To be fair, I believe that Dr. Deming would be aghast today if he saw what his 'disciples' have wrought. I speak from experience - somewhere in the twists and turns of my engineering career at the Great Big Defense Contractor I became a 6 Sigma Black Belt and in the process went back and read Deming's original work.
They did until they became obsessed with productivity and quality improvement to the exclusion of all else in their businesses. It clearly jump started their recovery from WW II. However, pushing on the the operational improvement frontier (defined by the combination of productivity and quality) cannot be your sole business strategy. They seem to be over that at this point but their focus on it allowed the rise of competitors (Korea for example).
But can you imagine what it would be like to be the typical Japanese "Salaryman"? As for being a production worker who starts off the morning in a formation doing synchronized exercises - I, for one, gave that up in boot camp.
Japan has a totally different culture from the West and shouldn't be judged by our values or expectations. The typical Japanese would find abhorrent, among many of our behaviours, the lack of civility or courteousness in our daily life.
Many things that we did in boot camp are no longer part of our lives. Do you still make your bed as you did in boot camp?
You're right of course but I reserve the right to dislike features of another culture (some of which I find downright disgusting). And yes, I do make my bed neatly. As I approach my mid 80's, that early bit of self-discipline allows me freedom to commit petty sins in the rest of the day.
Fuzzy recollection, but I think it was 1980, was interviewed by boards for CWO and OCS. Was an EWC(SW) then. One of the boards had a SWO LT, SWO LCDR and a Supply Corps LCDR. Things seemed to be going well, they knew me and had put me at ease. Then the Supply guy asked me what I thought of TQ-something. It was an acronym I thought I might have heard before but it might as well have been some Urdu term in Boolean Algebra. I responded, "Well, Sir, I took classes at night to earn a few college degrees. STEM wasn't available, Business held no interest for me, so I ended up majoring in what was available, Humanities, Psychology and uh-h-h...Social Studies. As to TQ-whatever, I know nothing. My preference in leadership & management is to tell people what they already know needs to be done based on our training and if that doesn't seem to be working I lean on them." That got me a frown from the SUPPO but nods & smiles from the SWO's. 2 out of 3 carried the day. I got sent to OCS but ended up a CWO. Accumulate as many tools as you can, use the ones you need for the job. Later, as a civilian, I got sent to several seminars, Covey and the like. I attended with interest but found they had little value in inspecting and overseeing road building and asphalt paving. That tired old Navy leadership model worked best.
Things that help a factory produce high quality parts are not necessarily going to help an engineer company clear a complex obstacle system covered by direct and indirect fire or how to fight ship board fires. But I suspect that the principles of lean has something in it about letting huge piles of trash accumulate and nobody knowing what fire hose connections work or allowing the naval base fire department to use hose connections that don't work with naval ship water mains.
people coming out of the Army's instructor course are better off than education school products. The old stuff will works well, but that doesn't fill any rice bowls.
The Navy IT School (Instructor Training) was wonderful. Very intense. It produced many fine Navy instructors. I'd put up any Navy Instructor against a 4 year college graduate in Primary or Secondary School Education. Most all of them have years of experience in the subject matter, superior discipline and motivation and good supervision. I DIVO'ed for two"A" Schools, EW and CTM. It was a rare thing to have a bum instructor. The theory was that any who couldn't cut the mustard got sent to the gym to hand out basketballs. Those that wouldn't cut the mustard got short-toured back to the Fleet. Never had to do either for competency. They were all good men. Except the EW1 who impregnated 2 CTM students. He retired an EW2, I think.
Funny thing about Lean and ISO, if used with some common sense they work pretty well. Lean still requires a bit of fat in order to avoid work stoppages by the delayed JIT, or not get killed by defective incoming materials.
ISO? Can help reduce redundant and streamline processes.
However? You must keep the proselytizing zealots under control and only adapt the parts that work for you. (Beware the evangelicals who will perform your external audits.)
