Dear Fred,
For me, W. Edwards Deming remains the great master of change
management in the 20th century workplace. His two books Out of the
Crisis (1986) and The New Economics (1993) are among the greatest
written on this theme.
While W. Edwards Deming is often identified with quality, his own
focus involved organizational transformation, that is change
management to move from ineffective management and leadership to
effective management though effective leadership. He considered his
fourteen points to be "principles for the transformation of Western
management" (Deming 1986: 18) and the "transformation of ...
industry" (Deming 1986: 23).
While you can get the books and learn much from them, Deming
systematized his findings in 14 simple points. While we can describe
these points in simple language, of course, putting simplicity to
work takes thought, reflection, and practice.
Deming's 14 points are:
"1. Create constancy of purpose for 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 their
responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the
need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the
product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag.
Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any
one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and
service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly
decrease cost.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help
people and machines and gadgets do a better job. Supervision of
management is in need of overhaul as well as supervision of
production workers.
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work productively for the company.
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research,
design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee
problems of production sand in use that may be encountered with the
product or service.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the work force
asking for defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations
only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of
low quality and low performance belong to the system and thus lie
beyond the power of the work force.
11. Eliminate work standards and quotas on the factory floor.
Substitute leadership. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate
management by numbers and numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
12. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride
of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed
from sheer numbers to quality. Remove barriers that rob people in
management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship.
This means, among other things, abolishment of the annual or merit
rating and of management by objective.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement
for everyone.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the
transformation. The transformation is everybody's job."
(Deming 1986: 23-24)
Deming views the organization as a system, but he is neither
reductionist nor instrumentalist. He sees the human beings who work
in and comprise organizations in human terms. His system rests on a
solid ethical foundation. Deming portrays human psychology in its
fullest dimensions and his understanding of needs can be compared
with Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. (Maslow 1954, 1987; Hersey and
Blanchard 1969: 22-40) This also involves the issues of trust and
shared value that are central to such current concepts as
organizational learning.
The essential focus of Deming's world was a systemic approach in
which everyone in an organization shared knowledge and
responsibility. Quality is its outcome. The greater the mastery of
profound knowledge, the more total the quality outcome.
For greater depth, please refer to Deming's two major works, Out of
the Crisis and The New Economics.
Deming was a great thinker but a notoriously difficult writer. Mary
Walton (1989) sums his work in a lovely little book, The Deming
Management Method. David Halberstam's (1987) classic, The Reckoning,
shows how the Deming method worked when Japanese engineers and
business leaders put it to work for change in the post-war era.
-- Ken Friedman
References
Deming, W. Edwards. 1986. Out of the Crisis. Quality, Productivity
and Competitive Position. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deming, W. Edwards. 1993. The New Economics for Industry, Government,
Education. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study.
Halberstam, David. 1987. The Reckoning. New York: Avon Books.
Hersey, Paul and Kenneth H. Blanchard. 1969. Management of
Organizational Behavior. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Maslow, Abraham. 1954. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper
and Row, Publishers.
Maslow, Abraham. 1987. Motivation and Personality. 3rd Edition. New
York: Harpercollins.
Walton, Mary. 1989. The Deming Management Method. London: Mercury Books.
--
Ken Friedman
Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language
Norwegian School of Management
Center for Design Research
Denmark's Design School
+47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM
+47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat
email:
ken.friedman@bi.no