Dr. W. Edward Deming's 14 points for management and transforming business effectiveness

Today we live in a post "credit boom" era... we've spent the last 2 decades inebriated with cheap or even free credit. And like an "all you can eat" banquet, we've had little respect for the credit we used. Now change has been forced on us and we must adapt.

After a recent company memo about improving the business and compulsory annual reviews; I decided to do some research in to ways of improving my effectiveness as a manager and the best way is usually to look at what the best of the best have done in the past.
In my quest for the best of the best I came across William Edwards Deming (you can google his name for more info).

In one of his books Out of the Crisis he describes 14 points for management and transforming business effectiveness, none of them are catchy phrases, but any GM/COO interested in more than short term share holders could do worse...

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 on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
    b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute workmanship.


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.
    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.

Another set of management principals is The Deming System of Profound Knowledge which advocates:

1. Appreciation of a system: understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers (or recipients) of goods and services (explained below);


2. Knowledge of variation: the range and causes of variation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements;


3. Theory of knowledge: the concepts explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known (see also: epistemology);


4. Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature.

I thought I would share this tid-bit.