Fun lean story? We were one day late shipping to a large aerospace company in Seattle. The fine? $5,000. The cause? We were short one single $0.37 bolt. Our JIT zealot did not allow any spare parts.
"A deemphasis on engineering and technical expertise resident in the Navy and instead outsourcing that to industry, and a corresponding shift to emphasizing management skills, will have long-term consequences for the Navy, Rickover agued.
“I have learned from many years of bitter experience that we cannot depend on industry to develop, maintain, and have available a technical organization capable of handling the design of complex ships and their equipment without the Navy, itself, having a strong technical organization to oversee the work in detail,” he said, adding that “management systems are as endemic to the government as the Black Plague was in Medieval Europe.”
The emphasis on management over technical acumen in naval officers, and the empowerment of line officers over technical experts in technical matters, combines to push bad engineering practices on the Navy, he said."
The plague continues unabated and the immunization is about as good as that for SARS-CoV-2. Big Defense is making money like Big Pharma.
Yes, there were some abuses, as we all to often are more than happy to engross ourselves in the various transformation fads du jour. That said, there was a lot of goodness done under the iteration of "this" fad ... under CNO Vern Clark's reign. As naval analysts, strategists, historians, we should avoid one and zero conclusions.
Under Clark (and most notably, Wally Massenburg and Black Nathman) the Navy started looking at the business end of the Navy as a business. Bristle, bristle. "We're not businessmen, we're warriors! We're about being effective, not efficient!" I get it. So did ADM Mullen who I think put a soft bullet into Vern's "enterprise approach" for these very reasons. But we need to understand that some parts of our business (repairing jet engines, overhauling ships, depot level repair work ... ) are business, and there were things we were doing that were far from "best practices!" And they could (and DID) benefit from lean six sigma and other enterprise approaches to the "fixing" side of the navy. Now truth be told I was in the aviation side of this, and the aviators jumped on this first, with remarkable results. Keep in mind, this type approach works for making an established process work better. It's NOT going to help you design your next destroyer! It's NOT going to fix a well known broken requirements generation process. But it can / and DID fix a lot of our maintenance (O, I and D level) issues.
I remember talking to ADM Mullen about this shortly after he took over and he said "but how can you change the culture?!" My response was "What culture? The culture that says you have to work port and starboard shifts while being perennially behind? The culture that says you can't ever take a break for lunch? Or to go to the gym? The culture that makes it impossible to get a day off? When we "leaned" out the I-level F-18 engine factory at Oceana, we went from "that culture" to three 8 hour shifts, zero "bare firewalls" and we were doing so well that people could actually go to lunch and periodically we could take three day weekends because we were so far ahead. The sailors LOVED that new culture!
Don't know when you were there Jetcal1, but the transformation I'm talking about happened 20+ years ago. I'm hoping some of it remained and you were the beneficiary of the goodness. There are people who know better than me the specifics, perhaps on this thread ... but in a nutshell ... we brought in an expert industry team as consults (folks who did this as their day job). They looked at our process and realized we were constantly going back and forth, zigzag style, getting to "work stoppage" as we'd not lined up the parts needed before an engine was inducted. This was "leaned" out, which drove down the time to repair by both physically arranging the line better and then driving out waste in the process as well. Basic Lean-101 type stuff. And it worked. I know there are people who were there who remember more of the specifics. I was an interested observer hanging out in the double wide. I'm hoping that even years later, they kept the better processes and didn't revert to the dysfunctional way it was done prior. A lot of the goodness that happened by taking the enterprise approach was at the I-Level, though not only there. For instance, squadrons were working their usual day and stay check, and in the process of investigating problem areas, we found out there was an I-Level window that worked two 8 hour shifts. Which meant, that night check would be at work stoppage for 8 hours when the window closed?! So with the same folks, we switched to three 8 hour shifts, rather than two ... that was a low hanging fruit example, but there were many more.
