There’s an interesting post on Tuppenceworth from Fergal reviewing “Inside the Emerald City”, which is an expose of the shenanigans in the Green Zone in Iraq. I like the term “Green Zone”. It reminds me of of the recorded PA you often hear in US airports:
“The White Zone is for loading and unloading.”
I wonder what the PA would be for the Green Zone?
“The Green Zone is for hiding under you bed and praying they don’t come for you”
But I digress… Fergal points out that much of the book is an expose of how the American Management Consulting ‘culture’ which has been exported to Iraq has contributed to the rolling disaster there. W.Edwards Deming described American management thinking as the most dangerous thing that America could export. It wasn’t until the Japanese took Deming seriously and started making inroads into automotive market share that Deming (and other manufacturing quality gurus) were taken seriously in the US… and even then the biggest problem with making quality management and quality improvement stick has been a failure to have a clear constancy of purpose…
… for example, General Motors was one of the first US car makers to take quality of manufacturing seriously. Jack Welch famously told his staff that if they didn’t crack that challenge they’d all be out of work. Fast forward to 2007… GM is closing factories in the US while Toyota (whose CEO last year said that quality was his number one problem for the coming year) have opened four new plants.
But again I digress…
CelticTigger (who is that masked man?) has commented on the post – from the sounds of it he (or she) has been in the trenches with management consultants. Poor soul.