Beacons of Business - 24

[Guest guest]

Sairam Sisters and Brothers,

We will continue to listen from Ananth Raman, Chairman & CEO, President,

Graphtex, Inc., New Jersey, US.

---

"There was a time when we were introducing ISO 9000, which was a system of

quality control measures for our company. One of our companies was a job shop

where we do specialty items for our customers. Since these products are made

for specific applications it is extremely difficult to standardise things and

is a very complicated process. This made it a difficult environment to

introduce these types of quality measures, since it involves a lot of rigid

procedures.

The expert said, "This is all very simple. All you need to do is write down each

of the procedures that you are already doing. You don't have to make any

improvement; you don't have to say anything else except exactly the way you are

doing it. This has nothing to do with right or wrong, you simply say what you

are doing and do what you say." Even after he said all of this my fellows were

still completely worried.

One evening I was thinking about this while attending a study circle with my

spiritual group. I saw that all of this was simply talking about unity of

thought, word, and action. So, I called in my employees and gave them a talk

about unity of thought, word and action. I told them, "This is nothing but the

concept of having what you feel, what you write and how you act be the same.

This is all that ISO 9000 is about."

So we went all over the company and said, "The company's objective with ISO 9000

is to have unity of thought, word and action." If I had used the word spiritual

to describe the basis of this concept, I would have probably gotten some

negative reaction. To me I didn't feel that I needed to tout this as spiritual.

It was just truth and honesty, that's all. When I explained what unity of word,

thought and action meant, they understood the concept very easily.

Sometimes they would even come back with an example such as this: "If a customer

wants us to deliver a product the next day and we know it is going to take one

week, usually we tell them it will be the day after tomorrow so we can buy some

time. Can we do that? If we do, then it disturbs the unity of thought, word and

action. So, what do we tell them? Do we tell them the truth?"

They started raising all of these questions throughout the departments; I was

amazed at the chain reaction that began. So I told them, "Let's not go mad

about this unity of thought, word and action. Let's have a monthly meeting

where we can discuss these problems where you find it difficult to be totally

truthful." I tried to help them see the difference between telling a customer,

"no, it won't go tomorrow, we are having difficulties," which is the truth,

versus "it will go day after tomorrow," which is a lie. In this way they could

still buy some time without promising something which was not going to happen.

We continue to have these monthly meetings where we examine these difficult

situations and look to see how we can solve them with a unity of thought, word

and action."

© Global Dharma Center 2004

http://www.globaldharma.org