I was there decades ago when they did the fifteen months of 6 12 hour days followed by an eight hour day on Sunday with two shifts.
Our problems were;
1a. BuPers reduced personnel because not all personnel time was accounted for.
1b. SeaOpDet was also mismanaged.
2. Parts mismanagement.
Our parts problems were procurement not scheduling related and we had a little civilian gnome who drove a Lancia squirreled away in the NW corner of the building who coordinated all induction forecasts with the wings.
(He most likely went away with the drawdown.)
No lunch? That speaks poorly to LPO who should have been splitting his crew. (Same with PRT)
I'm not understanding the QA problem and solution, could you please simplify?
Our problems were 90% external to the building in regards to parts. NAVAIR just failed to properly forecast the on-wing times which were 1/3rd of what had been promised. The overseas I-level shops got priority.
sid, I was only involved in the aviation side of this. I think it's safe to say that while CNO Clark intended it to grow and metastasize to the rest of the Navy ... it didn't. Perhaps ships are a harder problem to crack, or perhaps the navsea stovepipes were sturdier than the navair ones! But for aircraft reliability and sustainability, it worked. We got more flight hours, and higher FMC rates, and ... get this ... at less cost. Just from aligning resources to an agreed upon mission / metric. Did it endure? I don't know. Perhaps parts did. It takes egoless leaders who are willing to align under a "single process owner" (in this case, the Air Boss) and do the right think for the enterprise. The stars aligned with Clark/Nathman/Massenburg. They tried to set up a process that would survive different leadership / personalities, not sure that part succeeded.
Well yes and no. Carriers are part of naval aviation, but a ships a lot different than an aircraft and last I looked PEO Carriers reports to NAVSEA.
Stovepipes, or “communities” are not all bad. When they represent deep domain expertise, it’s ok to be a “specialist”’ who by definition, will not know (deeply) what is going on in the other communities. It’s just when you have to integrate across stovepipes or communities — at all levels — that you run into problems. The easy and first go-to fix is to play with organizational structure and then to try and throw money at it. But regardless of how you slice the pie , there will be different often disparate groups that have to work together to ultimately be successful. The trick is working the seams between the domain expert groupings while not destroying the goodness of what makes that group successful in their domain.
"sid, I was only involved in the aviation side of this."
I appreciate the response Mark...
But gotta ask...
Aren't aircraft carriers part of the "aviation side"?
Sorry, but the sentiment that they were/are not helps validate my contention that the USN has long devolved into a loose gaggle of "Communities" drafting along in a leaderless fashion.
Should add, I was growing up in the neighborhood where these beasts took flight ...
Dad was flying lead in that pic...taken when the Wing was transitioning from the A-5 to the RA-5...he related that during that hop one of the aircraft suffered some kind of casualty serious enough they weren't sure it was going to make it back to Sanford.
TQM / TQL et al are three letter acronyms that while painful wasters of time and effort, probably gained traction to implement because of the lack of threat once the FSU went away. They pale into transparency when compared to the negative impact generated by CRT, DEI and so on. If you are looking for genuine wasteful destruction in our acquistion process, you have to add a letter to get...TA TA! I give you the one and only JCIDS! And 10,000 acquisition "professionals". Never could figure out how JCIDS was supposed to "streamline" an overly slow, administratively glacial process by adding a totally new and additive layer of processes, reviews, and oversight. That's how you get the Army's Future Combat System, Commanche helicopter, the Navy's LCS and Zumwalt crui...er, destroyer? The USAF tanker replacement and failing F22 numbers...Asking for a friend: Did TQM lead to JCIDS?
Standardized parts and procedures, I get that. Possessing the dreaded MBA, I am well aware of its real world shortcomings in non-business and business applications. The problem lies with folks who possess such degrees that fall into one of two categories: 1) those with zero real world experience
2) those who are educated beyond their intelligence
Anything that becomes a chart or a diagram is supposed to SIMPLIFY the presentation of an idea or concept.
