PLEASE EXPLAIN CHRONIC SYNDROME, J.M. JURAN, AND WHAT HAS ANY OF THIS GOT TO DO WITH ME?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 5, 2011
The reason for my previous missive on DO YOU SUFFER FROM THE CHRONIC SYNDROME was like all my missives. It was meant to stimulate thought and reflection.
I gave an industrial example to open this missive for a psychological fixation that I have experienced as an unobtrusive observer of the production line.
Over my long life, and being of a person inclined to calibrate experience, I have noted that we can meet someone we haven’t seen in months or even years and they are wailing about the same things as if we just saw them five minutes ago. This is a manifestation of a chronic fixation and pattern.
I’ve also noted that people have the same problems when they are in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and beyond. I know this because they have often presented such problems at my door, personally and professionally.
Likewise, I’ve noted that the same people succeed again and again no matter what the circumstances or the unanticipated crises they may encounter with a regularity that defies happenstance.
This experience has caused me to wonder. It all crystallized for me in 1986 when I married my Betty Ann, worked with J.M Juran, and was promoted to a directorship for Honeywell Europe Ltd. I mention these three data points because I gave myself permission to break out of my constraints to communicate my thoughts. Ten books would follow.
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As mentioned in the previous piece, I directed the Quality Control Circle program for then the largest such program in the continental United States with over one thousand QCC’s at Honeywell Avionics, Inc., Clearwater, Florida.
It was the Age of Hysteria, what I called in one of my book “The United States of Anxiety.” Japan was eating our lunch by taking away our precious markets in automobiles, electronics, light fixtures and appliances. Our industrial working class was shrinking overnight. Panic was in the air. NBCTV capped the panic with “Japan Can, Why Can’t We” in early 1980, the same year I joined Honeywell.
Honeywell Avionics recruited some seven Ph.D.’s to man its organizational development (OD) strategy prior. Actually, Honeywell’s Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth had created QCC’s in 1978 and was managing quality at the trench level before Tom Brokaw’s epiphany, but it did intensify Honeywell’s efforts.
Fast forward to 1986 and Europe. There I found the same entrenched OD problems to which Juran and W. Edwards Deming had alluded. Europe was still in its post-WWII configuration, which magnified problems experienced in the United States.
The irony is that Juran, an evangelist for quality and quality management, teamed up with the quality statistical guru Deming to launch Japan into competitive excellence with the United States through quality. Japan then moved to surpass an America that refused to acknowledge, identify and resolve its chronic problems.
William Livingston writes about this chronic fixation in THE NEW PLAGUE (1985). I came back from Europe at the end of the 1980’s to write WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), which complemented Livingston’s work.
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My interest in the CHRONIC SYNDROME was to acquaint you with your possible chronic fixations that Juran has described in terms of industrial systems. Juran claims there are sporadic and chronic problems in systems that invariably impact the results of operations.
Sporadic problems are governed by contingencies or unanticipated contributors that are in fact intermittent and easily identified and resolved.
Chronic problems are pervasive and constant. They form into clusters of problems at critical points in the process. They become so natural to the system that they are ignored.
That is no longer true as American industry has crossed the quality bridge finally, thanks to Juran, Deming and others, to deal strategically with chronic manufacturing problems. Motorola developed a statistical process call “six sigma” in 1986. That process ensures no more than 3.4 defects per million products produced. It is why American automobiles, among other products, are now as good as any in the world.
So, some thirty years later (1980 – 2011) the United States remains suspect when it comes to quality with its own citizens as well as the rest of the world. Loss of trust is hard to regain.
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Then there is the matter of Americans as individuals. Denial and self-ignorance appear a part of our vital construction. Five friends can quickly identify our chronic proclivities if not chronic problems. Were they to candidly tell us about ourselves chances are the friendship would be in jeopardy.
We don’t want to know what gets in our way, and therefore we blunder forward repeating the same errors again and again and again ad infinitum.
Before going to Europe in 1986, I was contracted to conduct a seminar with top Honeywell executives of a facility in the northeastern United States. I interviewed all ten executives individually asking them to describe in some detail the nine other members of their executive team.
From these data, I created a composite profile of each person, and represented these attributions in bullets on flip chart paper numbering the profiles from one to ten, and placing them on the walls of the conference room.
After discussing various sporadic and chronic problems of operations, I switched gears and asked each member of the executive team to pick out his profile (there were no women on the team). How many do you think were able to pick out their profile? The answer is at the end of this missive.1
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It occurs to me we don’t take sufficiently serious enough our own self-ignorance, and how that causes us to operate, for all intent and purposes, somewhat blind, vulnerable to constant manipulation by pyramid climbers who play on our vanities.
Instead, we read self-help books, which feed our self-ignorance because we don’t see ourselves in dark ways. These books play on our vanities – Dr. Phil does a good job of that on television – providing resolutions to our chronic behavioral problems when the author or the expert is as ignorant of us as we are of ourselves.
Self-help books are safe, so are self-help seminars where evangelists and motivational speakers find us nodding our heads in agreement, and going right back to behaving the way we did when we came in.
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In the June1993 edition of THE READER’S DIGEST an article of mine appeared with the first line, “To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself.” Friendship starts with accepting ourselves as we are, but we cannot do that if we deny the self that requires such acceptance.
THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996) was written to illustrate this point. It was a discourse challenging the entire self-help industry, illustrating in details personal references. One reviewer said, “Fisher bares his soul in this book, and in doing so, exposes mine to me.” That was its purpose.
The United States is now involved in a forty-year rectification of its industrial self-indulgent practices. For this courage, success is apparent, and it will continue. I have not seen a similar rectification or resolution in the personal area Perhaps it is because we have not suffered enough.
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