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Hi. This is John Bernard. I m in Boston today and going to speak tomorrow morning
to the Outdoor Industry Association s Annual Rendezvous 2012. So, I m happy to be here
and wanted to share a few thoughts with you about the classic tradeoff between cost, quality,
and time. I can remember back when I was young and in high school and working in my father
s business, there was a cartoon in the office that talked about this tradeoff between cost,
quality and time. And I forget the specifics of the cartoon, but it basically joked that
if you want it done right, it s going to take more time, going to cost more money. If you
want it done at a lower cost, we won t do a very good job and if you want it done quickly,
we re going to have to tradeoff quality and it might cost more. So, for a long time that
myth really held out in our businesses that the tradeoff between cost, quality and time
was in fact a tradeoff. But, what we ve learned is actually those factors optimize against
each other. And whether you work in a factory or you work in an office or in a government
process, the truth is that cost, quality and time play really well together. If the quality
of a process is really good and very clean and there is no breakdowns in it and there
is no extra steps, it actually is very efficient; takes a lot less time to do and do well. If
it s poor, if it has flaws in it, it consumes a lot of resources and a lot of time and that
means it costs more money. So, what we now know is that a high quality process, a process
that really works well and does a good job of producing the output that we really want,
that process actually takes less time and costs less money. So, as we think about processes,
one of the things we want to think about is this tradeoff between cost, quality and time
and recognize that it s not a tradeoff at all, in fact they re partners. If you want
to drive the quality of something up and the cost down, work to have it take less time,
because less time means it s got to work well and when it takes less time, it costs less
money. I hope this has been helpful and I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Thanks and have a great day.
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