A Scientist in the Sea – A Parable Retold

Dr.Pulin K Dutta

One day in late October in 1954, an elderly well-built tall man boarded a passenger ferryboat at the Sanfrancisco harbour sailing towards Tokyo in Japan. It was an American boat. The man was a restless inquisitive physicist. He climbed up to the American Captain’s cabin. The first thing he saw on the wall was the route map, as shown in Fig.1. Indeed he was curious and asked the Captain, why Sanfrancisco and Tokyo were connected by a straight line. The Captain informed him that both the ports were almost at the same level and the straight line was the shortest distance. Anything wrong?

 

 

 

                                                                         FIG.1

Before going further, the reader may ponder over it to understand the question and the answer a bit more in depth. As already mentioned the middle-aged man was a scientist.

Now, the scientist took a pencil from the Captain’s desk and drew a dotted line lightly as shown in Fig.2.

FIG.2

The American Captain was not amused and said, “ I don’t know who you are; but I have no time to waste taking a fancy route. My passengers won’t like a longer ride nor did I wish to burn more gas. Please leave me alone to do my job”. The scientist quietly left the Captain’s cabin without a word. Now the question is which version is right?

After some months of this incident, the American Captain was realising that his Japanese competitors in the same business across the Pacific were covering the same distance faster and therefore getting more business. He was certain that the cunning Japanese sailors were cutting corners somewhere to beat the Americans. He was determined to find out more about their boats and ‘tricks’. Later on while he was in the Tokyo harbour, he began asking his Japanese sailor friends over drinks what kind of boats they were sailing and what were their secrets of covering the distance faster. A few of the Japanese sailors told him that they did not understand fully yet the reasons; but as they got the idea from an American scientist through the Japanese Union of Scientist and Engineers, some months earlier, they decided to give it a try anyway and found the idea indeed worked to their advantage. They also told the name – Dr W E Deming, who was already very well known in re-writing the success stories of many Japanese companies. They also showed him the photograph of Deming on the wall.

The American Captain very quickly recognised the man in the photograph, who irritated him once and wanted to know more. Now, what do we understand from this simple story told by Dr Myron Tribus, who first heard it from some one else?

[DrTribus was a dedicated follower of Deming. Dr Tribus was a well-known scientist, past VP of Xerox Corporation, Director-in-Chief at the Centre for Advanced Engineering Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.]

According to Tribus, Deming’s ideas on scientific management were rejected by his own American managers, just like the American Captain mentioned earlier. The Captain believed the earth was flat and the two dimensional Cartesian co-ordinates were adequate to sail his boat. Deming tried to help him by reminding him that the earth was not flat and one has to use polar co-ordinates, especially when he was sailing in the vast Pacific Ocean. Then he would have found the curved path was indeed shorter. The Japanese sailors listened to Dr Deming’s idea and adopted it and gained a lot.

In a similar way, the Japanese business managers, industrialists and government officials keenly learnt Deming’s ideas and succeeded beyond their own expectations to rebuild Japan as a relentless economic powerhouse in less than a decade, in spite of lack of natural resources, high density of population, very high number of earthquakes (on the average about 10 a day, not all of which are equally devastating) and the aftermath of two atom bombs in 1945.

Tribus termed the Japanese as “the Round earth believers” and the Americans as “the Flat earth believers”. The impact of Deming in Japan was so great that the JUSE, on behalf of the Emperor, instituted an annual prize, known as the “Deming Prize” for excellence in any field in the business world. This is the highest form of recognition any business anywhere in the world is seeking to get.

So far about 10 Indian enterprises succeeded after years of strenuously redesigning their companies. Walking into any one of them will tell a beautiful story.

Despite such success stories, why the American Business Schools and their likes in India are still not adapting the Deming approach is a mystery to me. On the other hand, my experience says that even here it can work well, if we have the attitude to accept transformation. My fear is while we are doing better than before in the economic sense, I am not so sure if it could ensure sustained progress in the longer term, unless we change our present management culture.

The round earth is getting smaller and highly choosy. Only those who changed for the better now will survive and grow. Deming said, “Survival is not compulsory”. Is that true?