Book Reviews

The Robust Organization:
Transforming Your Company Using Adaptive Design

By William A. Stimson

Reviewed by Steve Buchwald, CIRM

This is a fairly new book having been published in 1996 by Times Mirror as part of the Irwin group of books, and as such contains many ideas that are on the current business "top hit list." However, I am sad to report that I can't recommend this book for inclusion into the APICS book offerings because of it's somewhat cerebral and boring presentation style.

I was a bit leery of it's effectiveness when I first received it. The sub title of the book is "Transforming Your Company Using Adaptive Design", but, when I checked the subject index to find a reference to "Adaptive Design" I couldn't find one. Even now after having read the book I'm still not sure exactly what adaptive design is except maybe the application of design engineering concepts and techniques to the process of designing effective and flexible processes that enable an organization to be robust. This then begs the next question, what is a robust organization? On page 6 the author explains this notion as: "A robust system will lead to convergence to the objective of a planned activity. Robustness is a quality of operation that must be planned, or designed, into a process." This whole discussion is couched in terms of "Quality Loss Function" a statistical concept made famous by Genichi Taguchi. As I think you can see from this discussion this approach is one of a high level cerebral theoretical approach to something as simple and as natural as continuous improvement. Nonetheless, I realize that APICS has all types of members and that some love to read the quarterly journal that is an option you can subscribe to as an APICS members. I have not chosen to subscribe to this though because for me the articles are always to theoretical. But since I'm sure that enough of the APICS members do enjoy those types of articles I did suggest to the APICS bookstore committee that they might think about adding a special section for high level theoretical books like this one.

You are probably asking yourself now why I am so negative on a book that contains many ideas that are on the current business top hit list. Because, I don't find anything new and earth shattering in this book. For example, there are complex discussions on controllability and state variables that is nothing more than a complex presentation of the material found in the JIT student guide on product specifications, control limits, and standardization. Now there is some good reading. I am quite impressed with the presentation material in the JIT course and highly recommend it as a good introduction into this idea of the "Robust" organization. I trust I haven't offended anyone too seriously but I believe it is my duty to report the quality of books as accurately as possible. If you would like to disagree with anything I say don't hesitate to let me know.

Good reading!