Sixty Years of Deming and American Managers Forgot to Pay Attention
Filed under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leadership Skills, Leading Change, Marketing, Organizational Transformation, Product Management, Surviving Lousy Leaders
Note from Art: this distinctly non-holiday post couldn’t wait for a better time. There’s no time like the present for leaders and managers to be thinking deeply about their businesses and the road ahead.
Dr. Deming once stated that he hoped one of his life’s accomplishments was to keep American companies from committing suicide. The public spectacle of Detroit and Wall Street committing suicide in the same quarter would indicate that he failed in his mission.
The site of these firms begging in the streets for alms from taxpayers is nauseating. T
Deming spoke, taught and wrote about what we should be doing. He was clear in his belief that the U.S. was the “single most under-developed country in the world,” principally due to our philosophically bankrupt leadership and business management approaches.
He talked to many of the leaders in the U.S. auto industry. He described a theory of management that if adhered to, would cure U.S. firms of the “Deadly Diseases” of traditional U.S. management practices. These were the very diseases that got automakers and so many other firms in such big trouble to begin with. Short-term thinking, ego, false leadership models, lack of constancy of purpose and so many others that are in plain sight for all to see and fix.
From the ashes of World War II, Japanese leaders and managers worked to develop a new style of management. This tiny country (in land mass) with no natural resource other than a motivated workforce and leaders and managers relentless in pursuit of quality and collective prosperity, rose in a few short decades from laughingstock to the world’s second largest economy. Peel back the layers of Japanese success and you will find Deming at the center.
Deming’s Theory of Profound Knowledge and 14 points offered (and still do) keys to many of the answers. They are not prescriptive, but rather they combine to create a philosophical approach to running a business, that if adhered to, will stand a chance of succeeding for customers, workers and partners on a global stage.
We now face the daunting task of regenerating our economy. All of us that work, manage and lead have an opportunity to contribute. While our ashes are paper and not buildings like Japan in 1950, the situation is just as dire.
One reader mentioned in an earlier post of mine that it was interesting how Deming was rolled out when things got bad. My perspective: it’s interesting how we paid him lip-service when we should have worked to understand, adapt and apply his principles.
Dr. Deming saw that much of American industry had sown the seeds of its own demise in flawed management practices, even when times and numbers looked good. If you are looking for ideas during this time of trouble, Deming’s philosophy of management is a good place to start.
*Suggested reading: Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming
Sustaining Performance Excellence in Business and in Life
Filed under: Leadership, Organizational Transformation
It genuinely bothers me when organizations spend years and untold dollars reinventing themselves and succeeding with a quality framework (i.e. Baldrige or Six Sigma) only to show up in the business press as an organization fighting for survival.
It’s like the obese person with one foot in the grave suddenly committing to health on America’s Biggest Loser and at the end of the program, successfully completing a marathon. For a moment, life is good and our belief in our capacity to do anything that we set our mind to, restored. Certainly the experience and lessons-learned during the successful journey to improve have changed this individual’s life for the better. And then, we glance at the tabloid cover in the grocery store checkout line to see a picture of this fat then fit and now fat again individual working out with a box of Krispy Kremes.
I wrote a related post a few days ago with the harsh title of Change or Die, and upon second thought, the title should have been: Change & Sustain or Die. Organizations and people are fairly adept at changing for a moment at the end of a gun barrel, but they are not so good at sustaining the change when the barrel is no longer pointing their way.
- There’s the former Baldrige winner that lost their CEO in an untimely passing. The new leader took a cost cutting mentality and ended up cutting out programs and people critical to the organization’s focus on performance excellence. The ensuing performance included a stint in bankruptcy. That’s a bad case of the Baldrige Blues.
- Motorola is given large credit for helping create the Six Sigma Quality framework. Their focus on process improvement and their Baldrige award are legendary and define the culture. The company is fighting for survival, mired down in completely forgetting the Voice of the Customer in pursuit of endless elegant iterations of cell phones that no one wants. Their imbalanced scorecard had them losing $12 for every device they sold last quarter and burning through billions with a “b” in cash over the last year.
- Ford. Enough said.
- GM, don’t get me started.
It’s not like Toyota withheld key information about the legendary Toyota Production System and the many other business practices that they learned by applying Deming’s principles, studying the writings of Henry Ford and the unique innovations in the operations of early supermarkets in the U.S.
- Circuit City. See ya. (OK, this one is unfair…they never achieved any form of recognizable Performance Excellence.)
The Bottom-Line For Now on Sustaining Performance Excellence
Leadership is always an issue when it comes to performance, and in my opinion, it is THE issue when it comes to sustaining excellence. The various Quality frameworks offer essential directions for the never-ending journey in pursuit of creating value and continuously improving, but the secrete is that there is no final destination.
