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April 10, 2026
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"As industrial processes involve specialized skill and expert technical training, made effective by intelligent co-ordination, it is clear that a humanly efficient Industrial Democracy necessitates leadership by those who possess the requisite knowledge, skill, and technical training."
"[Technocracy is] a system of governance in which technically trained experts rule by virtue of their specialized knowledge and position in dominant political and economic institutions."
"Technocracy originated in the winter of 1918-19 when Howard Scott formed a group of scientists, engineers, and economists that became known as the --a research organization. Howard Scott was chief engineer of this group. The Alliance lasted about fourteen years. Its membership embraced many of America's top scientists and engineers, including such personalities as: Frederick Ackerman, architect; , statistician; Thorstein Veblen, economist; L. K. Comstock, electrical engineer, and Charles Steinmetz. It conducted what became known as the famous 'Energy Survey of North America.' Out of the survey, and under the guiding genius of Howard Scott, there emerged a completely new way of looking at life and human affairs. The social assets and liabilities (in a physical sense) of North America were laid bare for the first time. The social trends and tendencies were analyzed scientifically and for the first time in history a continental area (North America) had a glimpse of its future, or at least of the broad alternatives."
"The best Six Sigma projects begin not inside the business but outside it, focused on answering the questionâhow can we make the customer more competitive? What is critical to the customerâs success?... One thing we have discovered with certainty is that anything we do that makes the customer more successful inevitably results in a financial return for us."
"Six Sigma has forever changed GE. Everyoneâfrom the Six Sigma zealots emerging from their Black Belt tours, to the engineers, the auditors, and the scientists, to the senior leadership that will take this Company into the new millenniumâis a true believer in Six Sigma, the way this Company now works."
"Six Sigma is really a cultural thingâa way of behavior."
"Six Sigma is an organized and systematic method for strategic process improvement and new product and service development that relies on statistical methods and the scientific method to make dramatic reductions in customer defined defect rates."
"Six Sigma is a comprehensive and flexible system for achieving, sustaining and maximizing business success. Six Sigma is uniquely driven by close understanding and customer needs, disciplined use of facts, data, and statistical analysis, and diligent attention to managing, improving, and reinventing business process."
"A large part of what we think of as economic activity is designed to accomplish what high transaction costs would otherwise prevent or to reduce transaction costs so that individuals can negotiate freely and we can take advantage of that diffused knowledge of which Friedrich Hayek has told us."
"In general terms, transactions costs are the costs that arise when individuals exchange ownership rights to economic assets and enforce their exclusive rights. A clear definition of transactions costs does not exist, but neither are the costs of production in the neoclassical model well defined."
"[The fundamental principle of six sigma is to] take an organization to an improved level of sigma capability through the rigorous application of statistical tools and techniques."
"The six sigma method is a project-driven management approach to improve the organizationâs products, services, and processes by continually reducing defects in the organization. It is a business strategy that focuses on improving customer requirements understanding, business systems, productivity, and financial performance. Dating back to the mid 1980s, applications of the six sigma methods allowed many organizations to sustain their competitive advantage by integrating their knowledge of the process with statistics, engineering, and project management."
"The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty."
"It is always sound business to take any obtainable net gain, at any cost and at any risk to the rest of the community."
"It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment, or the courage, to pay the price...One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing."
"Microeconomics, including the study of individual choice and of group choice in market and nonmarket processes, has generally been considered a field science as distinct from an experimental science. Hence microeconomics has sometimes been classified as "non-experimental" and closer methodologically to meteorology and astronomy than to physics and experimental psychology... But the question of using experimental or nonexperimental techniques is largely a matter of cost, and generally the cost of conducting the most ambitious and informative experiments in astronomy, meteorology, and economics varies from prohibitive down to considerable. The cost of experimenting with different solar system planetary arrangements, different atmospheric conditions, and different national unemployment rates, each under suitable controls, must be regarded as prohibitive."
"Markets are institutions that exist to facilitate exchange, that is, they exist in order to reduce the cost of carrying out exchange transactions. In an economic theory which assumes that transaction costs are nonexistent. markets have no function to perform, and it seems perfectly reasonable to develop the theory of exchange by an elaborate analysis of individuals exchanging nuts for apples on the edge of the forest or some similar fanciful example. This analysis certainly shows why there is a gain from trade, but it fails to deal with the factors which determine how much trade there is or what goods are traded."
