept such as ‘TQM’ risk obfuscating the issue. Not a good thing because the master/slave dynamic needs to realise it is over, lest the twain ne’er meet.(or agree) and they haven’t so far so I’m not holding my breath. Maybe your writing can help the idea of “the practical utility of telling each other what is going on . . .” more mainstream or summit?

“Tell us everything, even the things you might not think are useful, lest you be deemed recalcitrant and uncooperative.”

Give us a break. I need a smoke.

I don’t know why people decry the state of satire in the place. It is all around us.

I agree. TQM is hugely important for globalisation. Because TQM/SPC/deming-way are so empirically rigourous in making a production process meet a quality output, it doesn’t matter where a product is built or fabricated. Something built in China or Mexico can meet the same quality requirements as something built in Germany or Japan.

I consider agile/Xtreme etc approaches to quality which maximise innovation and productivity without sacrificing customer expectations of quality.

I should have added that my point is not necessarily against autocracies but in favour of feedback whether one is operating in a market or within an autocracy (a firm or within the heirarchical structure of a government department). TQM systems are after all implemented within fundamentally autocratic structures. But those structures give a little in order to make themselves more productive.

So my point is not really pro market and anti-autocracy. It’s a case of horses for courses – markets will be better at some things and autocracies will be needed for other things. Rather I’m arguing that feedback is almost always good per se and secondly that, at least in autocracies it’s not that easy to optimise feedback. So we should be trying hard to do this and TQM gives us some very suggestive clues as to how we should be going about it. The place I’m thinking of most of course is governments. They’re into feedback like everyone else – one has to fight off the questionnaires from Govt agencies on what you thought of their service, but lets just say that often not a lot is done with that feedback.

Firstly Link I agree with you that the article is long winded! I should have edited it down more and made it punchier. I got a bit bogged down in editing it and could have improved it. But at some stage you have to press ‘publish’.

There’s also something else which I meant to add in this post, which slightly derailed discussion on the last installment. I really want to argue that feedback is a fundamental category of economics full stop. I also think that the significance of feedback to successful economic organisation is a powerful additional explanation for the superiority of markets over other structures in a whole bunch of economic activities (though obviously not all).

But the two arguments are separable, and my purpose is not to emphasise the second argument (which for instance Andrew Norton took me as doing in the first installment. Hayek’s anchoring so much of his own discussion about information in economics makes his own work less interesting and useful that it might otherwise have been in my opinion.

I think both of you underestimate what is involved in stimulating good useful feedback. Link says that it’s about treating people well. Well TQM tries to do that and that’s part of its essence, but in TQM treating people well is situated in a very specific set of practices. As I suggested in the post, the business world is littered with failures that tried to treat their employees well (Ansett said it thought of its employees as family). And it’s littered with poorly implemented TQM plans that made things worse. And TQM took a long time to emerge. So it’s not easy. Part of the point of this post is to argue that TQM is really a very highly developed form of organisation, not just a few tricks. I think of it as a stage in the ascent of human endeavour in which the blue collar workers came to be treated more like white collar workers and sought to intimate that by beginning the discussion with Adam Smith’s thoughts on slavery.

Another analogy

Why is feedback in the workplace unique to market economies? If it improves productivity, an intelligent autocrat could demand that all his enterprise managers seek out and use “the knowledge of the shop floor” and appoint commissars to police the ruling. Market competition is a great discipline on managers but so is the fear of incarceration (self-interest).

Needless to say I am not advocating an autocracy (which would not be terribly cost-effective even if the ruler was a benign genius). But I really think the essence of market capitalism lies with the role of the price mechanism as generator of information across the economy rather than in the workplace.

‘. . . production floor and ‘how’ it could be bettered.

time gets sucked (away.

don’t it wot.

Treat them like imbeciles, or as if they be your mortal enemy, routinely sucking the lifeblood from your business and they will oblige with fulfulling your worst fears.

Employers can pay their staff and some pay them well, but they can never reimburse them for the chunks of time that work has subtracted from their lives–gone forever. A little emotional reward is the only recompense possible for the giving up one’s life. Money everywhere ebbs and flows, but time gets sucked and we are always in a state of atrophy.

A worker cannot take his pay packet or his savings beyond his deathbed but he can and should be able to take with him the knowledge and the feeling that his life’s labours were appreciated and well spent, lest he feel he has wasted his own life, by feathering the nest of another.