Work Smarter AND Work Harder

In the late 1970's there was a very popular phrase used by American unionism. "Work smarter, not harder."

And I think they meant it. They wanted the worker to be treated decently at the workplace and they liked the concept "work smarter, not harder."

But unfortunately, after spending years studying the world's most important management techniques rarely did I find that the unions understood the phrase: "Work smarter, not harder." What did the union do to help people work smarter?

If you went down to the factory floor, and you saw the way people work, it would be very hard for you to distinguish between a person and a machine. I'm being a little facetious, because you physically can tell the difference between a worker and a machine. But they were treated the same. The worker was working like a machine, doing the same thing over and over again.

I remember one lady I was watching in a small company working on a punch press; she bent down, picked up a piece of metal with the left hand, put the metal into the punch press, then put both her hands onto two separate buttons so the machine knew that, when it came down, it wasn't going to hurt her hands. Then when the press went back up, she reached in with the right hand, took out the formed piece of metal, put it down on a stack over to the right, and kept doing it over and over again.

When I turned to the manager, who was next to me, I said, "How many plates is she going to do in a day?" He said, "She's going to do 5,000." And what is she going to do tomorrow? "She's going to do another 5,000." It was a little bit of a shock to me.

Around that time, I visited an Oldsmobile plant. This was in Tarrytown, New York. I went to the Oldsmobile plant because in a few months I was going to go to Japan on a study mission, my first study mission, and I wanted to get a comparison, a visualization, of what American factories looked like compared to what I was going to see in Japan.

As I was walking around Oldsmobile's assembly line, I noticed one particular worker, whose job was to put in brake fluid into every car. I was just amazed to see a human being working so slowly. To me, it was devastating to come to work every day and to do that kind of job. It was deadly. I turned to the guide who was walking with me and I said, "How long is he going to do that?" He said, "I don't know how long he's going to do that, but," he said, "Norman, we had a man in this plant that all he did for 43 years was to put a tire on a hook, and the hook brought the tire to the assembly line."

Imagine getting up, going to work, and your job is to pick up a tire, put it on a hook. And that's all.

The irony in this story is that the guide turned to me and said, "You know, he only collected two retirement checks."

Imagine what management does, to be expedient, is to take the workers that have gone through so many years through our school system, to learn, to inquire, to grow, to want to really do a good job in life, and then to be given these meaningless jobs that industry has set up for them. I can't fault the worker for they need the job to feed their family.

"Work smarter, not harder," what does work smarter mean? Surely it means to use your brains. I think General Motor's bankruptcy reflects their inability to develop people properly. It is called Karma. The bible says, "As you sew so shall ye reap." General Motors did not know how to use people and now suffers from that neglect. Unless they learn that lesson now, they are just prone to fail again. People are not like machines. People can be very creative on the job with the right understanding and leadership from management.

I once saw a cartoon, and the cartoon showed a box, and above the box was a sign, "Leave your brains here." You'll get them back when you leave at the end of the day.

Yes, we wanted workers to come and use their body. And the other part of the union's motto is also misunderstood - "not harder." Even that is wrong.

We want people to work as hard as they can physically, mentally. Yes. Look at Tiger Woods. I always like to use Tiger Woods as an example, because Tiger Woods is always working hard. He's one of the best athletes in the world, surely the best golfer. Probably making $100 million a year. He's won over 65 PGA tournaments. What an amazing man.

Last year, when he won the sixth tournament of the year, the announcer asked Tiger, "What are you going to do now, Tiger?" He said, "What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go out and practice." Yes. Every day, he's up at 6:00 in the morning and goes to the gym. He spends virtually the whole day continually learning, practicing, stretching his muscles, continuously improving so he can stay No. 1 in the world.

I also admire Tiger because he's willing to change. Even though he was No. 1, he has a coach coaching him. And the coach, about a year ago, completely helped him change his style. Imagine that. Completely changing your style even when you are No. 1 in the world.

Work smarter, not harder. So what could unionism do? Some unions have a tradition of educating their worker, like the carpenters, and like the electricians. There are certain unions that you spend many years apprenticing, learning your skill, having to pass tests to show that you've achieved certain levels of skill - to be certified as a mason, as an electrician, et cetera.

There the union is following that model of work smarter, not harder. But most American unions, like the automobile unions, didn't care at all if the worker used their brains.