"Quality means meeting customers' (agreed) requirements, formal and informal, at lowest cost, first time every time."
"Following the lead given by new institutional economics, we shall take the transaction as our unit of analysis. For our purposes, a transaction can be thought of as any act of social exchange that depends on information flows for its accomplishment. Transactions can be as simple and brief as the purchase of a packet of cigarettes, or as complex as and extended as those which bind a Zen master to his disciples. Like institutional economists, we are interested in the relationship that can be established between different transactional characteristics and the phenomenon of institutionalization. Our use of the term transaction, however, will extend beyond that of institutional economics where the focus has tended to be primarily on transaction costs and efficiency considerations. These, to be sure, are relevant. But, as we shall see, they are not the whole story."
"Low cost relative to competitors becomes the theme running through the entire strategy, though quality, service and other areas cannot be ignored."
"In the 1970s and 1980s, business processes were redesigned on average once every seven years. This rate of change was easy for the IT department to follow. The time needed to alter the information systems that supported new or changed business processes stayed within acceptable limits. In the 1990s, the rate of change began to increase and information systems began to lag behind. In 2000, a manager succinctly remarked: âWe can completely redesign our business processes every three months and subsequently our IT department needs a year to catch up with the supporting information systems.â"
"Innovative e-business projects start with a design of the e-business model. We often encounter the view, in research as well as industry practice, that an e-business model is similar to a business process model, and so can be specified using UML activity diagrams or Petri nets. In this paper, we explain why this is a misunderstanding. The root cause is that a business model is not about process but about value exchanged between actors. Failure to make this separation of concerns leads to poor business decision-making and inadequate business requirements."
"True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost."
"One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations: to put it on is a particular business, to whiten the pins is another ... and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which in some manufactories are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometime perform two or three of them."
"There are in the Exhibition some beautiful examples of such amongst the productions of other countries as well as of our own. They are made by the united labour of many women. The cost of a piece of lace will consist of:"
"Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business processes and IT infrastructure reflecting the integration and standardization requirements of a company's operation model... The key to effective enterprise architecture is to identify the processes, data, technology, and customer interfaces that take the operating model from vision to reality."
"A business process is a series of steps designed to produce a product or service. Most processes (...) are cross-functional, spanning the âwhite spaceâ between the boxes on the organization chart. Some processes result in a product or service that is received by an organization's external customer. We call these primary processes. Other processes produce products that are invisible to the external customer but essential to the effective management of the business. We call these support processes."
"Over the past decade, I have watched more than 100 companies try to remake themselves into significantly better competitors. They have included large organizations (Ford) and small ones (Landmark Communications), companies based in the United States (General Motors) and elsewhere (British Airways), corporations that were on their knees (Eastern Airlines), and companies that were earning good money ((Bristol-Myers Squibb). Their efforts have gone under many banners: total quality management, reengineering, right-sizing, restructuring, cultural change, and turnarounds. But, in almost every case, the basic goal has been the same: to make fundamental changes in how business is conducted in order to help cope with a new, more challenging market environment."
"Business process engineering aims to achieve the greatest efficiency possible in terms of business-organizational solutions. Organizational departments, reengineering project teams or even business process owners can be responsible for process engineering. While work schedule development for manufacturing processes might be institutionally allocated to a certain department for years as job preparation, other kinds of business processes are not quite as regimented."
"In definitional terms, a process is simply a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focusâs emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action."
"Business Process Reengineering seeks radical rather than merely continuous improvement. It escalates the efforts of JIT and TQM to make process orientation a strategic tool and a core competence of the organization. BPR concentrates on core business processes, and uses the specific techniques within the JIT and TQM "toolboxes" as enablers, while broadening the process vision."
"Reengineering posits a radical new principle: that the design of work must be based not on hierarchical management and the specialization of labor but on end-to-end processes and the creation of value for the customer."
"Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed."
"To succeed at reengineering, you have to be a missionary, a motivator, and a leg breaker."
"A business process is a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer. A business process has a goal and is affected by events occurring in the external world or in other processes."
