W. Edwards Deming’s substantive influence upon management thinking and practice is evidenced by the number of organizations that have worked to implement his key points, the abundance of books and papers related to his ideas, and the impact of his ideas on the practice of business today. While I’m not a fan of the term Quality Guru, it is hard to miss his impact.
Deming’s main concepts can be summarized as:
| Visionary Leadership: The ability of management to establish, practice, and lead a long-term vision for the organization, driven by changing customer requirements, as opposed to an internal management control role. |
| Internal and External Cooperation: The propensity of the organization to engage in non-competitive activities internally among employees and externally with respect to suppliers. |
| Learning: The organizational capability to recognize and nurture the development of its skills, abilities, and knowledge base. |
| Process Management: The set of methodological and behavioral practices emphasizing the management of process, or means of actions, rather than results. |
| Continuous Improvement: The propensity of the organization to pursue incremental and innovative improvements to processes, products, and services. |
| Employee Involvement: The degree to which employees of an organization feel that the organization continually satisfies their needs. |
| Customer Satisfaction: The degree to which an organization’s customers continually perceive that their needs are being met by the organization’s products and services. |
Almost thirty years after the publication of The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education and we are still striving to realize these. They are still as aspirational and, for many organizations, out of reach today as they were in the eighties. We can argue that a lot of the concepts that swirl around Quality 4.0 is just trying out new technologies to see if we meet those objectives.
We can, and should, discuss the particulars of the System of Profound Knowledge. For me, it makes an excellent departure point for what we should be striving for. By looking to the past we can discover…
- Strengths that define us
- Weaknesses that frustrate us
- Causes that energize us
- Relationships that inspire us.
Investigations of a Dog 
This post was me writing up some of my ideas from the session “Honor Deming’s 14 Points Through Modular Kaizen” by Grace Duffy at ASQ WCQI
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