Can craftsmanship survive in the age of mass production?

Craftsmanship was once a celebrated art. Through the pages of history we would see that, as economic sense started to make presence among various societies, craftsmanship provided a leverage to everyone to excel at what they have been doing. But as the need for the created goods started to substantially increase, production became a challenge for the craftsman.





This is the advent of mass production. No longer could a craftsman distribute his energies on all his skills to create a product. The necessity for specialization in one skill would not only divide his work by expertise but would also reduce his time of production by assigning him only the smallest entity of work.Craftsman no longer had the edge over mass production.

Low productivity of the craftsman has driven the need for establishing Organizations that could mass produce the same products with better efficiency and productivity. The total skill-set of the craftsman is maintained by distributing it across various specializations.This Organization follows the sound principles of  modern management.

Not only the productivity of goods increase but the proficiency of the labor too increases on repeated execution of their tasks.This would greatly facilitate in streamlining the production successfully. The craftsman now has to "Deskill" his skill set to facilitate distribution of his tasks for the betterment of the production.The flip side of such an event is the drop in the satisfaction level of the employees who are subjected to same jobs repeatedly.

We therefore need proper metrics to measure the performance at every level.The three Es that define the performance can be briefly put as

These first two i.e. being efficient and effective would promote one to the level of excellency.Excellency can be attained with accurate speed and direction for a company.







For a company selling a product being efficient is being affordable, and the quantum of market research they do before they develop the product is effectiveness.to put in other terms,being efficient will look at things with high margin but being effective will question weather we have to do it or not.

             More out of less     :    Efficiency

                        for More     :    Effectiveness

More out of less from more  :    Excellence