What if the problem isn't your strategy, your people, or your tools, but the lens you're looking through? In this first conversation with Andrew Stotz, quality educator Balaji Reddie explains why so many organizations chase Deming's 14 Points and prizes but miss the philosophy underneath. He also gets into what changes once you start seeing your organization as one connected system. There are a few surprises along the way, like why his employees actually celebrated the day he got rid of performance appraisals. 0:00:01.9 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest Balaji Reddie, who is an educator and trainer in teaching of Dr. Deming and quality management generally. Now the topic for today is a deeper perspective of the teachings of Dr. Deming. Balaji, how are you?   0:00:29.6 Balaji Reddie: I am fine. It's wonderful to see you this morning. I have been looking forward to this for quite some time now.   0:00:37.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. In fact, we've been talking back and forth in the past and then we had a meeting recently to get going on this because you've got so much to share. And one of the things I just said is a deeper perspective on the teachings of Dr. Deming. Maybe you could just give a little background of yourself for those people that have never heard of your journey. Maybe tell us a little bit about your journey, the Deming journey, as well as what you're doing now.   0:01:02.2 Balaji Reddie: All right. So I am an electrical engineer by profession and my first job which I got was in a lamp, a bulb manufacturing company which made automotive lamps. And that's where I chose to be in the quality department because I was being shunted around in all the different departments and the owner of the company asked me, "Where would you like to be?" and I said, "Quality." I don't know, when I look back why I chose. I think it appealed to me as an engineer and also the fact that I wanted to be a manager. It combined engineering and something to do with managing people. I don't want to sound dramatic, but I don't think I chose quality, I think quality chose me. But what I did after that was conscious. I did a postgraduate diploma in quality management, the first structured course in the country, and then went on to a Master of Science in quality management here in India.   0:02:00.2 Balaji Reddie: So that's been my journey here as far as working. I worked a lot. I used to teach part-time, but I made this switch 20 years ago to be an educator primarily and decided to put all my focus into creating the next gen of managers. At the same time, during the bit of a free time that I have, I do consult, but that's not the core profession of mine. So, yes, I'm an educator and a trainer. You can say that. I teach quality management, anything to do with operations, supply chain, et cetera, but there's always been a Deming slant to it. Along with that, I've also liked to… Because I went into the works of Dr. Juran, I got a good chance to meet with him and be in touch with him. It was only the last six years of his life, but I think he had very little time to give me, but he gave me time. So I have a good perspective of both these gentlemen. And if you know quality, they're the pioneers.   0:03:01.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I'm curious, when you first started out with the degrees and the, as you mentioned, getting a diploma and then a master's, was Deming front and center in there or was that a secondary thing? What was it like in the beginning?   0:03:19.6 Balaji Reddie: Oh, my entire focus was actually Deming. I needed to be qualified in that. I wanted to qualify myself in quality, that's what I meant here, because there was no… I was looking for a structured course on the subject. You had these training programs, certificate courses, but this one caught my attention when they said we have a diploma in quality. And part of the course was we had to, there was a project like a dissertation, and we had to show how we implemented this in our companies where we were working. And for those who were not working, they were provided companies where you go and actually implement these. So it was a win-win. So the company gained and you gained. That's how it was. That's what I liked about that course. Same with the masters. It was a complete two-year course. This was a year-and-a-half or three semesters. That was more elaborate, the masters. So, yeah.   0:04:18.0 Andrew Stotz: And what is the state of Deming and the teachings of Dr. Deming in India? We know that many companies in India have implemented the teachings of Deming over the years. But of course, there's a lot of people that just know nothing. I'm just curious, what is the state right now as far as the teachings of Dr. Deming?   