Once, I was at a Ford Motor Company engine plant inside of Cleveland. A friend of mine, Gifford Brown, was the plant manager. Gifford spent $2 billion of Ford Motor Company's money to build the most advanced automotive engine plant in the world. This plant was designed to produce engines to what Ford called their World Car. Most of the machines were made in Germany.

I came into the plant just when the machines were being completely installed. I watched the motors going along the line, almost completely done by automation. I looked at the workers, and what did I see? I saw workers sitting there, having a cup of coffee, smoking a cigarette, reading a newspaper. They were there only to attend the machines. If the machine did something wrong, they would respond. The workers made good money but the work was terribly boring.

That means the system was designed for machines, but not people. And what is the result of applying that kind of technology? Just look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler, going bankrupt.

When I keynote a conference, I ask the question very often, "Who is your most important asset?" And people will say, "Of course, people." The audience will say, "People are our most important asset."

And then I'll say to them, "If they're the most important, why aren't they on your balance sheet?" Your balance sheet, the financial balance sheet, represents the financial worth of a company. If you look at it, you'll see cash, you'll see accounts receivable, you'll see investment in technology and machines. You won't see investment in people. It's ironical. People are just written off. They're just expenses. They're treated as necessary evils.

But people are the real assets of the company. When management knows how to properly invest in their people the payback is enormous.

When we don't have people work smarter and harder, then they're expendable. Then we easily send the work to China, because what are we losing? We didn't make and real investment in then.

How can you get rid of a Tiger Woods? How can you get rid of any scientist, any genius in your company, anyone that has developed your treasures? Innovative people, you can't get rid of them.

So what do you do? I like the motto work smarter and work harder.

How do we challenge and get people to work smarter and harder?

Well, in my studies I found a very simple process in Japan. They very cleverly looked at the American suggestion system and they copied it verbatim. Initially, they got the same results that America did, like, one idea every seven years from the average worker.

But Toyota and the other Japanese company adapted the system and said, you know, it's a waste. People have real talent. How do we bring it out?

Then they slowly changed the system to a really participative management system. People know their job the best. We should be focusing on how do we get people to manage their own work.

That means, when a problem occurs, we want the person working on that job to be responsible for identifying where that problem came from and to find solutions. We want to make that person responsible for detecting quality problems.

Another brilliant thing that Toyota did in addition to extending the suggestion system is every time there was a problem they had the worker stop the line. They were serious about not allowing a defect to be passed to the customer. And so they established the idea that the next person who gets your work is your customer, and you should not pass a defect, you should not pass a problem, to the next worker.

When I was in Georgetown with a group of people from the construction industry a few years back, someone in the audience asked Gary Convis, who was the president of Toyota in Georgetown at the time, and they said to him, "Gary, what do you expect from your people? What do you expect from your employees?"

And Gary said, "You know, I expect only two things. One, I expect them to come to work. Two, I expect them to pull the cord."

Imagine the second most important thing to Gary was people pulling the cord, because he wanted to empower workers to use their intelligence, to solve the problems that they are faced at the time the problem occurs. Look what Toyota did. In 1950, they were known for making junk. They almost went bankrupt, almost went out of business. And now they make a Lexus and they have close to $50 billion in the bank, enough money to get them through this recession.

I'm sure at this moment the whole automobile industry is in trouble. They're all losing money. But at least Toyota has enough money to cushion them until the world turns around.

Work smarter, and harder. Work smarter is to challenge people to look around their work area and define ways to continuously improve. Because there are always problems, no matter what you do in life, there are always problems to solve.

Believe me, we want workers to work smarter. How to work smarter? Well, first, we have to educate them, don't we? If we want them to work smarter, then they have to know their jobs very well. So training is unending.

In the interview with Tom Hartman (See appendix) Autoliv, his company, is continually investing in people. Every month, they're training people, new things. Every month, they have scheduled training sessions with workers. And workers meet before every shift and after every shift. They meet to discuss things that happened during the day, the problems that occurred to them and what they went through to solve them.

At Gulfstream, they went from virtually no ideas per worker and now they're up to 33 ideas per worker per year. 33 improvement suggestions per worker implemented each year, and the savings are enormous. And Autoliv claims that they are up to 66 ideas. That's more than one problem identified by a worker each week. That's the way we learn to work smarter.

We really should want to have a learning corporation. What do we mean by a learning corporation?

