One of the most memorable case studies on Japanese management was the case of the empty soap box, which happened in one of Japan's biggest cosmetics companies.
The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soap box that was empty. Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason unknown to them, one soap box managed to go through the assembly line empty.
Management asked its engineers to solve the problem. The engineers worked feverishly to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soap boxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty.
No doubt it was a moderately viable solution but they spent a phenomenal amount of money and resources to develop and implement this idea.
Amidst all this fuss, when a rank-and-file employee came to hear about this problem, he offered management a jaw-droppingly simple solution: point a strong industrial electric fan at the assembly line. As the soap boxes pass the fan, any empty ones simply get blown off the line.
When confronted with problems in life, most of us fret and worry about how to find the best fix for it. We imagine the solution to be difficult and complex when sometimes, it's really quite simple. So the next time you're faced with a problem, don't instinctively reach for your engineers and analyst and experts or the expert in you, try looking at it from other ways and discover a simple answer.
Eugine Loh, 938Live, MediaCorp Pte Ltd