0:04:40.3 Balaji Reddie: Oh, I'd like to… Just a slight correction there. We have the highest number of Deming Prize winners, but that does not necessarily mean that they're implementing the teachings of Dr. Deming. In fact, many of them after having got the prize… I worked in a company, we were suppliers to one of them. And when they came to do a vendor assessment to our factory, obviously there's a lot of buzz. Everyone in the company, they called me the Deming man. They used to call me that. And so when these guys came down and they were talking and when they gave their business card which had the Deming Prize logo, so they said, "Oh, we have… You know, Balaji is here and he's our Deming man." So who's he and what is this? And so they came and met me and they said that, "We got the Deming Prize." I said, "Excellent." But I said, "Just because you got the Deming Prize, I mean, have you worked on the Deming philosophy?" "Isn't this the same?" And I said, "No." And I, of course, joked with them, and they said, "So how do we learn?" And I said, "Pay me." [laughter] Anyway, yeah, then we got talking and they realized that there was such a big gap in what they were doing. For instance, when I spoke to them about performance appraisals and having quotas and things like that, they were like, "What?"   0:06:04.9 Andrew Stotz: Interesting. And when we talk about the Deming Prize, when I asked you that, we're talking about the Deming Prize which is offered by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers through their Deming Prize Committee. This isn't something done through the Deming Institute.   0:06:12.3 Balaji Reddie: No.   0:06:19.7 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Okay. And do people study Deming there in India anymore or is it fading out or…   0:06:26.7 Balaji Reddie: Well, yeah, that's what I said, they do know. The good part is that because of the fact that the Deming Prize winners are there, at least they know about Dr. Deming. And then they're curious to know, "Oh, what did he teach?" Because again, they've been given that perspective that he taught, well, wrongly, PDCA, and he focused on the 14 points. And then when they read the 14 points and then they get… Because when you read it just without understanding, you can actually… It can put off certain people. You may get a little repulsed and say, "Oh, my God, what's he saying?" But then there are certain people who get intrigued and say, "Wait a minute. This is challenging. He's saying that we need not have quotas? Then how are you going to get work done?" And that's where the questioning begins. And there have been normally these trends where some companies where they called me over, I shall not name one of them, one of the students I was teaching in class and I was talking about the 14 points, and then she comes up to me and she says, "I've spoken about you to my father, and he's working in this company, and they're going for the Deming Prize. He wants to meet you." And then she brings him to the college the next morning and then we had a lovely discussion. And he said, "We've been discussing the 14 points." And I said, "You know what? You're putting the cart before the horse. You need to discuss profound knowledge first." So he said, "I'll put you in touch with my HR, the human resource." And then that lady got in touch with me, then we had a good chat and I explained to her and she understood very quickly. Incidentally, Andrew, that's something very amazing, when I speak about these things to the HR people, they take to it like a fish takes to water. They say, "You're right. What can we do about appraisals? Appraisals are wrong." But they also know they're shackled. They do not have the authority to break and come out of it. There have been some cases where they've been bold enough, but many of them… That's one of the things I've seen over these last 20 years that I've been teaching, that everybody principally agrees, but they also say that we're bound by it.   0:08:37.6 Andrew Stotz: That reminds me when I attended my first seminar when I was 24, and I was very intimidated by all the people in the room. I was just fresh out of university, working at Pepsi in Los Angeles. I flew into Washington, D.C., and so I sat right in the front row and I just decided I'm not gonna look at anybody behind me because they're all bigwig executives. But then when I heard Deming really show no mercy and really be tough to them, I was like, "Wow, wow, this is interesting." And he was getting to the… As a factory supervisor, which is what I was at Pepsi, I could just see he was getting to the heart of the matter. And so, yeah, a lot of things are very obvious to people in the factory, but then it's the leadership that is an issue. I'm curious when we think about… Let's imagine that someone listening to this has never heard of Dr. Deming and it's their first time, they stumbled upon this, they're hearing you speak. They're gonna ask the question, "Why does this matter? What benefit do I get from this?" How would you describe that to someone who knows nothing about Dr. Deming and his teachings?   0:09:59.3 Balaji Reddie: Oh, well, when you start getting aware of what this man had to say, let me tell you, when you start actually getting to it, you'll find that what you've been missing all this time in life. And then when you actually get to implement this, it'll be way, way better than where you are right now, sometimes totally in a very, very different direction. And you begin to realize that you had an illusion of knowledge, that you thought you were correct, and then suddenly a new perspective comes in. Just to make a point here, I don't want to be boastful about this, but I'm really proud to say this, that in all the companies that I worked, I removed performance appraisal. None of the companies I worked in had performance appraisal. And the day we removed it in one of the companies, there were actually celebrations.   [laughter]   0:10:56.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Which for many people listening that don't know anything about the teachings of Dr. Deming may think, "That's crazy, because I thought that we run business through performance appraisals, KPIs, and the like." One of the ways I was thinking when you were just speaking was it's a little bit like Deming's… You're a fish, and Dr. Deming is a guy that's gonna come up and tell you, "Oh, by the way, you're surrounded by water." And you're like, "Wait, what do you mean? What's water?" And then all of a sudden he brings this awareness like, "What am I swimming in? I am swimming in something, and it's called water." And it's like everything that's going on, the concept of how we learn, the concept of variation, the concept of psychology, it's like all of these are foundational things that we've been swimming in, but we really haven't been paying attention to. And I think he woke me up to a lot of that. So what should we talk about today? What do you got on your mind?   0:11:55.7 Balaji Reddie: Well, I presume that the audience would be someone who's read about Deming, or if they have not read, I can go it either way.   0:12:05.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, I mean, I would say just let's go into what your learnings are and what you want to teach us today and share with us, and then people can follow along.   0:12:17.4 Balaji Reddie: All right. So let's begin with what he meant by Profound Knowledge, because that was something he put together only towards the end of his life. I'm reminded of a few things that led to me thinking about these things. One of the very first books that was written on him was by Mary Walton, The Deming Management Method. And with due respect, she was an excellent journalist, and so she followed him around. Everyone was intrigued to know who this man is because he had just gained popularity. If Japan Can… Why Can't We? And so she wrote this book, I think as early as '84, if I'm not mistaken. And she followed him around for almost three years before she actually published the book. So she attended four-day seminars, and she's trying to understand what this man was. So the biography bit of it was very nice. But if you go there in the preface and in one of the chapters, there's a very interesting conversation where she says, "I asked Deming that why don't you set up a body, an organization? Why are you doing this all alone?" And he didn't say a word to her, and he just mentioned to her, "I'm good." So I believe he was still looking for the answers to offer something to the world. He had it all in uncoordinated stuff here and there, but that came much later, I think in 1989, when he finally put it all together and called it Profound Knowledge. Because that was when a year, a month or so before he passed away, he set up the Deming Institute. I think he thought he was ready now to leave behind a legacy that others could build upon, right?   0:14:08.0 Balaji Reddie: And so that he called it… Again, I'm looking for the missing link here—. Apparently, when he wrote it, as he called it deep knowledge, but it was someone who gave him the word profound, and that's how the name stuck. So I'm still trying to find out who did that. I saw this in one of the letters to Henry Neave, where he was writing to all of his colleagues, he called them, and taking feedback from them. And in that, he said that, "I profess this is deep, this is wide." And somebody said, "It's profound." I forget. I really want to find out who it is. I asked Bill Scherkenbach, and he said, no, it wasn't him. Henry, of course, no. I asked Bill Latzko, and he said, "No way. I never said that." So I really don't know who said it, but he christened it "profound." And we all know now, it sounded very pompous to begin with when you hear profound, and then you say, "Wait a minute." When you start getting into it, you say, "He's right. There's no other word to describe this. It is profound." So what exactly is Profound Knowledge? Now, it's a different way of looking at things around you. And especially he designed this or created this for man-made systems, organizations that you and I work in, helping us to look at things differently, right? And that's why he said it's a different lens. And when you see things differently, you ask different questions, right? When you ask different questions, you get different answers. When you get different answers, you draw different conclusions. When you draw different conclusions, you take different decisions. And when you take different decisions, that's when you get different results. It's insanity to expect different results by asking the same questions every single time. All right.   