The large corporations would encourage a select group of people to innovate new products - they were part of the learning corporation and all the others could be like machines. That was not a learning organization. A learning organization is where everybody is learning. And of course the ultimate, which we will get a lot more into in this book, is what Canon has done.

Canon went from a conveyor belt system where one worker would do very limited work, to cell technology where one worker builds the entire copier. They now work from 30 minutes to three hours building an entire copier on their own. Look at the skill that's necessary to do that. Just think about the education that is needed to have every worker totally multi-skilled, to know everything about that copier in order to build it properly.

That to me is the current state of the art of "Working Smarter and Harder."

Quality Control Circles

My first Productivity newsletter June, 1980 described the importance of Quality Control Circles (QCC). The circle was designed by Kaoru Ishikawa and virtually every Japanese company implemented the process getting all workers into small problem solving teams. Each team normally was a work group with less then 10 people.

Prior to the circles, quality information was in the hands of the quality manager whose job was to maintain quality standards. To obtain high quality products it was necessary to have all workers become self-inspectors of their quality. It was impossible for the quality manager to maintain high standards on their own. But through Ishikawa's instructions the knowledge of the quality manager was taught to all workers. The workers were taught how to use the quality tools:

1. Cause-and-effect diagram (also called Ishikawa or fishbone chart): Used to brainstorm and classify possible causes of problems and their solutions.
2. Check sheet: Used by workers to check off every error or problem found.
3. Control charts: Graphs used to study how a process changes over time.
4. Histogram: A graph to show frequency distributions.
5. Pareto chart: A bar graph to show the most significant problems.
6. Scatter diagram: To look for relationships.
7. Stratification: A technique that separates data gathered from a variety of sources so that patterns can be seen.

All the above were tools originally used by the quality managers.

The work teams would normally address two or three major problems a year and the teams would meet during their breaks, at lunch or before or after work. Periodically, maybe twice a year, the teams would present their results to senior management.

QCC was a wonderful way to show respect to workers and to get them involved in problem solving activities. Through circle activities quality dramatically improved.

I need your help. Still today after more then 40 years since QCC started in Japan, every Japanese company that I visited this past year has circle activities going. Why did the quality movement in America die?

How Toyota Became the World's Most Productive Automaker

Once again looking back at the first Productivity newsletters in 1981:

"Twenty years ago, Toyota began working on a radically-different system to make production totally efficient. Its goal is the maximum utilization of employees, equipment, and materials, and it depends on the intelligence and creativity of the worker." - Productivity newsletter January 1981

Amazing when I look back in retrospect what we had discovered - I only wish GM, Chrysler and Ford would have spent more time studying our early newsletter. A month later, in February 1981 we took our first study mission to Japan.

In review of that article in January 1981:

1. "More automobiles were made in Japan in 1980 than in the United States.
2. Not one European auto maker could produce as much as 20 cars per man-year of labor, Toyota was producing forty-nine."
3. Toyota's employees submitted 15.3 suggestions per worker and at GM it was only .8
4. At Toyota at an 800-ton press it took ten minutes to do a set-up while in the US it took from four to six hours.
5. Labor productivity at Toyota was twice as high as the typical US plant.
6. The Toyota Production System developed by Taiichi Ohno who wanted to find ways to eliminate waste in the manufacturing process.
7. Kanban: 1. drastically reduced inventory - Toyota keeps just three to four hourse of inventory on hand, every process viewed as part of the continuous assembly line including the vendors. Some vendors delivered parts two or three times a day. Westinghouse was studying the system and feels that it could save their company $400 million a year.
2. reduced storage space from 2,340 sq. meters to 568 sq. meters
3. improved the efficiency and effectiveness of the worker
4. improved quality - since all processes are viewed as an integral part of the assembly line, a defect in any of them will force the system to stop.
8. In the US, in conventional production systems, each process is given a production schedule, produces and sends supplies to the following process. Toyota reversed this with Kanban, and JIT; requires that each process withdraw parts from the process that precedes it.

Since JIT calls for only the necessary quantity of parts at the necessary time -- nothing more, nothing less, only the final assembly line can know exactly what the necessary quantity and timing are. Thus the final assemby goes back to the preceding process to get the necessary parts, and the preceding process produces what has just been withdrawn - all process are connected in the chain including vendors."

Ritsuo Shingo

Let me start with Ritsuo Shingo, Dr. Shingo's son was president of Toyota China and Hino Motors China. Ritsuo recently keynoted the Shingo Prize conference in Nashville. He initially wanted to get up in front of the audience and read his speech, but I spent two days with him, reviewing his talk and convincing him to just get up and tell his best stories.

