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Dr. W. Edwards Deming He was an American statistician, professor, author, lecturer, consultant and also known as the father of the Japanese post-war industrial revival and was regarded by many as the leading quality guru in the United States. Trained as a statistician, his expertise was used during World War II to assist the United States in its effort to improve the quality of war materials. He was invited to Japan at the end of World War II by Japanese industrial leaders and engineers to produced cheap, shoddy imitations to one of producing innovative quality products.
He changed our lives by developing better ways for people to work together, derived his first philosophy and method that allows individuals and organizations. Deming was educated in engineering and physics and became an early student of statistics, the theory of knowledge and systems thinking. He eventually integrated the disciplines of statistical thinking, how people learn, systems thinking and psychology into his theory of profound knowledge, which allows leaders and managers to see a dynamic, complex social system in new ways, predict its performance, and continually improve it in a rapidly changing world.
Using his ideas to eliminate cross purposes, teams and organizations can produce greater wholes more than any of the individual parts or people added together. He bore October 14, 1900, in Sioux City, Iowa, the oldest son of Pluma Irene and William Albert Deming. When he was young, his family moved to Wyoming, where Deming graduated from high school in 1917. In 1921 he received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Wyoming at Laramiean. In 1925 an Master of Science. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and in 1928 a Ph. D. from Yale University.
Both graduate degrees were in mathematics and physics. He subsequently worked at the U. S. Department of Agriculture and the Census Department. While working under Gen. Douglas MacArthur as a census consultant to the Japanese government, he famously taught statistical process control methods to Japanese business leaders, returning to Japan for many years to consult and to witness economic growth that he had predicted as a result of application of techniques learned from Walter Shewhart at Bell Laboratories. Later he became a professor at New York University while engaged as an independent onsultant in Washington, D. C. Deming conducted a thriving worldwide consulting practice for more than forty years. His clients included manufacturing companies, telephone companies, railways, carriers of motor freight, consumer researchers, census methodologists, hospitals, legal firms, government agencies, and research organizations in universities and in industry. Yet his teachings have changed our workplace vocabulary in less than 20 years to include ideas such as pleasing the customer, partnering with suppliers, empowering workers, managing for quality, and eliminating layers of management and hierarchy.
He is the author “Out of the Crisis” in 1986 and “The New Economics” in 1994. Deming was finally recognized for his contributions in the United States in 1987, when he received a special award, the National Medal of Technology, at the White House. The award was in recognition of his determined support of statistical methodology, his contributions to sampling theory, and his advocacy of these methods to corporations. Deming continued to teach his business philosophy until his death in 1993. Traditional Management Practices
Traditionally, the term “management” refers to the set of activities, and often the group of people, involved in four general functions, including planning, organizing, leading and coordinating activities. Note that the four functions recur throughout the organization and are highly integrated. Emerging trends in management include assertions that leading is different than managing, and that the nature of how the four functions are carried out must change to accommodate a “new paradigm” in management.
This topic helps the reader accomplish broad understanding of management (including traditional and emerging views), and the areas of knowledge and skills required to carry out the major functions of management. 2. Deming’s philosophy He was a prolific writer in the fields of mathematical physics, statistics, and finally, management philosophy. The management philosophy of Dr. Deming can probably best be summarized by two major components: Profound Knowledge and the Fourteen Points. Dr. Deming’s Fourteen Points and their partners, the Seven Deadly Diseases.
In the years since its introduction, Deming’s philosophy of continual improvement of products, services, processes, systems and people has rarely been practiced in its fullness. In too many cases, his philosophical principles have been reduced to promoting only continual improvement in products and services to please or delight customers. Instead of focusing on the more intangible aspects of his philosophy, as Deming advised, American companies have focused almost exclusively on the tangible products and services produced by those systems.
