Office Olympics – Total Quality Management & Business Reengineering

Quality is the buzzword that seems to stir the bone marrow of the entrepreneurs and the C-suite employees and excite them to the core. Total Quality Management (TQM) is another jargon that came of late that tells you to maintain quality in everything you do. It takes into account the incompleteness and imperfections of the homo sapiens and advocates improvements in everything you do every time. It tells you what you do today should be better in quality than what you did yesterday. Like this, you improve every day till you become all perfect and attain emancipation. Before you emancipate there is a good chance that the organization can also emancipate

That is where the catch-22 lies: you should help the company emancipate before you do. That is all about quality and the Total Quality movement. A banana is hung before the employees saying that if you practice TQM and the daily doses of improvements, you will see the quality of your personal life also improving to a noticeable degree. This is an intangible extra perquisite that an employee can expect apart from his or her salary. They start thinking that this can be the last instrument that can change their spouse for the better. It is this optimism that is injected into the bunch of idiots in an attempt to make them practically intelligent.

Here is a glimpse of practical intelligence in action.   

Innovate for Excellence

In this organization-wide movement of improving quality another important word is innovation. You should innovate in everything that you do. Innovation is the key. Employees are told that winners don’t do new things, they do the same thing in different ways. It simply means adding porridge and cheese to the sandwich that you stuffed with vegetables earlier to make it tasty. But management is generally against such generous approaches of innovation where costs increase. They advocate innovation without an increase in costs. It is like dipping in the water without making your hair wet. When asked, they nonchalantly reply everything is possible and some companies hang such reminders of impossibility on the front doors that say, “Everything is Possible”. The intention is to remind the employee that they are entering the impossible zone, and it is their duty to turn the impossible into possibility. 

Here are some innovations that challenge the normal practices.

For the simple reason of turning impossibility into possibility, a tool is provided to the employees and massive training sessions are conducted to make them understand the value of business reengineering. This is an intangible tool to turn utopian ideas into reality. At the end of the training, the employees feel more perplexed than excited. There is often a guide to take them through the whole ordeal. Their signs of progress are measured by an external consultant.

Here is the external consultant at work.

If you wonder what we are talking about, it is in simple words reengineering everything that we do for better results. To make it even simpler, you don’t go for a haircut, but you reengineer your head. You no longer go for a meager lunch, but you re-engineer your stomach or the intestine for uncountable reasons obviously positive and long-standing. In this attempt to reengineer everything with innovation for unknown reasons, there is full chaos in the whole system. The reason for this chaos is we are all schizophrenic, but we distinguish our idiosyncrasies and keep them under control when we interact with hard reality. TQM seems to break this barrier and asserts that it is this schizophrenia that can change the world.

Office Olympics – Total Quality Management & Business Reengineering

When over enthusiastic employees apply innovation for better results!

Sotto Voce

In most cases companies find it highly tedious and tiring to translate idiosyncrasies on an aggregate scale into productivity. Slowly the TQM tides down and normal activities start taking their place for practical reasons. The C-suite employees and the entrepreneurs understand after paying the price that too much innovation and reengineering are not easy to digest and yield results. They ultimately realize that quality and innovation cannot be a slave driving affair. So eventually these drives of innovation and reengineering ebbs down and succumbs to the dreary desert sand of dead habits. 

We know you are waiting for us to point out another corporate absurdity that you are also subjected to. We also know you have no other way but to accept it. But remember, you are not alone. Norman & Ozi and their whole bunch of colleagues are also with you to make your life easier and bring a grin to your faces at the end of the day.

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