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

Even after Deming tweaked the Shewhart cycle, he still referred to it throughout his life as the Shewhart wheel. Despite this, his students in Japan called it the Deming cycle. Today, you might recognize it as the “plan, do, check, act” method, or simply the PDCA cycle.

He wanted to equip the people inside the company with the tools they needed to profoundly change the way Ford worked.

How much variation would they allow or tolerate in the finished products? They called these “tolerance limits.” Industrial producers switched from trying to achieve an exact fit to allowing products to be manufactured within certain tolerance limits.

Standardization: That’s what changed the world. That’s what spurred the Machine Age and everything that came after.

How had this happened? How had “Made in Japan” gone from joke to juggernaut? How had the once vanquished country come to usurp its conqueror? It was astonishing. It was impossible. It was nothing short of a miracle. From business leaders to politicians to factory floor hands, everyone shared the same bewilderment. They began to ask the question: If

statistical process control (SPC).

Determinism and analytical thinking break down a problem into tiny pieces, whereas non-determinism and systems thinking look at a problem’s bigger picture. Analytical thinkers say, “Mission accomplished. Now, let’s go home.” Systems thinkers say, “What were the results? Now, let’s make it even better.”

In his later years, however, Deming came to rename check as study. To his way of thinking, check was too much like the go/no-go inspection process of checking manufactured products. He believed the better term was study, which implied approaching the results with a scientific curiosity to investigate and understand why things turned out the way the

Ed’s mission was to work himself out of a job.