We don't do it that way because industry wants to sell more, and be the sole-source. The classic example is batteries. Plain old storage batteries.
In my Phantom days, I had AA batteries in my penlight, AAA in my kneeboard, some hazmat mercury oxide piece of junk in my strobe, some other custom battery in the seat beacon and yet another in the PRC-90 survival radio.
Aside from poor performance in all (it was just verging onto alakaline battery days), the mishmosh of batteries meant that the survival pack (already pretty full) could be packed with extras for the PRC-90 and strobe, or not... And if I ever needed (say) a PRC-90 more than a penlight or strobe, well, sucks to be me.
Same with the tactical ground radios, custom batteries.
But the manufacturers would BS the SPOs about how their inept cicuit design NEEDED 11.8 volts of DC magic, and couldn't handle 12 or something. And the SPOs planning their second career agreed to this nonsense. Never mind us poor schmucks in the field or in the skies
Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of a great scientist so overelaboration and over parameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.
2.4. Worrying Selectively.
Since all models are wrong the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers aboard.
~ George Box, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1976
Well, water vapor (tigers) is hard to model. So we model CO2 (mice) because we have a consensus about how it works, despite the ice cores showing it is trailing and not leading global temperature change - just ignore that part.
CDR, I think you are a bit too hard on Dr. Deming. He never anticipated a system whereby orders are placed in exchange for campaign contributions. Imagine what kind of car you would be driving if your congressman had placed your order with General Motors.
Defense contractors, flag officers prepping for their next job post active duty, and congress. They all like the status quo. Curious if anyone has an idea of how to change that.
One of CDR Sal's recommendations. "For a period of no less than five years from their effective date of retirement, General Officers and Flag Officers shall not be employed by, be a independent or subcontractor to, an officer of, or a member of a board of directors - compensated or not - with any publicly of privately held company that does business with the Department of Defense." Sal has a number of similar reco's to solve other problems.
TQL with the famous Dr. Demming. Even us Marine infantrymen had to sit through it always in the afternoon after PT and following a huge noon chow…
https://deming.org/timeline/
To be fair, I believe that Dr. Deming would be aghast today if he saw what his 'disciples' have wrought. I speak from experience - somewhere in the twists and turns of my engineering career at the Great Big Defense Contractor I became a 6 Sigma Black Belt and in the process went back and read Deming's original work.
Japan certainly benefited from Deming's advice and incorporating it into their companies.
They did until they became obsessed with productivity and quality improvement to the exclusion of all else in their businesses. It clearly jump started their recovery from WW II. However, pushing on the the operational improvement frontier (defined by the combination of productivity and quality) cannot be your sole business strategy. They seem to be over that at this point but their focus on it allowed the rise of competitors (Korea for example).
But can you imagine what it would be like to be the typical Japanese "Salaryman"? As for being a production worker who starts off the morning in a formation doing synchronized exercises - I, for one, gave that up in boot camp.
Japan has a totally different culture from the West and shouldn't be judged by our values or expectations. The typical Japanese would find abhorrent, among many of our behaviours, the lack of civility or courteousness in our daily life.
Many things that we did in boot camp are no longer part of our lives. Do you still make your bed as you did in boot camp?
You're right of course but I reserve the right to dislike features of another culture (some of which I find downright disgusting). And yes, I do make my bed neatly. As I approach my mid 80's, that early bit of self-discipline allows me freedom to commit petty sins in the rest of the day.
"This one time, at Two Week MBA for Flag Officers, I stuck a Blackberry in my...."
Oh my. This can't have come from reading too much Tom Clancy as a kid. : )
Clancy's fiction made more sense than anything in the services at the time.
Agile on the way...
DevOps in the on-deck circle?
Of course!
