Suddenly, Deming is Relevant Again
Filed under: Career, Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Education, Performance, Professional Growth, Social Commentary, Your Professional Development "To Do" List
If you are a younger reader, the man that I am referencing in this post is W. Edwards Deming, the late and in my opinion, great management philosopher and consultant. Dr. Deming is certainly well known in quality circles (bad pun intended), but scour today’s current management books and if you’re lucky, you might find an occasional reference. Fascinating treatment of a man that inspired and guided the rebuilding of a country (Japan) and that spent his last years trying to “keep American companies from committing suicide.”
Through no fault of their own, my recent informal polling of some really sharp university students (undergraduate and graduate), I found through the “show of hands” method that very few had ever heard of Deming, and those that knew the name didn’t really know much about him.
I refuse to let a group of talented emerging professionals run through any management course of mine without spending some time with Deming, and introduced them via a 15-minute interview that he conducted in 1984, entitled “Management’s Five Deadly Diseases.” I encourage you to do the same. It’s fifteen minutes of pure Deming in his affected, slow and hard to understand speaking-pattern, filled with wisdom for managers that transcends time. I’ve added this and a few other readings to your homework list below.
Following my Tuesday night showing of this video, I caught up with one of my favorite management thinkers, Bret Simmons at his Positive Organizational Behavior blog in a great post, “Toyota’s Quality Mess: What Would Deming Say?” Bret and I exchanged some notes reinforcing the impact that Deming’s work has had on both of us in our careers.
Homework for Your Career:
If you are curious to learn more and improve your understanding of the role of a manager and perhaps improve your performance, consider this homework list:
- Read my post: “Sixty Years of Deming and American Managers Forgot to Pay Attention,” and Bret’s post on “What Would Deming Say?”
- Visit the Deming Institute and learn more about his “Theory of Profound Knowledge” and his “14 Points for Management.”
- Watch the interview above on “Management’s 5 Deadly Diseases.”
- And if you’re really into it, find a copy of “Out of the Crisis” and shudder at the parallels and still relevant lessons.
The Bottom Line for Now:
I’m most definitely in the camp that says that the science and art of management have not moved forward much in the past 100 years and that has to change. I’m also critically concerned about learning from the past and understanding the wisdom of those that came before us. We’ve not yet moved beyond the flaws and failings that Deming saw clearly in the management practices of the industrial revolution. And in fact, the only way that we will move forward is through conscious effort, or should I say, “constancy of purpose.”
You owe it to yourself, your career and your firm to understand and learn from this great man. I’ve outlined the homework. The test results will be visible at the end of your career.
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
Drive Out Fear in Your Organization’s Leadership Approaches
Filed under: Leadership, Leadership Skills, Management Education, Surviving Lousy Leaders
Students of the late W. Edwards Deming, the quality guru and management consultant will quickly recognize the phrase, “Drive Out Fear” as number 8 of his 14 points for achieving quality excellence. Dr. Deming penned his points during a period in the twentieth century when the approach to leading in business was highly autocratic; a style that he believed inhibited organizational advancement around quality. While prevailing leadership styles may have moderated a bit from the “command and control” approach so common a few decades ago, there is ample evidence that “fear” is still used liberally by organizations and small-minded managers to assert control and to drive compliance.
A few examples of Management by Fear:
- There’s the manager that frequently and publicly drops hints in departmental meetings about the likelihood of layoffs and the expectation that he will have to let go 2 out of 10 on his team.
- One of my favorites: the General Manager who gets visibly angry every time one of his key subordinates submits a vacation request form. According to one of his workers, “He clearly does not believe in vacations, and let’s us know that it will hurt our future opportunities if we insist on take time off from work.”
- I blogged earlier this year about the manager who railed at his employees: “The only way you will be on my team is if you are married to the job.” This same dipstick indicated what commitment means to him with: “The only way you will see me in a family vacation picture is with a blackberry stuck to my ear.”
- A colleague described the manager who expects 100% support of her ideas and policies. Dissenters have an interesting habit of either being fired or relegated to corporate Siberia working alone on or on projects that no one else would touch.
- One of my personal favorites is the manager that expects his co-workers to join him for drinks in the evening and rewards those who attend with the choice assignments and rides herd on those that refuse to worship his seat at the bar.
- An adult student in one of my recent management classes indicated that it was common for employees to be publicly humiliated by the screaming, cursing, belittling boss that just so happened to be one of the children of the founder.
Type the phrase “Workplace Bullying” into your favorite search engine, and you will be rewarded with a bevy of articles describing the growing awareness of this destructive behavior and its consequences for individuals, teams and organizations. Many of these articles describe the problem as “epidemic” and a number of organizations are responding with training programs on “bullying” similar to those on sexual harassment.
Fear is a tool that leaders have used to rule and subjugate throughout all of recorded history. Those with power use fear to gain compliance, to protect their position or to achieve their ends. Instead of the local warlord or playground thug, today’s corporate bully is likely a well-dressed, articulate professional that puts on a good face for the higher-ups and a completely different face for direct reports.
Suggestions for Smoking Out the Bullies in Your Organization:
- Make it a clear and visible practice to spend time talking with the team members of your direct reports. While your intent should not be to spy on the managers that work for you, if you establish a decent rapport with the broader team members, you will be more apt to pick upon the signs that indicate a bully is at work.
- Create on-going review programs and survey process that gauge manager performance, work-environment satisfaction and that provide people with an opportunity to safely highlight concerns.
- Ensure that everyone understands that you have a zero-tolerance policy for bullying. Live up to this policy when the occasion arises or it will be meaningless.
- Be aware that most bullying is done quietly. While it’s easy to recognize the boss that dresses down employees in public, you have to work harder to identify the quiet assassins in your workplace.
- Make certain that your own behaviors don’t rationalize bullying to the bullies. In many instances, the leaders frustrated with examples of heavy-handedness are themselves highly autocratic leaders that exhibit behavior that borders on bullying.
The Bottom-Line for Now:
Spend some time to determine whether “fear” is a factor in your organization. If people are in fear for their jobs or living in fear of falling under the wrath of a bully boss, they will not create, innovate or even execute their basic job functions in a quality manner. While today’s corporate bully is not shaking down the other kids for lunch money, he or she is shaking them down and stripping away their self-esteem, their drive and their desire to help the organization succeed. It’s time to hit back.
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