Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

by Chip Heath

Practitioners of Total Quality Management encourage leaders to “go to the genba” to understand problems. If a problem occurs on a factory floor, for example, engineers should go see it firsthand, assessing the situation and talking directly to the people involved. The best ideas, it’s believed, come from this kind of close-up sensory investigation of the situation; how can you improve something you don’t fully understand? So engineers diagnosing problems in a factory find it useful to have a close-up view of the relevant process, and Mulcahy found it useful to give her leadership teams a close-up view of how Xerox was treating its customers. A consumer research director at Procter & Gamble (P&G) named Paul Smith used a similar technique to give his colleagues a close-up view of their competitors.