Promise of Manufacturing

Promies of Manufacturing 

          Now consider manufact, nuring. Here the orientation is toward the efficient production of resultot toward attendance on other. Relationship are strictly businesslike, devoid of invidious connotations of rank or self.
          When we think about how to improve manufacturing, we seldom focus on ways to improve our presonal performance or present tasks; rather, it is axiomatic that we try to find entirely new ways of performing present tasks and, better yet, of actually changing the tasks themselves. We  don not think of greater exertion of our animal energies (working physically harder, as the slave), of greater expansion of our commitment (being more devout or loyal, as the priest), or of greater assertion of our dependence (being more obsequious, as the butler). Instead, we apply the greater exertion of our minds to learn how to look at a problem differently. More particulary, we ask what kinds of tools, old or new, and what kinds of skills, processes, organiztional rearrangements, inecentives, control, and audits might be enlisted to greatly improve the intended outcomes. In short, manufacturing thinks technocratically, and that explains its successes. Service thinks humanistically, and that explains its failure.
        Manufacturing looks for solutions inside the very tas to be done. The solution to building a low-priced automobile, for example, dervis largely from the nature and composition of the automobile itself. (If the automobile were not an assembly of parts, it could not be manufactured on an assembly line.) By contrast, service looks for solutions in the perfomer of the tasks. This is the paralyzing legacy of our inherited attitudes: The solution to improve service is viewed as being dependent on improvements in the skills and attitudes of the prformers of that service.
        While it may pain and offend us to say so, thinking in humanistic rather than techocratic terms ensures that the service sector of the modern economy will be forever inefficient and that the service sector of the modern economy will be forever inefficient and that our satisfactions will be forever marginal. We see service as invariably and undeviatingly personal, as something performed by individuals directly for other individuals.
        This humanistic conception of service diverts us from seeking alternatives to the use people, especially to large, organized groups of people. It does not allow us to reach out for new solutions and new difinitions. It obstruct us from redesigning the task themselves; from eliminating the conditions that created the problem.
        In sum, to improve the quality and efficiency of service, companies must apply the kind of technocratic thinking which in other fieldsnhas replaced the high-cost and erratic elegance of the artisan with the los-cost, predictable munificence of the manufacturer.