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’s System of Profound Knowledge encompasses four elements and includes fourteen points of management and seven deadly diseases of management. These four elements of Profound Knowledge are: 1. A Theory of Knowledge: How do we know what we believe we know? 2. A Theory of Variation: How do we analyze and understand what we know? 3. A Theory of P

14 Points for Management as presented on the Deming Institute website:7 1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs. 2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn thei

Eventually, this group of ideas formed the core of the now world-famous Toyota Way: •Kaizen: continuous improvement (predating Shewhart but perhaps inspired by Sakichi reading Henry Ford’s book). •Jidoka: the machine stops when there’s a problem. •Andon cord: any worker can stop the assembly line when there’s a problem. •Go to gemba:** the supervis

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

Maginot Line thinking is when you expend considerable resources in an effort to counteract a past threat.

Picture it. One Ford employee making ten cars a year for thirty-five years while his Toyota counterpart goes from four to sixty. Toyota’s supplier network? A typical GM car factory used eight hundred suppliers. Toyota? Just 125 … with half the in-house work. This dispels the Western myth of needing more to do more: Toyota was doing more with less.

It sounds like a self-help seminar, but Deming essentially told them that their competitors weren’t truly their competitors. They shouldn’t strive to be better than others but to strive to be better than themselves—that true competition was being better tomorrow than you were yesterday.

Where Ford’s approach was driven by practical matters, Taylor’s approach was more scientific in nature, giving rise to the term “scientific management.” In layperson’s terms, where Ford treated people like cogs in a machine, Taylor approached workers as if they were machines themselves—machines that could be optimized for maximum efficiency, given

For Deming, the System of Profound Knowledge was the vehicle; cooperation and management transformation were the destination. Ultimately, four key ideas would evolve into the four elements of Profound Knowledge: pragmatism, variation, human psychology, and systems thinking.