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

“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.”

Deming defined an operational definition in his book The New Economics as a procedure agreed upon to translate a concept into a precise measurement.2 Operational definition became a key component of Deming’s theories of knowledge and variation.

Deming gave Japan a fundamentally different view on how to practice capitalism. Instead of companies competing with each other to get a bigger slice of the pie, they should cooperate together to grow the size of the pie instead.

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

Shewhart gave us a way to continually improve a process. •Deming gave us a way to continually improve a system. •Shewhart showed us how to optimize an existing process. •Deming showed us how to rethink the process altogether. •Shewhart used statistics to improve manufacturing. •Deming used statistics to improve everything.

The WHO focused only on the immediate problem and failed to consider how one “solution” might trigger a chain reaction. They failed to see the whole system. This is exactly what I meant earlier about Profound Knowledge: profound change requires Profound Knowledge, and one of the tenets of Profound Knowledge is systems thinking, an ability to see th

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.

“Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the workforce.”

“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.”