PBM: Introduction

"Waste appears as excessive operating costs in the short run and excessive losses caused by market instability in the long run."

We have a really hard time working toward customer needs in our office because our mandate is to work in the public's interest to provide smooth and safe operations.  It is sometimes hard to argue the public's good in the heat of the moment from a single citizen calling with a private concern.  It is easy to get caught up with an angry single person and become disconnected from the true customer, the public.  I am going to try to think about this more when I answer the phone (which is always a bit stressful).  Operational costs are increased because the work and the customer are disconnected.  It is true for us in government, not only manufacturing.  We have had to set up ornate complaint management systems, and have people assigning complaints and tracking them on outlook, when in the past, we just took care of them with a call or letter.  We too have people whose jobs are to patch up mistakes that slip through the cracks because workers and customers are not connected, but I would start to argue that this is because we have forgotten who our true customers are. 

The Introduction also introduces the argument (which by several chapters later now I have taken to heart) that "human economic system and business organizations evolved out of efforts to apply thought to the problem of transcending the limits of what nature alone provides us for survival."  In order for our own long term survival and prosperity, business practices need to be transformed.  Human economic activity needs to be balanced and synchronized with nature's economic activity.  Riding the train down the coast, watching the persistent, powerful, and rhythmic waves rolling toward the land somehow made me wonder how we could have ever thought anything else.  

"Management by means now proposes a way to organize work that is slower, quiteter, and more likely to insure human survival in (note, my thinking is so post industrial revolution that I first wrote "on") Earth's ecosystem, while being sufficiently profitable to insure the long-term survival of companies."