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

There were more lessons. Copart didn’t just learn that it could operate better without its own fleet of trucks; it also learned it needed to change the way it interacted with employees. We learned it wasn’t just enough to treat your employees nice, give them good benefits, and hope they got it. That wasn’t enough to keep the unions out. We treated

McGregor had a key insight that has since been validated time and again: both are true. If you view people with mistrust (Theory X) and subject them to all sorts of controls, rules, and punishments, they will try to game the system, and you will feel your thinking is validated. Meet people with practices based on trust, and they will return your tr

A key part of the success of the TPS is in its effect on workers. Taylorism makes workers into cogs in a machine, paid simply to perform preplanned actions as quickly as possible. The TPS, instead, requires workers to pursue mastery through continuous improvement, imbues them with a higher purpose — the pursuit of ever-higher levels of quality, val

they discovered that the other organization’s strategy seemed perfectly rational and reasonable from their local perspective. There was no “treachery” afoot. There was simply a larger system whose pieces didn’t work well together. Having…

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