Achieving milestones and winning awards helps reinforce the progress on the journey, but leaders at all levels have to foster a culture that is perpetually dissatisfied. The fact is that the market never sleeps, customer issues/needs change constantly and there are always competitors interested in taking your share of the customer’s budget.
An MBA student reminded me the other night of Andy Grove’s (Intel) classic book and philosophy: Only the Paranoid Survive. Perhaps we should work on a Balanced Scorecard measure for Paranoia. Actually, that raises an interesting question. What do your metrics and measures and scorecards truly tell you about whether you are continuing the upward climb or falling backwards, potentially into oblivion?
Hey leaders, wake up. Someone’s going to have you for lunch while you are busy basking in the glow of your latest quality award. And speaking of lunch, do you know how long it will take you to work off that piece of carrot cake? Just say no to the dessert and get to the gym tonight. You’re looking a little pudgy.
Another related post: Does Your Dashboard of Performance Measures Include a Warning Light?
Do Your Employees Truly Believe That They Can Make A Difference?
Filed under: Leadership, Leading Change, Organizational Transformation, Strategy
I am busy preparing for my fall MBA teaching assignments and I tripped across an interesting survey about employees and change (circa 2006) in the excellent text: Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence by Evans and Lindsay. (Note, contrary to my comments regarding some other management texts that I’ve run across, this one has a great deal to offer both the student and the instructor.)
The survey of Fortune 500 employees offered an interesting insight into what your employees might really be thinking while you as a leader are delivering yet again, another of your famous “take risks, innovate, create and you are empowered” pep talks. The survey results said that 79% of respondents understood that they were accountable for “taking initiative and bringing about change,”40% of the respondents indicated: “they do not believe that they can make a personal contribution.”
While employees are often appropriately cynical about the disingenuous cheerleading of many leaders, if you’ve got 4 out of 10 members of your firm “not believing” that they can make a personal difference in the firm’s success, you’ve got a crisis on your hands!
I’ve written in prior posts that a leader should strive to ensure that everyone in a firm can pass the “Walk in the Door” test. Simply stated, everyone in the organization must be able to connect their priorities to a firm’s key objectives and strategies when they walk in or log on to begin their day’s work. Easy to write, hard to realize, but definitely not impossible to achieve. However, if 4 out of 10 employees don’t buy in to the belief that they can and will make a difference to a firm’s performance, my speculation is that “To Do” lists are filled with Urgent but Unimportant tasks that fill time and ultimately come to represent a person’s corporate existence.
Leadership Root Causes of the 40% Malaise Organization:
- Leaders lack credibility to help bring about change. People have heard the same pitches over and over again, but have not seen leaders step up and remove impediments or make the process and structural changes needed to allow people to create.
- The leaders talk change, but the bureaucratic procedures and silo politics serve to flush any hope for change down the drain.
- Leaders have failed to create proper awareness of a galvanizing vision and supporting strategy. Vision and strategy are likely abstract concepts to most employees in a 40% Malaise Organization.
- Communication is likely stilted and tough discussions avoided, or worse, discouraged or even punished.
- Systems and processes fight change and directly contradict the lofty exhortations of the leaders.
- Accountability for results is fuzzy. Malaise prospers and spreads in environment where accountability is kept in the closet, like mildew in a damp basement.
The Cure(s): Apply Some Good Leadership Common Sense Quickly:
- It’s hard to resist the “fire the leaders” that got you here in the first place. If you are the new leader at the top of your organization or team, give this one some strong consideration. Otherwise, keep reading.
- Quit talking and start listening and acting. The problem and the solutions are in your court. Seek to understand the level and depth of the malaise and why your associates believe that they cannot make a difference. What are the impediments? What systems, processes or behaviors confounding attempts at change and creativity? What management practices have ripped the heart out of any desire for people to solve the big problems?
- Provide people with context for the firm’s situation and build widespread awareness of a clear vision for the future. Ask everyone how to realize the vision and begin involving a broad swath of the population in defining strategies and actions. Create and publicize victories for teams and individuals as small changes take root and big changes begin to develop.
- Open communication channels, encourage and reward individuals willing to identify problems and solutions to tough issues. Hold your leadership team accountable to listening to ideas and acting on removing impediments. Eliminate the leaders that are more concerned with politics than results and replace them with leaders that understand what it takes to help a culture evolve at light-speed.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Every leader should spend a few minutes at night staring at the ceiling and pondering whether his or her employees are truly engaged in helping the business advance. If your perception is that the answer is "Yes," ask yourself how you can truly be certain. A company marches forward on attitude, and if the attitude is that “my input doesn’t matter,” you’re in deep trouble. It’s time to quit talking and start asking, listening and acting. How engaged are your employees?
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