No full stops in India February 17, 2006

In 1996, as corporate vice president, Mission: Quality at Wipro, my task was to initiate Six Sigma in Wipro’s five diverse businesses. To start with, the need was to get the top management aligned to build a shared vision of what it could do with Six Sigma quality. The essence of Six Sigma is to focus on defects in every process and drive them out of the system to make every product or service error-free. At the Six Sigma level, given a million opportunities to make a mistake, you make no more than 3.4. To reach there, it is not so much a statistical journey to hunt down defects; it becomes a way of life. In order to launch the initiative, Azim Premji and his colleagues were taken to a site away from Bangalore where a group of consultants from Motorola taught them the Six Sigma way. On the last day, after finishing his session, one of the consultants was bundled off in a rented car to catch his flight back to the US. After he left, I finished my day and headed back to Bangalore in my car. On the highway, in the middle of nowhere, I saw him standing with a vacant gaze next to a stranded car. I pulled up. For all our Six Sigma talk, the car ferrying him had run out of gas. Needless to say, I was deeply embarrassed. As I got down to the task of evacuating him, I found that he was not affected by the immediacy of the bad planning. Instead, he was surveying the state of the brand new road that had been laid, on which his car was standing. He told me, “Do you realise, Subroto, nothing ever is complete in India?’’Startled by the observation, I looked around. The road must have been laid just a fortnight back. But, in places, people were already digging it up afresh; some agency now had to lay cables. In another place, while the rest of the road had been laid, a stretch had been left undone because a culvert was being built. It must have been an afterthought. When the culvert would be ready, I was sure, somebody would turn up to undo everything and create a diversion because the drain underneath would have to be built again. So, nothing would ever be complete.Go to a swanky five-star hotel. The fancy frontage will belie the debris still lying on the rooftop or the incomplete plumbing next to the staff entrance, to which the spit and polish of the ballroom does not extend, or the rubble left over after the underground basement parking has opened for business. It is not the construction site alone. Look at the work of a software engineer. The code might be complete and released, but a year after, you will find that the documentation is not complete. A nice suit is carefully crafted but the lining has threads that should have been removed before the suit was handed over to the customer. A brand new apartment is handed over to a customer with a dozen small things that are not complete. You give your car for servicing—it is similarly okay for you to get it back, complete in all respects except the grease on the door and under the bonnet, left over dirt. Why do we, in India, never ‘complete’ things? In part, it is our sense of time. What, we may ask, is the need to complete anything? After all, thousands of years ago, we existed and we will continue to exist a thousand years hence. What is a speck of time in a civilisation that spans an eternity? Why insult time by seeking completion? So, it is okay to begin using a road even with the culvert not ready. It is okay to leave behind chips and mortar and remnants of construction debris when the front of a building is whitewashed. An incomplete manual, long after a product is shipped, is quite alright. The same mindset is displayed in our cities and villages, which get festooned with the cutouts and posters of political and religious leaders. No one removes them long after their visit or the event is over.As we become a global player in the larger scheme of things, as a nation, we must change our mindset. We have to break free from our poor sense of completion in whatever thing we are charged with. If we do not do that, despite the on-time pick-up, we may find ourselves stranded on the highway to the world. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html