Abstract
Let us begin with a story. Miguel Ángel had started at the INAEM several months before. He came from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. There, as managing director, he had been able to discharge his duties with the independence and flexibility granted him by a Spanish public sector foundation, a management model very close to that of a private company. His initial idea was to transfer that model to the units that the INAEM consisted of. He wanted to turn it into a dynamic body that could help to develop culture, and to achieve that he had to undertake changes, many of them. On every level. He had to drag it into the twenty-first century, from the start of the twentieth, where it was really. The artistic program was good, but the operating management was hidebound.
Chapter 1 begins the book with a situation where two managers need help in improving their Operations and service. A basic introduction to Operations complements this tale.
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Notes
- 1.
I have always loved story-telling. Maybe because when I was little there was no television and we had to make our own entertainment, by relying on the oral tradition.
- 2.
The INAEM is Spain’s government-run institute for supporting programs involving theater, dance, music and the circus.
- 3.
The INAEM’s strategy is fixed by law. Its goals are to promote, protect and disseminate programs connected to the theater, dance and music; to take them abroad and coordinate communications between Spain’s regions on such matters.
- 4.
The Toyota system can be summed in four rules: (1) details are important. Problems must be detected and solved. Every job must have a specified content, sequence, time and result. (2) Relations must be client-provider focused, and be clear and direct. (3) System connections must be simple and efficient. (4) Experience is not the only source of learning and managers show how to improve. A worker that finds a problem asks somebody in particular to help who must respond immediately.
- 5.
Curiously this idea has a great impact among participants, possibly because it has never occurred to them that in their offices they cannot understand the problems faced by Operations people. And furthermore this is very much a factory approach, where it has always been known that the one in the know is on the shop floor, not in an office.
- 6.
The creator of the Ishikawa diagram of which I am a great fan. It will appear several times in this book and the second part explains how to put it into practice. It is great for analyzing a problem and finding its causes. I have set one up in every business I have worked with. In an NGO they named a van for transporting children the “Ishi van,” because the decision to buy it had been taken after an analysis using the Ishikawa method.
- 7.
As well planned and rehearsed as everything might be, there will always be some uncertainty left. That is residual uncertainty.
- 8.
A Japanese term that refers to a business model in which there exists a coalition of companies united by certain economic interests.
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Womack, J. P., Jones, D. T. and Roos, D. (1990), “The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production”, Productivity Press.
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Muñoz-Seca, B. (2017). A Scenario and the Fascinating World of Operations. In: How to Make Things Happen. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54786-2_1
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