0:15:53.8 Balaji Reddie: Now, what exactly is, again, what do you mean by this whole thing, the lens? He brought together four seemingly disconnected sciences, right? He never invented any single one of them, but he saw the interconnections. All right. And the four sciences, he felt that if you had good knowledge, working knowledge of these four sciences, you need not be an expert in them, just enough for you to understand what's going on around you. All right? And in no order of importance, he had his title for each of those sciences. One was he called it appreciation for a system, which I would like to say very simply is connectedness, right? Because when people say systems thinking, okay, then you have the systems thinking experts who jumped into the picture. And I think they were caught napping. To be quite honest, Andrew, I think the people from the world of management were suddenly caught napping, and the experts were completely caught napping because they realized they'd missed the bus. Here's this man who caught everything together and put it into place, right? And so when they were… When they said systems thinking, so the systems experts came in and started trying to find out, "Oh, but he missed out on this, and he's confusing this with that." That's where it is. Dr. Deming knew where to start. All right? He said, "Yes, of course, it's all about systems, appreciation for a system, the fact that nothing exists in isolation." So I would like to say connectedness. Everything's connected to everything. When you start having that systemic approach, you realize you're not dealing with events, you're dealing with eventualities, and that there are always a huge myriad of inputs that create the outputs that you see in front of your eyes, right? And there's so many other attributes that they're separated in time and space, et cetera. We can talk for this forever. But the short word here is connectedness. Second…   0:17:56.1 Andrew Stotz: And I would say that the systems experts retreated soon after because they're nowhere to be found when we look at it these days, because everything's divide and conquer.   0:18:07.6 Balaji Reddie: Yes. Yeah, because there were people like Russell Ackoff, Stafford Beer was mentioned many times, and then their books. Now, I went on to read their books and I found, yes, they were going deep, but Dr. Deming knew where to draw the line and said, "That's it. Please don't go beyond this," and it depends on where you are, what you want to study. So draw your line around that and say that's it. And I think that thinking came from the next science which I'm talking about, which is understanding of variation, right? Now, although we say understanding of variation and people talk about the control chart, I think that's just the manifestation. If you look at the philosophy behind it, what Walter Shewhart actually was trying to do was to draw a line between when to act on the process and when to leave it alone, right? He came out with… He demarcated, and that's where it turned into the control chart with data. But broadly, Deming started applying this everywhere, right? He said that there are some things which are in my control and some things out of my control, and so he drew a line. And same with systems thinking, that how big and how deep should I go? And that's why he said every system must have an aim. Without an aim… So the aim and the purpose decide where you're gonna stop. You can't just keep on saying, "Oh, yeah, finally, okay, the whole world is a system." Fine, great, I get that. But I'm trying to study this, okay? My company, my organization, this process, these people. So you draw the line and say, "This is my purpose, so let me restrict." Again, I repeat, he knew where to stop. People tend to go overboard. And so he always said, "Begin with the aim, begin with the purpose." The purpose is the reason the system exists, and the aim is the direction in which you're headed. So you keep going there, keep revisiting that to let yourself remind yourself that I need to stop right here. Okay, and that's it. When I come to it later, because he said… Coming to the third part of Profound Knowledge, where he said you must have a theory of knowledge.   0:20:13.4 Balaji Reddie: Now, when people hear the word theory they get very put off. At least in my country, the broad doctrine is that theory is the opposite of practice. And so they think that theory belongs to the books and theory belongs at home. And when you come into the company, we all believe in being practical, right? And as you go through what Dr. Deming had to say about theory, you realize theory is a guide to better practice. And all the great practitioners are actually theorists. It's just that they don't know it, and we need to remind them. I've had enough of experience on this in my own company. And I remember when I turned on the light bulb for one of the very, very senior people in my company, he went completely quiet. He did not say anything, but I loved the way he reacted or responded to this when he started doing things very differently after the interaction that we had once. So that's with theory of knowledge. And…   0:21:19.9 Andrew Stotz: And would you say that theory of knowledge, would you correct my description of it, which is that you need to have a method of… You need to understand how you acquire knowledge?   0:21:40.1 Balaji Reddie: Yeah.   0:21:40.2 Andrew Stotz: And you gotta figure out, because acquiring knowledge, for instance, as an individual, we can play around lots of different ideas and experiments and stuff like that, but acquiring knowledge within an organization is a much harder thing. And so first is the idea that there's a level of rigor that you need in an organization to make knowledge stick.   