The way UPS keeps wasting money with stupid performance measurements instead of cost we are going end up the same.
When you get down to the guys who actually have their hands on things, they know what to do. They can design, engineer, and build the best products in the world. My question is: Why haven't we unleashed their potential? The answer is: the General Motors system. It's like a blanket of fog that keeps these people from doing what they know needs to be done. I come from an environment where, if you see a snake, you kill it. At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is go hire a consultant on snakes. Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is -- nothing. You figure, the snake hasn't bitten anybody yet, so you just let him crawl around on the factory floor. We need to build an environment where the first guy who sees the snake kills it. At Electronic Data Systems employees were trained from the day they joined the company to spend all day serving the customer, getting results, being the best in the world -- not being good bureaucrats. At GM the stress is not on getting results -- on winning -- but on bureaucracy, on conforming to the GM system. You get to the top of General Motors not by doing something, but by not making a mistake. You form groups, hold meetings, get consensuses, don't make decisions. You just kind of let this big old log keep rolling, knowing that sooner or later you're going to retire and get a big retirement anyhow. One day I made a speech to some senior executives. I said, ''Okay, guys, I'm going to give you the whole code on what's wrong. You don't like your customers. You don't like your dealers. You don't like the people who make your cars. You don't like your stockholders. And, to a large extent, you don't like one another.-Ross Perot
Anyone see any parallels between GM and UPS?