Fuzzy recollection, but I think it was 1980, was interviewed by boards for CWO and OCS. Was an EWC(SW) then. One of the boards had a SWO LT, SWO LCDR and a Supply Corps LCDR. Things seemed to be going well, they knew me and had put me at ease. Then the Supply guy asked me what I thought of TQ-something. It was an acronym I thought I might have heard before but it might as well have been some Urdu term in Boolean Algebra. I responded, "Well, Sir, I took classes at night to earn a few college degrees. STEM wasn't available, Business held no interest for me, so I ended up majoring in what was available, Humanities, Psychology and uh-h-h...Social Studies. As to TQ-whatever, I know nothing. My preference in leadership & management is to tell people what they already know needs to be done based on our training and if that doesn't seem to be working I lean on them." That got me a frown from the SUPPO but nods & smiles from the SWO's. 2 out of 3 carried the day. I got sent to OCS but ended up a CWO. Accumulate as many tools as you can, use the ones you need for the job. Later, as a civilian, I got sent to several seminars, Covey and the like. I attended with interest but found they had little value in inspecting and overseeing road building and asphalt paving. That tired old Navy leadership model worked best.
Things that help a factory produce high quality parts are not necessarily going to help an engineer company clear a complex obstacle system covered by direct and indirect fire or how to fight ship board fires. But I suspect that the principles of lean has something in it about letting huge piles of trash accumulate and nobody knowing what fire hose connections work or allowing the naval base fire department to use hose connections that don't work with naval ship water mains.
people coming out of the Army's instructor course are better off than education school products. The old stuff will works well, but that doesn't fill any rice bowls.
The Navy IT School (Instructor Training) was wonderful. Very intense. It produced many fine Navy instructors. I'd put up any Navy Instructor against a 4 year college graduate in Primary or Secondary School Education. Most all of them have years of experience in the subject matter, superior discipline and motivation and good supervision. I DIVO'ed for two"A" Schools, EW and CTM. It was a rare thing to have a bum instructor. The theory was that any who couldn't cut the mustard got sent to the gym to hand out basketballs. Those that wouldn't cut the mustard got short-toured back to the Fleet. Never had to do either for competency. They were all good men. Except the EW1 who impregnated 2 CTM students. He retired an EW2, I think.
Was "Pride and Professionalism" the one that got us the "Navy twill" uniform?
Yeah, that was a real blessing.
No. That was the FOGO's who owned stock in Dow Corning and Dupont.
Funny thing about Lean and ISO, if used with some common sense they work pretty well. Lean still requires a bit of fat in order to avoid work stoppages by the delayed JIT, or not get killed by defective incoming materials.
ISO? Can help reduce redundant and streamline processes.
However? You must keep the proselytizing zealots under control and only adapt the parts that work for you. (Beware the evangelicals who will perform your external audits.)
Fun lean story? We were one day late shipping to a large aerospace company in Seattle. The fine? $5,000. The cause? We were short one single $0.37 bolt. Our JIT zealot did not allow any spare parts.
There is a large aerospace company in the Seattle area that still comes up with spare parts issues...
Especially with bolts
Well, those bolts are expensive, you know.
Half a century into this mess. To quote Dave Larter adding to ADM Rickover.
https://www.defensenews.com/naval/the-drift/2020/12/12/its-rickover-time-the-drift-s-ii-vol-xxxvi/
"A deemphasis on engineering and technical expertise resident in the Navy and instead outsourcing that to industry, and a corresponding shift to emphasizing management skills, will have long-term consequences for the Navy, Rickover agued.
“I have learned from many years of bitter experience that we cannot depend on industry to develop, maintain, and have available a technical organization capable of handling the design of complex ships and their equipment without the Navy, itself, having a strong technical organization to oversee the work in detail,” he said, adding that “management systems are as endemic to the government as the Black Plague was in Medieval Europe.”
The emphasis on management over technical acumen in naval officers, and the empowerment of line officers over technical experts in technical matters, combines to push bad engineering practices on the Navy, he said."
The plague continues unabated and the immunization is about as good as that for SARS-CoV-2. Big Defense is making money like Big Pharma.
