Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge: How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future

Deming directed managers to build trust throughout the organization. Eliminate fear: the fear of not getting a bonus; the fear of making a mistake; the fear of not meeting annual MBOs, MBRs, and KPIs; and the fear of not measuring up to their peers.

Andrew Clay Shafer says, “You are either a learning organization or you are losing to one that is.”

Inspecting a product once it’s built doesn’t improve its quality. Inspection merely discovers a lack of quality. Quality isn’t something to be added at the end but to be designed into the product from the get-go. Deming said quality isn’t so much about improving the product as it is about improving the process.

“Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.”

“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.”

“Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.”

For example, instead of looking at incidents through arbitrary categories (P1 to P4), System of Profound Knowledge could be used to identify common-cause and special-cause patterns across all incidents. Leadership would be those same supervisors using these incidents as on-the-job training opportunities. John Allspaw says incidents are “unplanned i

“Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s

“Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.”