If you should hear a Japanese manager talking about taking a Mickey Mouse approach to product quality, don’t think he’s scoffing: while IBM Corp initiates a programme of Total Quality Management at US universities (CI No 1,772), the magnificent management consultant Peter Drucker reports that the Japanese have given up on Total Quality Management in favour of Zero-Defects Management; writing in the Wall Street Journal, he reveals that when Walt Disney Co opened the hugely successful Disneyland outside Tokyo, We all knew that it would take Disney three years to work the bugs out of this huge undertaking, said a leading Japanese industrialist, instead, it ran with zero defects the day it opened – every single operation had been engineered all the way through and simulated on the computer and trained for – and it suddenly dawned on us that we could do this too.
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