This means that people in different parts of the company must be free to talk and work with each other. Douglas MacArthur invited him to postwar Japan, to help the Japanese rebuild their industry. The Japanese named an industrial quality award, the Deming Prize, after him. The CCT extends Deming's advice by removing barriers between the customer and the supplier. Tom Peters refers to a barrier-free organization as porous .
Porosity makes organizations flexible, and responsive to diverse customer needs.
He specifically says that front-line workers should interact with customers and suppliers. Recall that specifications do not always reflect all the customer's needs. Workers at a major customer's plant were unhappy with Harris parts, although the parts met specifications. Manufacturing workers met with the customers' workers, and identified the problem. These defects interfered with the customer's machine vision systems.