Soft skills

The most important "soft skills" are those skills that we need to understand and manage:
- Superordinate goals,
- Style,
- Staff and
- Skills.

You may notice similarities between these levers and the eight quality principles described by ISO 9000
- Superordinate goals: Leadership
- Style: System approach to management
- Staff: Involvement of people
- Skills: Process approach & Continual improvement

A little story: Thirty years ago, McKinsey & Co. researched why the Japanese organizations were more successful than their American counterparts. McKinsey developed a business framework, which describes seven factors or levers that a manager can use.

It seems that American managers only understood and used three of the seven levers, while Japanese managers leveraged all seven factors, including four "soft" factors that westerners usually considered unimportant.
The 3 hard "S" are Strategy, Structure, and Systems.
The 4 soft "S" are Superordinate goals, Style, Staff and Skills.
(See Pascale & Athos ref in the link below)

In an effort to make soft things seem hard, and thus, understandable and manageable, western authors started compiling ever longer lists of the components and variations of those culturally bound, intangible and elusive factors.

A friend of mine says that companies value soft skills.
I don't agree.

I think they don't even understand the concept behind soft skills.
They say they do, because it is fashionable, and as with the Emperor's New Clothes, nobody dares to admit that they have spent their training budgets in a concept so volatile that they don't grasp.

Fungus

Follow this link to The Art of Japanese Management