Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge: How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future

Deming directed managers to build trust throughout the organization. Eliminate fear: the fear of not getting a bonus; the fear of making a mistake; the fear of not meeting annual MBOs, MBRs, and KPIs; and the fear of not measuring up to their peers.

“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.”

According to Shewhart’s Statistical Process Control, managers shouldn’t waste their time trying to fix every single problem. Instead, they should identify which ones can be predicted and fix them. Identify the ones that will likely never happen again and don’t make knee-jerk decisions. As a result, managers can spend their time on things they can c

This is what physicist Max Planck (the father of quantum mechanics), Einstein, and others observed: No matter how much you know, there is an infinite amount of chance and randomness in the universe.

As Ed worked throughout the eighties, he continually refined his ideas and teachings around Profound Knowledge. Those six management principles he originally taught at Nashua soon morphed into his now-famous “14 Points for Management,” which he outlines in Out of the Crisis.

14 Points for Management as presented on the Deming Institute website:7 1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to 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 thei

Wilke’s secret to success? A culture of operational excellence—built on lean manufacturing, statistical process control, the theory of constraints, and purpose-built software.‡ Lean manufacturing, of course, came from the Toyota Way, the fusion of Deming’s and Japan’s “East meets West” ideas and practices. Statistical process control, too, comes st

Toyota couldn’t afford those luxuries. In fact, during the postwar years, they couldn’t afford much of anything. They had to find ways to turn Toyota into a lean, mean, automaking machine with little margin for error.‡ Kiichirō, Eiji, and Ohno made three important decisions—three concepts that have become staples of successful manufacturing for ove

In the IT world, they sometimes refer to the Red Queen’s Race from when Alice went back to Wonderland. The Red Queen and Alice ran like the wind. When they stopped, to the little girl’s astonishment, they were exactly where they’d started. She remarked, “Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere el