Wealth Management

Voted #6 on Top 100 Family Business influencer on Wealth, Legacy, Finance and Investments: Jacoline Loewen My Amazon Authors' page Twitter:@ jacolineloewen Linkedin: Jacoline Loewen Profile
Showing posts with label Deming 14 points TQM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Deming 14 points TQM. Show all posts

December 16, 2010

Why "Hey, I'm in a community" makes people work

In baseball, a guy hits a home run, goes around the bases, and all his teammates come out and they give him a high five, and that’s awesome. And then every time somebody hits a home run, they do that.
In private equity, people tend not to do that enough, so when Loewen & Partners achieves a goal, we have to go celebrate. When I did my MBA, we had a third of our mark based on a proper Masters' thesis, which was the best part of the MBA for most of us. I wrote my Masters' thesis on Total Quality Management, TQM, which the Japanese had embraced to leap frog themselves ahead of the Americans. I discovered the writing of Deming and his 14 points to achieve TQM. The last point stunned me - celebrate!
And there are two reasons why we need to do just that - throw a party. As human beings, we’re not emotionally and anthropologically different from who we were on the plains of Africa 100,000 years ago. We need to feel that "hey, I’m in a community."
The second reason is that out of everything that I could be focused on during a year, the thing that gets rewarded with a party will be the thing that I really focus on. So I’ll tell everyone, if we hit this mark or we hit that mark, we’re having a party. Then it’s been concretely expressed to the employees that that must be the important thing. So it’s a way to double and triple underline the really important goal.