Books review (20001,June,4w)

1. " Deming prize" written in Japanese by Mr. Tokumaru and published by　Toyokeizai　Economic Journal. The author is a journalist and this is a novel based non-fiction story.The novel reveals an inside of Deming prize, TQC and QC circles in a large carmaker. Problems generated by Deming prize are referred in "The productive edge" written by Richard K. Lester, director of the Industrial Performance Centerof MIT. It says " One of the most notorious examples is Florida Power and Light, the first American firm to receive Japan's prestigious Deming Prize,in 1989. The utility's triumph was short-lived. Its quality control　bureaucracy swelled to embarrassing proportions, while real gains in performance were hard to detect. Employees who in the first flush of enthusiasm had dedicated themselves to the pursuit of total quality later admitted that now they were only going through the motions. Within a year, most of the company's staff were gone." Likewise Deming prizes in Japan have become such as the emperor has no clothes. The novel describes such situations vividly. 2. "The Goal" written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt published by North River Press The book was a novel and first published in 1984 to explain plainly his theory. His theory is called " The theory of constraints (TOC)". It is said over 2 million copies are sold in U.S.A. And now it was translated in Japanese and published after 16 years later. The reason of Japanese translation delay is the author's fear that if his theory were transmitted to Japanese in 1980s, Japanese would have absorbed the theory and gain more economic powers over U.S.A. in 1980s. But I wonder why the theory is a new finding. Because the basic concepts of TOC such as stock zero, flow (breakthrough) thinking, and separation between fixed costs and variable costs are things that had already been established before TOC. Stock zero and flow thinking were stablished by Toyota production system in 1960s and effective cost thinking such as fixed costs (sunk cost) and opportunity costs were established as Managerial Economics (ME) in U.S.A in 1970s. Also the book says that the goal of a manufacturing organization is to make money. But forty years ago, the top line of Toyota's inner training textbook for production management said "The our goal is just to make our organization profitable. We do only things that contribute to make money, do nothing wasteful."