"Tomas Bata and Bata-System of management are not well known today even though their success and heritage value are undisputed and awe-inspiring in the New Economy. T. Bata died in 1932 in a plane crash. By the time of his death he had introduced fundamental changes in management philosophy and techniques. Many of Bata approaches have been âdiscoveredâ during the last 20 years by the Western World as part of what has become known as the âQuality Revolutionâ. Quality management was practiced by the Bata enterprises since before the World War I, through 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, well before the âgurus of qualityâ even started thinking about the subject. Japanese visitors came to Zlin to learn about the Bata system well before the World War II. In addition, Bata executives traveled to Japan in 1937 and predicted the industrial rise of Japan at that time."
"A process is a set of linked activities that take an input and transform it to create an output. Ideally, the transformation that occurs in the process should add value to the input and create an output that is more useful and effective to the recipient either upstream or downstream."
"Many of the familiar principles of Quality Management amount to an elaboration of this simple truth: an innovative healthy organization requires that we work with people rather than do things to them."
"Business process reengineering encompasses the envisioning of new work strategies, the actual process design activity, and the implementation of the change in all its complex technological, human, and organizational dimensions"
"These individual actions are really trans-actions instead of either individual behavior or the "exchange" of commodities. It is this shift from commodities and individuals to transactions and working rules of collective action that marks the transition from the classical and hedonic schools to the institutional schools of economic thinking. The shift is a change in the ultimate unit of economic investigation. The classic and hedonic economists, with their communistic and anarchistic offshoots, founded their theories on the relation of man to nature, but institutionalism is a relation of man to man. The smallest unit of the classic economists was a commodity produced by labor. The smallest unit of the hedonic economists was the same or similar commodity enjoyed by ultimate consumers. One was the objective side, the other the subjective side, of the same relation between the individual and the forces of nature. The outcome, in either case, was the materialistic metaphor of an automatic equilibrium, analogous to the waves of the ocean, but personified as "seeking their level." But the smallest unit of the institutional economists is a unit of activity -- a transaction, with its participants. Transactions intervene between the labor of the classic economists and the pleasures of the hedonic economists,simply because it is society that controls access to the forces of nature, and transactions are, not the "exchange of commodities," but the alienation and acquisition, between individuals, of the rights of property and liberty created by society, which must therefore be negotiated between the parties concerned before labor can produce, or consumers can consume, or commodities be physically exchanged."
"After joining the faculty at UCLA in 1948, Professor O'Donnell quickly became a leader in the newly developing field of management theory and policy. He taught the basic courses in this area. In 1955 the first edition of the textbook Principles of Management, coauthored with Professor Harold Koontz, was published by McGraw-Hill. This book synthesized an operational approach to the management of enterprises. By filling a long-felt need in colleges and universities, it soon became the outstanding college textbook on its subject."
"The problem of quality management is not what people don't know about it. The problem is what they think they do know."
"Quality management is a systematic way of guaranteeing that organized activities happen the way they are planned."
"The Current Approaches to Management Theory and Science"
"Hitler also missed the point completely about American economic capabilities, for the cars and the refrigerators he sneered at were being produced by corporations that led the world in techniques of mass production and modern management. The Axis leaders deluded themselves into believing that, with the Great Depression, the American economic model had disintegrated. Yet despite the sluggish growth of aggregate demand in the mid to late 1930s, firms like General Motors were taking tremendous strides forward in efficiency, exploiting those economies of scale that were unique to the huge American market. Exports to Britain and the Soviet Union had given GM and its peers a foretaste of what was to come. With the American entry into the war, they were inundated with government orders for military hardware. In the First World War, the result had been a mess: production bottlenecks, chronic waste and inflationary pressure. In 1942 the opposite happened. 'The real news,' as Charles E. Wilson of General Motors put it, 'is that our American methods of production, our know-how about the business, could be applied to mass production of all these war things . . . and that is the one factor that I think our Axis enemies overlooked.'"
"There will be no drastic revolution in management functions or organizations in order to encompass systems management. Rather, the adaptation of systems management theory to organizations has been and will continue to be an evolutionary process."
"Quality management is ... an approach to management made up of a set of mutually reinforcing principles, each of which is supported by a set of practices and techniques."
"Although students of management would readily agree that there have been problems of management since the dawn of organized life, most would also agree that systematic examination of management, with few exceptions, is the product of the present century and more especially of the past two decades."
"[Total Quality Management (TQM) is] a management approach of an organisation centred on quality, based on the participation of all its members and aiming at long term success through customer satisfaction and benefits to all members of the organisation and society."