They have often substituted measurement for management. As a result of this linear-minded focus on the tangible outcomes, Deming’s goal of the complete transformation of organizations and their people remains an opportunity waiting in the wings, but we have no doubt that it will someday be as universally accepted as the assembly line. Deming would evoke disbelief in his management seminars when he insisted that 94 percent or more of all problems, defective goods or services came from the system, not from a careless worker or a defective machine.
He would go on to say that to improve an organization’s goods or services, the system had to be improved rather than searching for the guilty worker or broken equipment. Top managers in America’s leading companies were dubious students. But, in almost all cases, when they implemented his ideas, they were surprised to find that they agreed with him: The management and the system they were managing were the true source of both problems and improvements. (a) When people and organizations focus primarily on quality, defined by the following ratio, quality tends to increase and costs fall over time. b) However, when people and organizations focus primarily on costs (often dominant/typical human behavior), costs (due to not minimizing waste, ignoring amount of rework occurring, taking staff for granted, not rapidly resolving disputes, and failing to notice lack of product improvement—plus, over time, loss of customer loyalty) tend to rise and quality declines over time. 2. 1 System of Profound Knowledge: Introduction to a System of Profound Knowledge guides the user through the Deming basics. In Constancy of Purpose for Improvement, managers learn to overcome past, present and potential problems.
Appreciation for a System teaches managers to understand their workplaces as multifaceted systems. Some Lessons in Variation explains variation as dynamic and cause-related and introduces Dr. Deming’s trademark Red Bead Experiment. In Knowledge Is Built on Theory, managers learn how to apply knowledge and theory to the real world. Management Is Prediction teaches the rational steps to expert management. Management of People explains how to manage employees for maximum results. And in Role of a Manager of People, managers deepen their understanding of their executive roles.
Once the individual understands the system of profound knowledge, he will apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to. The individual once transformed as; set an example, be a good listener, but will not compromise, continually teach other people and help people to pull away from their current practices and beliefs and move into the new philosophy without a feeling of guilt about the past.
Deming advocated that all managers need to have what he called a System of Profound Knowledge; one need not be eminent in any part nor in all four parts in order to understand it and to apply it. The 14 points for management in industry, education, and government follow naturally as application of this outside knowledge, for transformation from the present style of Western management to one of optimization. The various segments of the system proposed here cannot be separated. They interact with each other and come with four parts they are: 1.
Appreciation of a system, every organization is a system that takes inputs from suppliers and transforms those using processes. This is true in manufacturing, service, education and government. 2. Knowledge of variation involves understanding that everything measured consists of both normal variation due to the flexibility of the system and of special causes that create defects. Quality involves recognizing the difference in order to eliminate special causes while controlling normal variation. 3.
Theory of Knowledge to improve products or processes these ideas will be based our current knowledge and our theories about the way things work. But theories can be wrong so we must actively check to find out if they are correct. The way to improve a product or a process economically is to increase our knowledge of the way it works. The practical steps for increasing knowledge are the ‘Plan, Do, Study, and Act’ (PDSA) cycle or can say The Deming Cycle. 4. Psychology is the study of the human mind, including how people act and interact in different situations. 2. 2 Deming’s 14 points:
W. Edward Deming is generally recognized as being the philosopher or guru of the Total Quality Movement. He developed a set of Fourteen Management Principles, Seven Deadly Diseases and Obstacles in the early 1980s. The 14 points seem at first sight to be radical ideas, but the key to understanding a number of them lies in his thoughts about variation. Variation was seen by Deming as the disease that threatened US manufacturing. The more variation – in the length of parts supposed to be uniform, in delivery times, in prices, in work practices – the more waste, he reasoned. . Constancy of purpose. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs. 2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. 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 lowest tender contracts. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag.
Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust. 5: Constantly improve the system of production and service. There should be continual reduction of waste and continual improvement of quality in every activity so as to yield a continual rise in productivity and a decrease in costs. 6. Institute training on the job. Modern methods of on-the-job training use control charts to determine whether a worker has been properly trained and are able to perform the job correctly. 7. Institute leadership.
