Japan vs. US – a funny story
Welcome World to the Organized Chaos Comic Blog. We hope that this website will be useful, informative, and down-right funny. For our first blog posting, we decided on a good belly laugh. Until next week…
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Team dynamics are always a challenge… especially in a very hierarchical business environment. When you have five bosses and twelve different strategies to get the same thing done, the job becomes a complete disaster. We have seen this time and time again.
The collapse of business is why the following joke was so funny to us when we first saw it a number of years ago. The story has been told in infinite ways (Puerto Ricans vs. Cubans, Company A vs. Company B, etc.) but our personal favorite is the US company vs. the Japanese company. Enjoy!
A Japanese company and a United States company decided to have a canoe race, to prove once and for all who was better. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance before the race.
The big day came and the Japanese won by a mile.
Immediately afterwards, the US team became very discouraged and depressed. The senior management of the US company decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be known. A “Discovery Team,” made up of mid-level management, was formed to investigate and recommend appropriate actions.
Their conclusion was that the Japanese team had 8 people rowing and 1 person steering, while the US team had 1 person rowing and 8 people steering.
The US senior management, not completely confident of the conclusion, hired a consulting company and paid them an incredible sum of money. After investigating the loss, the consultant group advised that too many people were steering the boat and not enough people were rowing.
To prevent losing to the Japanese again the next year, the rowing team’s management structure was totally reorganized to 4 steering supervisors, 3 area steering managers, and 1 steering director. They also implemented a new performance reward system that would give the 1 person rowing the boat greater incentive to work harder. It was called the “Rowing Team Quality First Program,” with meetings and dinners for the management team and free pens for the rower. The hope was to empower the rower through enrichment and rewards.
The next year the Japanese won by 2 miles. Humiliated, the US management laid off the rower for poor performance, halted development of a new canoe, sold the paddles, and canceled all capital investments for new equipment. They then used the money saved to give a High Performance Award to the steering management and distributed the rest of the money as bonuses to the senior executives.