"See my back!" When Ritsuo set up Toyota China, he needed an automobile and furniture for his office. He went out and bought a used Toyota. Imagine the president of the company buying a used car. He went to buy furniture and thought the prices for the desks and chairs were much to high so he looked around for used furniture and paid around one tenth of the new prices. Now, he said, "I didn't tell my subordinates to go and buy used things, I just felt that they would 'See my back,.' They all did the same as I did."

When I invited Ritsuo to key the conference, I told him that the Shingo Prize committee would be happy to pay business class airfare. But when he called his travel agent, and was told the cost of business class tickets, he couldn't spend that large amount of money. His body was uncomfortable on such a long flight from Tokyo but his mind was peaceful with the thought of how much he was saving the prize. He was taught well by his father.

He would spend 50% of his time on the factory floor training his workers. He would educate everybody and didn't hide anything, knowing that some people would leave would not restrain him for sharing everything he knew. When people did leave, he hoped that the relationship he had with them would continue.

He felt that top management should have a heart. And his commitment was most important. He would frequently have "heart to heart talks" with his employees. He said, "Always think about the other person and never look down at people." He felt that it was important for HR people, finance people and other support people to go often to the factory floor and talk and learn from the workers.

On the floor he would focus on reducing lead time; like a restaurant - order it then make it. Like pizza, bake and put on the topping.

There was a lot to overcome in China: people would spit on the floor, and punishment was used to educate, people were fined for making mistakes; wrong part they were fined; didn't meet target they were fined; people didn't feel pleasant, always being watched. It was a management problem not the workers. - Ritsuo changed all that to really trust and respect people.

People started with very low salaries but as Toyota did well so did the employees. He gave a lot of on-the-job training and always watched the results of his training. Every day he went around the factory, once a day to each department. He didn't like sitting in his office. He would write on a board so everyone knew where he was. Even as president he felt that education and training was his responsibility.

Ritsuo gave an excellent talk at the conference, people wanted him to stay beyond his hour. He promised to come back next year and they promised to give him two hours.

Finding Great Masters

My little talent these past thirty years has been to find the great masters of Productivity and Quality improvement and bring out their ideas for others to learn and put into practice.

In June 1980, in my first Productivity newsletter, we wrote:
"From 'Junk Merchant of the World' to a nation known for high quality -- how did Japan do it? Quality Control Circles could be the answer. Workers meet usually one hour a week to solve problems that affect their jobs. The results make QC circles worth looking at closely."

Of course, we subsequently learned that QC circles was an important but only a small part of the Japanese miracle.

In 1980, Wayne Ricker, with no restrictions, allowed me to be the first to write and publish in America a series of articles on Quality Control Circles (QCC). QCC is still practiced at virtually every major Japanese company to gain involvement from all employees on solving those challenging problems around them. Fundamental to QCC is teaching the workers the basic quality tools and having them apply them at their job site.

In the future, on my web site, I will be re-reviewing QCC with the hope that you also will re-consider using this technique to gain more participation from your workers in solving problems around their work area. I will once again share with you the QCC tools and techniques.


In the August 1980 Productivity newsletter, we reviewed a book "How to Win Productivity in Manufacturing" by Wm. E. Sandman with John P. Hayes.

"Orders in waiting represent idle work-in-process (WIP). 'Reduce this waiting time and you will increase your profits and productivity."

"When an order spends 95% of its time waiting and only 5% being worked on, ... there is no balance between materials and labor."

"When you increase the speed of cash flow, you increase productivity."

...........Waiting
Time .. Queue Time
|——|————————————————————|
5% ..... 95%

Honestly, it took me years to learn the power of this very simple diagram. The heart of Lean we subsequently learned, comes from eliminating wastes to improve the value adding ratio. We had this back in 1980 but did not really understand it well enough at the time.

On my web site, I want to review with you on a regular basis my learning from the past, putting all the marvelous things I found into a proper perspective but I also want to reveal the powerful concepts that keep coming to me. In April, I spent time with Shigehiro Nakamura, Zenji Kosaka, Ryuji Fukuda, Noriaki Kano, Bunji Tozawa and Ritsuo Shingo (Dr. Shigeo Shingo's son). Each just poured new information into me that I hope will prove very beneficial for your improvement efforts.

So please tell others about my new site and do come back often.