In addition to relearning Rickover we also have to relearn Henry Kaiser.
Yes, there were some abuses, as we all to often are more than happy to engross ourselves in the various transformation fads du jour. That said, there was a lot of goodness done under the iteration of "this" fad ... under CNO Vern Clark's reign. As naval analysts, strategists, historians, we should avoid one and zero conclusions.
Under Clark (and most notably, Wally Massenburg and Black Nathman) the Navy started looking at the business end of the Navy as a business. Bristle, bristle. "We're not businessmen, we're warriors! We're about being effective, not efficient!" I get it. So did ADM Mullen who I think put a soft bullet into Vern's "enterprise approach" for these very reasons. But we need to understand that some parts of our business (repairing jet engines, overhauling ships, depot level repair work ... ) are business, and there were things we were doing that were far from "best practices!" And they could (and DID) benefit from lean six sigma and other enterprise approaches to the "fixing" side of the navy. Now truth be told I was in the aviation side of this, and the aviators jumped on this first, with remarkable results. Keep in mind, this type approach works for making an established process work better. It's NOT going to help you design your next destroyer! It's NOT going to fix a well known broken requirements generation process. But it can / and DID fix a lot of our maintenance (O, I and D level) issues.
I remember talking to ADM Mullen about this shortly after he took over and he said "but how can you change the culture?!" My response was "What culture? The culture that says you have to work port and starboard shifts while being perennially behind? The culture that says you can't ever take a break for lunch? Or to go to the gym? The culture that makes it impossible to get a day off? When we "leaned" out the I-level F-18 engine factory at Oceana, we went from "that culture" to three 8 hour shifts, zero "bare firewalls" and we were doing so well that people could actually go to lunch and periodically we could take three day weekends because we were so far ahead. The sailors LOVED that new culture!
Having been at Oceana 400 for several years, I'd be very curious as to how it became lean.
Don't know when you were there Jetcal1, but the transformation I'm talking about happened 20+ years ago. I'm hoping some of it remained and you were the beneficiary of the goodness. There are people who know better than me the specifics, perhaps on this thread ... but in a nutshell ... we brought in an expert industry team as consults (folks who did this as their day job). They looked at our process and realized we were constantly going back and forth, zigzag style, getting to "work stoppage" as we'd not lined up the parts needed before an engine was inducted. This was "leaned" out, which drove down the time to repair by both physically arranging the line better and then driving out waste in the process as well. Basic Lean-101 type stuff. And it worked. I know there are people who were there who remember more of the specifics. I was an interested observer hanging out in the double wide. I'm hoping that even years later, they kept the better processes and didn't revert to the dysfunctional way it was done prior. A lot of the goodness that happened by taking the enterprise approach was at the I-Level, though not only there. For instance, squadrons were working their usual day and stay check, and in the process of investigating problem areas, we found out there was an I-Level window that worked two 8 hour shifts. Which meant, that night check would be at work stoppage for 8 hours when the window closed?! So with the same folks, we switched to three 8 hour shifts, rather than two ... that was a low hanging fruit example, but there were many more.
I was there decades ago when they did the fifteen months of 6 12 hour days followed by an eight hour day on Sunday with two shifts.
Our problems were;
1a. BuPers reduced personnel because not all personnel time was accounted for.
1b. SeaOpDet was also mismanaged.
2. Parts mismanagement.
Our parts problems were procurement not scheduling related and we had a little civilian gnome who drove a Lancia squirreled away in the NW corner of the building who coordinated all induction forecasts with the wings.
(He most likely went away with the drawdown.)
No lunch? That speaks poorly to LPO who should have been splitting his crew. (Same with PRT)
I'm not understanding the QA problem and solution, could you please simplify?
Our problems were 90% external to the building in regards to parts. NAVAIR just failed to properly forecast the on-wing times which were 1/3rd of what had been promised. The overseas I-level shops got priority.
