Dear Bob ...I'm not fully convinced your description ("Six Stupid process controls," Keep the Joint Running, 4/30/2007) is exactly the situation, nor the usual root cause. Stuff like six stupid does happen as part of the bigger foul up.Corporations are trying to maximise profit - period. If they can do that by serving 9x% of the customers adequately, then they don't care if (100-9x%) of them get screwed over. Th Dear Bob …I’m not fully convinced your description (“Six Stupid process controls,” Keep the Joint Running, 4/30/2007) is exactly the situation, nor the usual root cause. Stuff like six stupid does happen as part of the bigger foul up.Corporations are trying to maximise profit – period. If they can do that by serving 9x% of the customers adequately, then they don’t care if (100-9x%) of them get screwed over. They make up for any potential losses there by the magnitude of the number of cases where they make some profit (and which is bigger than if the processes were perfected).It is cheaper EASIER AND FASTER to have good enough processes than to have fully proper processes. FASTER being a key consideration. They won’t take time to do the processes right even if they could. And most of them are not smart enough to do them 100% properly at all even if they did take the time. – Systems thinkerDear Thinker … Actually, corporations aren’t trying to maximize profit, or at least, not all of them are.Publicly held corporations try to “maximize shareholder value,” which is about the price of a share of stock and the number of shares outstanding, not directly about profit. Different companies use different timescales when making decisions, some pay more attention to the balance sheet than the profit-and-loss statement, and some pay more attention to non-financial leading indicators like customer satisfaction or product quality.Some privately held corporations focus on doing what it will take to cash out in an IPO. Others sacrifice immediate profit for long-term viability to a much greater extent than publicly held ones. My point is that your generalizations mask the complexity and diverse criteria that go into corporate decision-making.I agree that it’s easier and faster to have good-enough processes. Often it’s also the right answer. It makes a lot more sense to get something into production fast and then subject it to improvement cycles than to delay implementation in an attempt to achieve perfect design.The delay means you get no business benefit instead of some benefit for an extended period of time. The attempt to achieve a perfect design is almost always fruitless anyway, which means the business ends up having to subject the supposedly perfect design to improvement cycles anyway. Only because the process designers figure it’s perfect, there’s a lot more resistance to the improvement cycles.The other problem with the slower approach is that sometimes the perfect design arrives too late to do any good. The problem it was supposed to solve has been replaced by other problems.– Bob Powered by ScribeFire. Technology Industry