0:22:06.9 Balaji Reddie: I think it's more about awareness. When you become aware of how you're converting information into knowledge. When you… He makes you aware of that, right? Dr. Deming gets you aware, he makes aware, "Okay, okay, wait, what's happening here?" Now, that method and all turned out to be the Plan-Do-Study-Act, whatever you call it. But he helped you understand how you're doing this, right? And you become cognizant. You get your cognitive behavior, you get very aware of things happening around you, right? You start asking the question, "Why? Why is this happening?" And then you get to the bottom of it. "Oh, when I do this, I get this." And that's when it becomes powerful for you. And then you also, "When I do this, I do not get this." And the more the theory fails, the more powerful it gets for you, because you know where it fails. So that's the awareness thing. So connectedness, being aware of the fact that it's beyond just numbers. It's about where, the variation bit, the third bit is about awareness, like I said, about learning, and the fourth, of course, about people. And he said here that all of us are born with a learning system, right? Each one of us has a learning system, a system of learning, but every single one of us has a different system of learning. We learn differently, and we learn at different speeds, at different paces, right? And so understanding the learning process of a person and then putting that person on the right job, right? He said you have to stop that person from working, and that's where joy in work comes in. People enjoy their work. I think the bottom line there is empathy when you start understanding why people do what they do, whether it's your people in the company, the customers, your suppliers, the entire system. So he says the learning process of every person needs to be understood. You want to control the market, you need to understand what makes the customer tick. You want to keep the suppliers with you, you want to understand what makes the suppliers tick, right? And what makes them tick.   0:24:23.3 Balaji Reddie: So that's the fourth part, which I would put as the word empathy. Trying to empathize. So putting this all together, he said that's what he called as Profound. So if you look at it in a broad sense, connectedness and empathy are very philosophical, and the variation and theory are very scientific. So he wanted us to be scientific and philosophical simultaneously. It's not either-or, it's and. And that's difficult to do, right? You have the big divide. You have a set of people who say, "Oh, I believe only in data. Show me the data, show me the results." And then there's a whole other set of people who says, "You gotta feel. You gotta feel for the company. Motivate." Yeah, but neither is wrong, but neither is complete. And this is complete. So this is where I found that I think we could begin, that we need to look at all these four sciences together. And of course, then came the 14 points which he laid out for us. Now, these 14 points, now if you look at them, because I just discussed the four… Of course, I've not gone into depth of each of the sciences, but I think good enough to understand what we are trying to deal with here, then you'd see that the 14 points are actually 14 consequences of this way of thinking. That you don't try to do the 14 points. When you start thinking this way, you end up with the 14 points, right? And there are some things which need to be done, right, and we need to start somewhere with this. And one of the main things that he always said is that people need to be educated about this, that people need to learn about this. And so education and training is important even when it comes to profound knowledge. And he said someone has to take the lead, all right? Someone has to get things done. And so that was his point number 14, that create a critical mass of people in the company that understand, believe, and will work towards these 14 points, right? So I'm gonna begin right there.   0:26:43.1 Andrew Stotz: I was just thinking about his saying, "One need not be an expert in any one point, [chuckle] any one of these areas." With the System of Profound Knowledge, the more I've studied it recently, which I've been working on a project recently where I had to go back to the System of Profound Knowledge, you really see that he's trying to provide a coherent, holistic system.   0:27:16.1 Balaji Reddie: Yes. I call it as a theory of leadership and management.   0:27:23.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And then you start to realize that if you can understand these four things, which isn't that… It doesn't have to be that complex, it can be pretty amazing. And I know one part of my business is investing, which I do on behalf of my clients. And one of the things that makes me stand out as unique is that I don't get distracted by the random variation in the markets. And so that doesn't mean that I'm gonna get it right all the time, but what it means is that my mind is much more clear when I understand. And as I tell people about variation, I say, if you think about just your birth, the beginning of your life is a random event. You had no influence over that, who you were born of. And therefore we at least know that randomness plays one role in your life. But when you start exploring the possibility that randomness is all around you just like water, it just wakes you up and you start to realize, "Aha, I've been reacting to things," and punishing and rewarding and all of that stuff that's happening in companies. And what I'm really doing is I'm just chasing my tail. Or as Dr. Deming would say, putting out a fire. A man could run… A manager could run… Could put out fires their whole career and never improve the system.   