Jetcal, too much for a comment thread, but I presented a paper on this topic which may help fill in some of the blanks. Check it out here: http://www.dodccrp.org/events/14th_iccrts_2009/papers/114.pdf
If interested (or bored!)
Thanks. Methinks you were there a bit after they moved the squadrons from Cecil. Rumor was that it was bad.
Before and after 😎
"But it can / and DID fix a lot of our maintenance (O, I and D level) issues."
Apparently it wasn't an enduring fix...
https://news.usni.org/2024/07/08/overhaul-delays-for-uss-george-washington-uss-john-c-stennis-partially-due-to-unknown-steam-turbine-damage
Overhaul Delays for USS George Washington, USS John C. Stennis Partially Due to Unknown Steam Turbine Damage
sid, I was only involved in the aviation side of this. I think it's safe to say that while CNO Clark intended it to grow and metastasize to the rest of the Navy ... it didn't. Perhaps ships are a harder problem to crack, or perhaps the navsea stovepipes were sturdier than the navair ones! But for aircraft reliability and sustainability, it worked. We got more flight hours, and higher FMC rates, and ... get this ... at less cost. Just from aligning resources to an agreed upon mission / metric. Did it endure? I don't know. Perhaps parts did. It takes egoless leaders who are willing to align under a "single process owner" (in this case, the Air Boss) and do the right think for the enterprise. The stars aligned with Clark/Nathman/Massenburg. They tried to set up a process that would survive different leadership / personalities, not sure that part succeeded.
Well yes and no. Carriers are part of naval aviation, but a ships a lot different than an aircraft and last I looked PEO Carriers reports to NAVSEA.
Stovepipes, or “communities” are not all bad. When they represent deep domain expertise, it’s ok to be a “specialist”’ who by definition, will not know (deeply) what is going on in the other communities. It’s just when you have to integrate across stovepipes or communities — at all levels — that you run into problems. The easy and first go-to fix is to play with organizational structure and then to try and throw money at it. But regardless of how you slice the pie , there will be different often disparate groups that have to work together to ultimately be successful. The trick is working the seams between the domain expert groupings while not destroying the goodness of what makes that group successful in their domain.
That sounds very theoretical! But I saw it work 😎
"sid, I was only involved in the aviation side of this."
I appreciate the response Mark...
But gotta ask...
Aren't aircraft carriers part of the "aviation side"?
Sorry, but the sentiment that they were/are not helps validate my contention that the USN has long devolved into a loose gaggle of "Communities" drafting along in a leaderless fashion.
Should add, I was growing up in the neighborhood where these beasts took flight ...
https://th-thumbnailer.cdn-si-edu.com/gRSRgccgMJkAJ4t8l7X1LlFNjfw=/1000x750/filters:no_upscale()/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/RA-5C_main.jpg
Dad was flying lead in that pic...taken when the Wing was transitioning from the A-5 to the RA-5...he related that during that hop one of the aircraft suffered some kind of casualty serious enough they weren't sure it was going to make it back to Sanford.
So I get maintenance nightmares.
sid, kudos to your dad ... that bird WAS a beast!
TQM / TQL et al are three letter acronyms that while painful wasters of time and effort, probably gained traction to implement because of the lack of threat once the FSU went away. They pale into transparency when compared to the negative impact generated by CRT, DEI and so on. If you are looking for genuine wasteful destruction in our acquistion process, you have to add a letter to get...TA TA! I give you the one and only JCIDS! And 10,000 acquisition "professionals". Never could figure out how JCIDS was supposed to "streamline" an overly slow, administratively glacial process by adding a totally new and additive layer of processes, reviews, and oversight. That's how you get the Army's Future Combat System, Commanche helicopter, the Navy's LCS and Zumwalt crui...er, destroyer? The USAF tanker replacement and failing F22 numbers...Asking for a friend: Did TQM lead to JCIDS?
They are all the same. DEI is a process. TQM is a process. There's no difference.
