Freedom from Command and Control Quotes

“command-and-control management has created service organizations that are full of waste, offer poor service, depress the morale of those who work in them and are beset with management factories that not only do not contribute to improving the work, but actually make it worse. The management principles that have guided the development of these organizations are logical—but it’s the wrong logic. The”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“It is an unquestioned assumption that managers should have and set targets and then create control systems—incentives, performance appraisals, budget reporting and computers to keep track of them all—to ensure the targets are met. In Toyota, these practices simply do not exist. To”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“As managers develop the systems approach, they learn to use computers for the things they are good at and to the contrary avoid using computers for things that people are good at. The consequences are fewer computer systems and more control. I”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“Maximizing the ability to handle variety is central to improving service and reducing costs. The systems approach employs the ingenuity of workers in managing and improving the system. It is intelligent use of intelligent people; it is adaptability designed in, enabling the organization to respond effectively to customer demands. Workers”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“As with any target, in the pursuit of this purpose managers actually make performance worse—by ‘managing costs,’ for example, they create (more) costs. If only they knew. In pursuit of economies of scale, managers of service organizations build factories to handle work and worsen service, but they remain unaware of the extent of the damage, because their measures, being activity- rather than purpose-related, keep them blind. Top-down”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“A central tenet of the traditional command-and-control mentality is management by the numbers; this is the basis and means for decision making. The numbers are largely financial and activity-related (what people do), which may or may not be of value to understanding and improving the system. With a proclaimed interest in ‘shareholder value,’ senior managers sit astride a system that they make more unstable and suboptimal through financial interference. Almost without thinking about it, the purpose of the organization becomes ‘make the budget.’ As”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service

“There is a story of a Japanese guru working with a board of management on what to do to improve their organization’s performance. He drew up a flip-chart list of recommendations on which the first one was, ‘The board should resign.’ He got their attention. The point he wanted to make was that unless you change the way you think, your system will not change and therefore, its performance won’t change either. The question is: ‘What thinking needs to change?”
― John Seddon, Freedom from Command and Control: Rethinking Management for Lean Service