Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

Tea Petrin and Alesa Vahcaica 109
was not the only thing needed. A development of export-oriented
production firms was also necessary. Otherwise, the entry of small, new
firms would have only a short-term effect on economic growth and
competitiveness of the Slovene economy. To achieve export competitiveness,
the restructuring of existing enterprises was needed. The
restructuring would follow the pattern of industrial restructuring in
those countries which were the most successful competitors in the
world. This further implied that entrepreneurs and managers, as well as
workers’ collectives and policy makers, would have to concentrate on
strategies that were best suited for gaining international competitive
advantage. This meant that Slovene companies would have to restructure
according to the organizational and production principles of the
new competition. Whereas the old production paradigm was based on
minimizing the costs of producing standardized products, the new production
paradigm was based on establishing the competitive advantage
through superior product design and permanent innovation.
There were several attempts to stimulate restructuring of Slovene
enterprises in order to gain international competitiveness. Two such
projects 2 were based on the principles of new competition (see Petrin,
1992, 1995, 1996). In reality, it meant the introduction of total quality
management in the enterprises as well as cooperation among enterprises
in the form of strategic groups. The first of the two projects,
which was carried out in 1989–90 and 1990–92, will be discussed here
from the point of view of employee involvement.
The project revealed clearly the importance of employee involvement.
It was found that any meaningful restructuring demanded the involvement
of everyone in the enterprise. It was crucial that everybody gained
an understanding of the new production and organizational principles
on which the internal restructuring would then be based.
Programs of this type depend, to a great extent, on the methodology
used. Because this means a deep change of enterprise culture, a thoroughly
tested approach should be used and the results cannot be
obtained in a short period of time. In the wood-processing industry, we
found that the main cause of low international competitiveness was low
operational efficiency. For the introduction of the new management system,
we chose a well-tested system of ‘20 keys’ – a system developed by
the Japanese management consultant Iwao Kobayashi (Kobayashi, 1995).
The twenty areas of the 20 Keys system cover all aspects of enterprise
operations. The areas are cleaning and organizing, management by
objectives, team activities, reducing inventories, quick change-over
technology, value analysis, zero monitoring, coupled manufacturing,