One thing nice about the Lean Six silliness is it kept from O-4 and O-5 busy and unable to dream up dumb things to bother the troops with.
Sal, I'm missing the square on that spaghetti chart that says "And then a miracle occurs"...
Standardized parts and procedures, I get that. Possessing the dreaded MBA, I am well aware of its real world shortcomings in non-business and business applications. The problem lies with folks who possess such degrees that fall into one of two categories: 1) those with zero real world experience
2) those who are educated beyond their intelligence
Anything that becomes a chart or a diagram is supposed to SIMPLIFY the presentation of an idea or concept.
Elon Musk's comment "the best part is no part" is often right. What does this do, why do we need it, and if we do why do we do it that way?
We don't do it that way because industry wants to sell more, and be the sole-source. The classic example is batteries. Plain old storage batteries.
In my Phantom days, I had AA batteries in my penlight, AAA in my kneeboard, some hazmat mercury oxide piece of junk in my strobe, some other custom battery in the seat beacon and yet another in the PRC-90 survival radio.
Aside from poor performance in all (it was just verging onto alakaline battery days), the mishmosh of batteries meant that the survival pack (already pretty full) could be packed with extras for the PRC-90 and strobe, or not... And if I ever needed (say) a PRC-90 more than a penlight or strobe, well, sucks to be me.
Same with the tactical ground radios, custom batteries.
But the manufacturers would BS the SPOs about how their inept cicuit design NEEDED 11.8 volts of DC magic, and couldn't handle 12 or something. And the SPOs planning their second career agreed to this nonsense. Never mind us poor schmucks in the field or in the skies
All the more reason to look at COTS equipment that has already been field proven.
When they pull out the powerpoint, it is time to go to sleep.
No! It's time to shoot the Power Point Ranger!
You don't need to shoot him. Just unplug him.
If you don't shoot him, he will inflict his idiocy on other people that have better things to do. Engineering efficiency is the way to go.
One of the benefits of retirement is no more PPT. Or any Windows OS.
2.3 Parsimony
Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of a great scientist so overelaboration and over parameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.
2.4. Worrying Selectively.
Since all models are wrong the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers aboard.
~ George Box, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 1976
Would be nice if our current cadre of climate disaster modelers embraced 2.4
Well, water vapor (tigers) is hard to model. So we model CO2 (mice) because we have a consensus about how it works, despite the ice cores showing it is trailing and not leading global temperature change - just ignore that part.
It works for grant money at any rate!
“grant money”. money laundering. tax. theft. whatever it takes.
/insert mr_mom_220._221_whatever_it_takes.gif
That's the most important part.
I read the other day that researchers at CERN have 'recreated' black hole jets in the LHC.
https://scitechdaily.com/matter-antimatter-black-hole-jets-recreated-in-cerns-laboratory/
What they actually did was flog the data to death, until it agreed with their preconceptions.
That way, they continue their research funding!
If only we could clone Musk and Feynman.
CDR, I think you are a bit too hard on Dr. Deming. He never anticipated a system whereby orders are placed in exchange for campaign contributions. Imagine what kind of car you would be driving if your congressman had placed your order with General Motors.
Break up the defense contractors.
Have some government owned manufacturing
Forbid flag officers from working for defense contractors post retirement
Severe penalties for anyone taking gifts from contractors.
Defense contractors, flag officers prepping for their next job post active duty, and congress. They all like the status quo. Curious if anyone has an idea of how to change that.
Congress does nothing. Then something bad happens. And they swing 180 degrees in the opposite direction.
One of CDR Sal's recommendations. "For a period of no less than five years from their effective date of retirement, General Officers and Flag Officers shall not be employed by, be a independent or subcontractor to, an officer of, or a member of a board of directors - compensated or not - with any publicly of privately held company that does business with the Department of Defense." Sal has a number of similar reco's to solve other problems.
Forbid O-4 and above, or E-7 and above from working for defense contractors.