Back when I was working towards my MBA, I had a professor that was very passionate.  Let’s call him Nick.  One night, Nick polled the class, asking us who we thought was the epitome of a great leader, a person whose policies allowed for everyone to win.  When one of my classmates offered Lee Iacocca, the then-chairman of Chrysler as an example, I swear that I could see steam pouring out of Nick’s ears.  “LEE IACOCCA!” he bellowed.  “Lee Iacocca is building his engines in Mexico!  How does that help everybody win?  He’s trying to solely increase the bottom line by costing Americans jobs!”

You’re kidding, right?

Rather than ague with Nick, lest he burst a blood vessel in his forehead, we let him rant on.  When he finally calmed down, he gave us his example of a good leader: H. Ross Perot.  Yup.  This was before he ran for president, and just after he sold his business, EDS to General Motors.  All that I knew about Ross Perot was that Richard Crenna played him in that movie about a hostage rescue in Iran.  As part of this diatribe, Nick also managed to dismiss Peter Drucker and Management By Objectives (MBO), and introduced us to W. Edwards Deming.

Who?

W. Edwards Deming was a statistician by trade, who wound up in postwar Japan to work on the census.  He was invited to teach statistical control and the concepts of quality to a group of engineers, managers, and scholars.  His concepts were put into practice by Japanese industry, and the rest is history.  Japanese goods became renowned for their quality and reliability.  Couple that with the energy crisis in the 1970s, and you can understand why Japanese automakers took away market share from Ford, Chrysler, and GM.

Indelible mark

See, while American auto companies were giving us the Corvair and the Pinto, Japanese car companies were building a reputation for quality that trumps American car companies to this day.  Maybe Iacocca should have listened to Deming.  Anyway, here are his 14 Points:

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

11.a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.

11.b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

12.a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

12.b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

It’s funny how these concepts are just being accepted now, more than 20 years after Deming wrote about them in his book Out of the Crisis.  My company has started preaching the “factory without walls” concept to help our diverse divisions work together to bring in new business.  Too bad they’re still stuck on slogans.  Here’s a link to a Wikipedia entry that provides more background on Dr. Deming: W. Edwards Deming at Wikipedia

I’ll be revisiting Deming in the coming weeks, so stay tuned!  Why not subscribe, so you don’t miss a new installment?  Subscribe

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