‘Firefighting Arsonists’ Are Making Work Miserable and Inefficient

‘Firefighting Arsonists’ Are Making Work Miserable and Inefficient

When senior executives commissioned a review of product development for Harley-Davidson in the early 1990s, the authors concluded that Harley’s process yielded products that were LEW: late, expensive, and wrong. The review also identified Harley’s most seasoned, most can-do project managers—the ones who had literally saved the company—as one of the core problems. Their heroic efforts to get product out the door, by focusing on resolving the cris…