According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product.

Most important decisions for designing energy efficient buildings are made in the early stages of design. Designing is a complex interdisciplinary task, and energy efficiency requirements are pushing boundaries even further. This study analyzes the level of complexity for energy efficient building design and possible remedies for managing or reducing the complexity. Methodologically, we used the design structure matrix for mapping the current design tasks and hierarchical decomposition of lifecycle analysis for visualizing the interdependency of the design tasks and design disciplines and how changes propagate throughout the system, tasks and disciplines. We have visualized the interdependency of design tasks and design disciplines and how changes propagate throughout the system. Current design of energy efficiency building is a linear and one-shot approach without iterations planned into the process. Broken management techniques do not help to reduce the complexity.

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Complexity in designing energy efficient buildings: towards understanding decision networks in design

In philosophy of science, there have been two different starting points for epistemology: Platonism and Aristotelianism. These two alternative starting points have played a major role also in the formation of fundamental ideas of engineering and management generally as well as in relation to construction. It is contended that an overly Platonic influence on engineering and management has created a number of problems. For solving these problems, beyond mere patching, a more balanced take on Platonism and Aristotelianism is needed.

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On Epistemology of Construction Engineering and Management

The purpose of this article is to understand the academic landscape on collaboration in design, its characteristics and related concepts for promoting collaboration within in the project based production systems. We aim to answer to the following three questions: How to define collaboration in design and why individuals need to collaborate during design? What characterizes effective collaboration in design? Which concepts support the development of collaboration in design? For shedding light on this subject, a literature review is conducted and applicability to Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry and project delivery are discussed. In this study, it was found that collaboration is a complex phenomenon, which explains the diversity of views and many complimentary concepts in organizational and design literature. Collaboration requires the management of material and knowledge boundaries, in order to develop common goals, processes and product. Lean construction concepts, methods and tools have helped the teams to develop collaborative design and construction practices.

Collaboration in Design – Justification, Characteristics and Related Concepts

Low trust levels among project parties are generally believed to harm construction project performance, but the role of trust in the context of information flow and solving design quality problems ...

To trust or not to trust: is trust a prerequisite for solving design quality problems?

Lean construction methods have demonstrated potential to improve construction productivity. For example, the location-based management system and the last planner system have increased the reliability of planning and control in construction production. However, these benefits are often reduced because of inaccurate manual data collection. To alleviate these problems, technologies for automated monitoring of workers have been developed to identify site events in chaotic environments. This paper aims to investigate whether a Bluetooth low-energy-based real-time indoor positioning system can monitor task progress from workers’ presence. Our findings suggest that the proposed system is a feasible solution for monitoring task-level progress when there are explicit dependencies between tasks. This method could automatically detect task start and finish times and estimate the hours required to complete a task. This enables the measurement of waste hidden inside tasks, which allows for interventions for improving flows and eliminating waste.

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Ergo Pikas

Papers

Complexity in designing energy efficient buildings: towards understanding decision networks in design

On Epistemology of Construction Engineering and Management

Collaboration in Design – Justification, Characteristics and Related Concepts

To trust or not to trust: is trust a prerequisite for solving design quality problems?

Using real-time indoor resource positioning to track the progress of tasks in construction sites