Yes I have read "direct from DELL" but here's a little snippit of history which may address your point in a more specific way.
In the mid-80s I did a lot of work with Chrysler and GM on re-engineering their business processes (and related shifts in industrial process). At the time they were struggling to understand how the Japanese could make better cars more cheaply. I spent some time with Nissan on this - the Japanese were quite open about what they did, which was very "low-tech" by american standards. They rightly perceived that despite the simplicity of the model it would be hard to replicate by the american companies.
GM used a number of "industrial PCs" from an Austin company called Texas Micro. As a part of the installation work I made a number of trips to Austin and at one session I met a guy who ran a much smaller local company called "PC's Limited". This intense young man seemed very interested in the culture clash between the existing American auto company mentality and the JIT concepts that the companies were trying to implement, and he asked me if I could stay over another day and chat with him about it.
On that visit and several subsequent visits I met with MSD and talked about the Japanese style, which focused on flat management, individual responsibility, and very simple processes, and how the American companies were planning to implement something similar. He was very well informed on the processes themselves and the underlying business dynamics. He was much more interested in why the American companies, despite their awareness of the value of simplicity, seemed intent on "solving the problem a different way" mostly with big injections of technology which actually took workers out of the equation and gave them less empowerment.
I can see the reflection of MSD's thinking at that time in many of the structures of the DELL we know today, in particular JIT and supply chain management, the focus on simplicity, concentration on a small number of core product lines which cover the "sweet spots" with a maximum of efficiency, and, more subtly, understanding what the real barriers to replication of these principles would be for a company which already had a different and more complex model in place.
I do indeed see a lot of similarity to "theory z" in his thinking. |