0:29:02.8 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. A lot of activity, no work.   0:29:04.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:29:06.2 Balaji Reddie: Okay. Incidentally, when you said about investing, one of my students who did something fascinating, I've yet to get to the bottom of it, I never sat down and asked him how he did it, but he used control charts for the stock market. And one day he explained to me, he was trying to rather, because I never… I'm not into all of that investing. That's done by my wife. I just sign the papers and she puts it in. So I… I mean, I might as well be shown the Constitution and say, "Okay, this is what it is," you know? But yeah, so he… I remember sharing with him and he said, "Can I use this for stock market?" I said, "Look, son, I don't know how this works, but I presume what you can do is this. If you had yesterday's Sensex numbers and you have today's, then you can draw a control chart for the differences, you know? And then you get an upper limit and a lower limit. And then if today's closing is so much, it can rise up to the upper control limit, that is the difference. You can add the difference to today's closing and say it can rise to so much, it can fall by so much, and likewise to the lower control limit." And then his eyes just lit up and he said, "I know what to do." And that was it. And I didn't meet him for a week. And a week later, I meet him and he says, "I want to show you something." And he opened his laptop and there were control charts all over the place and I just couldn't figure out, "So what was all this?" And then he said, "I've been following these. There are some blue chip companies and there are some…" I don't know, I don't understand these things much, but he said that, "I'm drawing a control chart for these and so I know that when it crosses the upper control limits, that's the max I can get for the share, so I sell."   0:30:55.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I mean, the hard part… The stock market is purely random most of the time and it's a challenge. But one of the things… I gave a speech to my investors and I did control charts and I did it as a way of helping them understand the markets.   0:31:04.2 Balaji Reddie: Okay.   0:31:12.7 Andrew Stotz: To predict the markets is hard.   0:31:15.7 Balaji Reddie: It's hard.   0:31:16.4 Andrew Stotz: But the control chart allows us to kind of.. It allows us to understand that most of the variation is just normal ups and downs.   0:31:24.8 Balaji Reddie: Yes.   0:31:26.5 Andrew Stotz: And so don't freak out about it. That's the first thing that really helps me. So that area of variation I find very fascinating.   0:31:34.7 Balaji Reddie: Very fascinating. I used it for COVID data, by the way. And there was a lot of criticism about that, but I knew I was going in the right direction because I was plotting the charts for the percentage positive and not the number of cases that were being tested positive every day. And so if the percentage positive lay within limits, then we were safe. I mean, everyone wants a zero, I get that. But I'm just saying here, having said that we're collecting the data and we are turning out so much of positive every day, then it should lie within certain controllable or predictable limits. And when it crosses the limit is when we get a little worried. And that's what I used this for initially. I remember it was Lloyd Provost who stood by me, whereas the other practitioners were saying, "No, you cannot use control chart for COVID and for data and for epidemic and pandemic." Whereas Deming himself used it for an epidemic of cholera somewhere. I read it in his work and where he used the c-chart and he saw that areas where the points were outside limits and then they tested the water and well, well, whatever it was, it turned out to be that he found the special cause and blah, blah, blah. So that's what gave me the idea of using the control chart for COVID and it was quite fascinating.   0:32:56.