Quality and people

Abstract

Education and training are always indispensable for people-building management. The lessons learned by the Western world-class quality companies and the strategies of Japanese excellent companies are very similar: both emphasize the human aspect of management.

As compared with cost and productivity, the human desire for quality existed far longer, and quality is the common concern between manufacturer and customer. These features of quality make it more compatible with human nature. Furthermore, when quality is improved in a creative way, cost is reduced and productivity is increased. It may be only logical that we must start with quality whenever we attempt to improve a company’s performance.

Tokizane cites the twenty-six human behaviors which characterize human beings. Most of them can be classified into three types: creativity, sociality and the rest. O’Toole proposed that work should be defined as follows:

“An activity that produces something of value for other people.”

which coincided perfectly with the three elements of human work stresses by Nishibori: creativity, physical activity and sociality. It is concluded that the essence of human work is introducing and fully displaying humanity in our daily work.

The relationship between creativity and work standardization and the four elementary steps for converting our work activities into creative ones are also discussed.