Back in the late 1970s, when I first started in management, I became increasingly frustrated with the lack of discipline I encountered in the manufacturing workplace. We made many errors that resulted in lost productivity and sometimes marginal product quality. The system relied heavily on luck. This was because the processes were largely out of control and produced considerable variability in the finished products. Added to that was frequent equipment breakdowns, some of which were near catastrophic. Workers were inadequately trained, and some of them were in positions for which they were unqualified. I even encountered some finished product designs that appeared to be noncompetitive because of the inferior raw materials used in order to reduce costs.