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately there wasn't a lot of independent thinking during that time.   0:33:02.5 Balaji Reddie: Yeah. [laughter]   0:33:03.0 Andrew Stotz: Real serious groupthink at that time. So I had my experience in my PhD research and my job as an analyst all my life where… And I teach my students believe nothing, believe no one, demand evidence. And so I'm constantly digging and that's just the heart of being an analyst. But when I go back… I want to go back to when I was starting at Pepsi. The reason why my boss recommended me to go to the Deming seminar was simple because I knew how to work a computer. And that was 1989 when I went to work at Pepsi. And what I had, all of these loaders that were loading up trucks with Pepsi each night. We would load about 80, 90 trucks each night. And in the heat of the summer, we would work till 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, but generally we would finish at 11:00 or midnight. But they were just… I would go to the drivers in the morning and then the drivers would come back in the afternoon and complain that the product that they needed was not on the truck. And there was just… And I went to the loaders, they go, "I put it on the truck. I don't know what you're talking about." And so there was this battle between the night loaders and the truck drivers. And so what I just did originally was I just started… I did inspection. The first thing I did is I said, "Look, before you close the doors on the trucks at night, I just want to count myself to understand what's happening here." And then I started keeping a record of that and I put that in Excel, it was Lotus 1-2-3 at the time, and then I put up charts of each person's error rate each night. And so we had a long chart. And I never actually even told them what I was doing, I just put up on the wall. And then they started looking at it over time and talking about it and then asking me questions. And it wasn't for the purpose of blaming, it was the purpose of just understanding.   0:35:01.2 Andrew Stotz: But then what we really started to see was that some people were much more accurate than others. And then we started to ask the question, "Well, how are they doing it?" And then they explained how they kept records of what they were doing and all that. And so we started to see that we could improve this. And we started to improve those numbers quite dramatically until we got to the point where I told the loaders when they were done that they were to lock the trucks and seal them and the drivers were not allowed to open them. They had to take them as is. And when everybody realized we really have to build from the beginning that this is loaded right, then we started to have massive efficiency. In the number of… Let's say you have 50 or 100 truck drivers that come in at 5:00 in the morning. It could take you till 9:00 AM to get them out the door if they've got problems and they're checking their trucks and all that. But if you've got it set right and you've done it right, we were able to rush people through the door and the drivers would get out to the LA freeways much earlier and that makes a difference for the whole day. So that was my first experience with it all. And then my boss just said, "Well, seems like you know about statistical quality control." I said, "I have no idea. I have no idea what that is." But he said, "You should go to Washington, D.C. And study with Dr. Deming." And that's my little story.   0:36:20.4 Balaji Reddie: Oh, wow. Okay.   0:36:21.6 Andrew Stotz: So how would we… What's the best way to wrap this up and think about what somebody who doesn't really necessarily have experience with the System of Profound Knowledge, you've given them some good overview. What would you like them to take away from this?   0:36:39.2 Balaji Reddie: Well, if you have now come to know about what this is, I think you could go to the W. Edwards Deming Institute website and you could subscribe and start looking into the learning pathways, systems thinking, there are a lot of catalogs available there and they've done a great job of putting things together. So they could do that reading, of course, you need to start reading, but the danger in reading Dr. Deming's work is it could put you off sometimes. And I would recommend a good place to start reading and understanding the Deming philosophy would be Henry Neve's book, The Deming Dimension. It's a very good start, one of the best introductions. You could always build upon that. So along with having Out of the Crisis, The New Economics, and Essential Deming, which was put together by Joyce Orsini, these are the three essential Deming books which contain papers, his own works, and then use Deming Dimension as a guide, so to say. You could read the books together and you could read profound knowledge to begin with. And once you get a good idea about what there is, then the question comes is where do we start? And that's where I just ended by saying that we start at point number 14 about creating a critical mass and take on leadership, right? So somebody has to take the lead. So what we could do is, I think the next time we meet, we could begin with that, how do we start? So we'll talk about the principles of leadership that W. Edwards Deming spoke of and what did he expect the leaders to do once you've decided or you've started seeing things differently and you say, "No, I need to do something about this. I need to start somewhere." And so we'll start with the principles of leadership. That's the way I look at it.   0:38:44.5 Andrew Stotz: Fantastic. Well, I look forward to our next conversation, how we can start to think about how we take this information and make a better world and make a better company, feel better. And so from everybody at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org and jump into DemingNext to continue your journey.   0:39:09.7 Balaji Reddie: Yes.   0:39:11.1 Andrew Stotz: It's an exciting tool. And this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is: "People are entitled to joy in work."