The emphasis of production supervisors must be to help people to do a better job. Improvement of quality will automatically improve productivity. Management must prepare to take immediate action on response from supervisors concerning problems such as inherited defects, lack of maintenance of machines, poor tools or fuzzy operational definitions. 8. Drive out fear. Encourage effective two way communication and other means to drive out fear throughout the organization so that everybody may work effectively and more productively for the company. 9. Break down barriers between departments and staff areas.
People in different areas such as research, design, sales, administration and production must work in teams to tackle problems that may be encountered with products or service. 10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force 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 work force. 11. Eliminate arbitrary numerical targets. Eliminate work standards on the factory floor.
Substitute leadership Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute workmanship. 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, ”inter alia”, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective. 13. Institute a vigorous program of education, and encourage self-improvement for everyone. 14.
Top management commitment and action. Put everyone in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everyone’s work. 2. 3 Seven Deadly Diseases: The following are Dr. Deming’s seven deadly diseases also known “Seven Wastes”. 1. Lack of constancy of purpose in planning product and service that will have a market, keep the company in business, and provide jobs. 2. Emphasis on short-term profits, short-term thinking (just the opposite of constancy of purpose to stay in business), fed by fear of unfriendly takeover, and by push from bankers and owners for dividends. 3.
Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review. 4. Mobility of management, job hopping. 5. Management by use of visible figures only, with little or no consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable. 6. Excessive medical costs. 7. Excessive cost of liability, swollen by lawyers who work on contingency fees. 2. 4 Category of Obstacles: 1. Hope for instant pudding, improvement of quality and productivity is accomplished suddenly by affirmation of faith. 2. Search for examples, which companies undertake to find a ready-made recipe they can follow when they must instead map their own route to quality; 3.
Our problems are different, the pretext managers rise to avoid dealing with quality issues. 4. Our quality control department takes care of all our problems of quality, another excuse managers use to avoid taking responsibility. 3. Traditional management practices Traditional management behavior Management desire to be in control prevents people being creative Middle managers prevent innovations getting top level visibility Poor leadership style Maintaining traditional ways of thinking Intolerance of fanatics wanting to change the world
Excessive rules, constraints and bureaucracy Unwillingness to change a winning formula Resistance to change Excessive demands to produce lengthy written reports No free time allowed for new ideas 4. What is the difference between Deming philosophy & traditional management practices Traditional way of management focused on internal activities. Quality had a meaning which was totally internally defined. Products or services provided by organization were assumed to be good in quality, if this organization has done its best in producing that product or service.
People thought bad quality products are due to the workers who do not perform their job correctly style is the assignment of the responsibility of the quality to the management. Especially responsibility of the quality goes into the middle level management in the operational level. But in total quality management, focus is the customer. So that ultimate decider of the quality is the customer. Fitting to the customer requirement was the least requirement while delighting them is the ultimate goal. 5. Conclusion: It is hoped that this assignment has provided the reader with some insight as to the similarities and differences between Dr.
Deming’s philosophy and traditional management, and will help foster understanding of the underlying principles of each. One final contrast should be highlighted. Dr. Deming was already in his 80s by the time that the United States began to reawaken to his teaching and methods. He continued to share his knowledge at a frenetic pace, completing what was to be his last seminar within a few days of his death in 1993. His purpose was to share his knowledge, and to try and make the world a better place. He was always very generous with colleagues, giving credit liberally to those whose ideas found their way into his books and articles.
Nothing seemed to give him so much pleasure as someone using his methods to improve. . References Web link listed below: 1. http://deming. ces. clemson. edu/pub/den/index. html 2. Deming – Three Careers 3. www. deming. edu 4. http://www. oqpf. com/links. html 5. www. doright. org/deming 6. www. curiouscat. com/management/dembooks. htm Books related: 1. The Deming Management Method – by Mary Walton 2. Out of the Crisis – by William Edwards Deming 3. The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education by W. Edwards Deming 4. Thinking about Quality: Progress, Wisdom, and the Deming Philosophy by Lloyd Dobyns