Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

Sony's debacle concerning fires in PCs with Sony batteries installed in them is a lesson hopefully we all can learn without doing it the hard way.

If you don't know by now, Sony was forced to perform a huge recall of its batteries as a result of the problem, which evidently, could have been avoided.

What was found out on Monday was that when they learned about the fire in a Dell Inc. (Dell) notebook computer that had one of its batteries in it caught fire; they failed to check the condition of batteries in other notebooks and failed to check the hardware of the Dell PCs they were in. The implication is that management didn't thoroughly do their job.

The first uncovering of the problem happened in November 2006, when a Dell notebook PC caught on fire in Tokyo while it was being used.

One report says from there "Sony knew the cause of the fire was that the battery was prone to overheating and that the reason for the overheating was metal particles that had contaminated the battery during the production process.

"The production process was corrected immediately upon discovering the problem, but Sony only examined the same type of batteries produced around the same time. Sony did not examine batteries it had produced for companies other than Dell on the ground that no accidents had been reported in other computers.

Sony also did not thoroughly examine the electrical circuits and other hardware used in Dell PCs."

Something as serious as a fire caused by your product has to be looked at from all angles with a product; the failure of Sony's management in making this happen is the cause of the major recall. Experts say that it could have been avoided if they had taken everything into consideration earlier in the process.

Managing the quality of anything in business means that we can't simply look at things from a localized or limited point of view. Anything connected to the problem needs to be thoroughly examined no matter what aspect of a business is not performing to expectations. Sony's learning this lesson the hard way.