Over at LeanBlog, Mark Graban writes about the latest batch of Shingo award recipients in his posts 2006 Shingo Prize Winners, Shingo Winners “Control Their Destiny”?? and Shingo Investing: a Losing Bet where he compares stock performance of past prize winners and finds a nasty negative trend. Bill Waddell of Evolving Excellence wrote Don’t Let Delphi Drag Down the Shingo Prize, lamenting how Delphi can receive so many awards and be patently un-lean. Both authors raise relevant challenges that reminds me of a similar controversy of the “case studies” Tom Peters used in his classic In Search of Excellence.

Having worked at and visited a number of the Delphi plants I know they’ve done good things, although in my opinion just too little and too late and at the wrong altitude. With Delphi’s bankruptcy can GM be far behind? What do you think?