W. Edwards Deming’s 14th point is: Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job. One important point to note is that quotes lose a great deal when taken out of context. You can also find quotes by Dr. Deming, such as: “As I use the term here, […]
Doug Hall,CEO and founder of Innovation Engineering, participated in a previous podcast on Using Systems Thinking to Power Strategy, Innovation and Growth. He returns to the Deming Institute podcast again (download) and he shares his approach for using innovation or leadership to improve management practices. Doug talks about command and control management being too slow […]
Far too often companies promote employees into management positions and expect them to fulfill the obligations of their new position without helping prepare them to meet their new responsibilities. People who excelled at doing their non-supervisory job often have little education or experience to succeed with their new responsibilities. Managing a software development team is […]
The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. – Daniel J. Boorstin After you decide that Deming’s ideas seem valuable you must act to adopt new methods in order to benefit from what you have learned. This takes many forms and I have discussed many possible steps in that […]
If people asked Dr. Deming what they should do if they tried to get their company to adopt Deming’s ideas on management and the company wouldn’t he often suggested working on their resume and applying to other companies. Of course a tricky part of this decisions is determining how much effort to put into getting […]
The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande is a wonderful book about how to create systems that work. At the core the Checklist Manifesto is about determining the critical process conditions and creating a system to assure that the those process items are properly handled. In the book Atul Gawande paraphrases Daniel Boorman, veteran pilot who […]
Total Quality Management in Logistics: a case study from the trucking industry by Harry Lehman, Jr. (a thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School). The thesis aims to study the practical aspects of implementing a W. Edwards Deming-based quality program within a particular trucking company, Mason Transporters I am thankful the Navy makes such documents available […]
In response to our request asking what topics readers would like to see addressed on our blog, Dan Bracewell said: I’d like to see some posts about how to implement change in an organization. How does one get an organization to start looking at itself as a system? How does one get the organization to […]
Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organizations from an Orderly Universe by Margaret Wheatley does a good job of exploring how to view organizations as a system. A quote by Meg Wheatley from an interview long after the publication of the book does a good job of capturing the ideas explored in the book: […]
Transformation: How to Apply the System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK) presentation by Tripp Babbit at our 2015 research conference. Tripp also moderates our Deming Institute podcast. Tripp discusses Kurt Lewin’s change model: unfreezing – overcoming “interim” and dismantling the existing midset changing freezing – adopting the new habit/way-of-thinking, the new way becomes what you expect […]