ABSTRACT
This book has described a journey. It is a journey that will never be complete. With the technology that is available today, most manufacturing companies are able to do things which even twenty years ago would have been unthinkable. I wonder what the discussion around the dining table, which once sat in the dining room of our home in Edinburgh, and which now sits in my own dining room, would be today. The two Johns, Garnett and Longmuir, men who had been through two world wars and seen dramatic advances in industrial technology, would have been overwhelmed by the impact of new technologies: the role of the Web, the integration of systems, the global capability of companies today, and many more innovations have changed the face of manufacturing over the past twenty years. They would not, however, have felt they had nothing to offer. All the technology that exists today is still managed, developed, implemented and created by people. For both men, people were both the starting point and the finishing point. I have found that whenever I forget that, I am in deep trouble. It is people who make enterprises work, it is people who need the products that these organisations produce, and it is people who gain a living from their involvement in that process.
