A Review of Deming’s Essential Points

Source: Walton, Mary, The Deming Management Method, Putnam/Perigee: NY, 1986.

Management goals are gained through processes like chain reactions. First, employee perceptions have to change for the better through morale building. Then, quality will improve. That leads to improved productivity that leads to customer satisfaction that leads to business success that leads to better employee perceptions that leads to....

Deming views management goals as shaped by the forces with which the business has to deal. Goals are reshaped through systematic purposes affecting suppliers, materials, design and research, customer needs, employee needs, and needs of the public in the way of truth in advertising and improving quality while maintain price ceilings. But it hinges on the perception that is produced. Maintaining the appropriate perception is based on the fourteen points briefly given below:

  1. A constancy of purpose for improving quality requires innovation, research and education, continuous attention to products and service, and careful maintenance of facilities and equipment.
  2. The philosophy of improvement must focus on people emphasizing improved quality to reduce cost, the importance of quality over progress and business growth, the "reasons for" doing something rather than "reasons not to",and planning for management growth over retaining the status quo.
  3. The cessation of dependence on end goals to drive changes. This includes concentrating on cost reductions not price, viewing price as only a variable value that can be controlled, finding ways to develop superior products/services, disregard competition and their goals, measure value rather than amount, build a team approach to quality.
  4. Make quality improvement a mainstay through basic statistical controls, planned, patient approachs, and locating and dissolving problems.
  5. Superior products/services come from utilizing mastery training concepts. The elements in this are measuring performance statistically (objectively), measuring only positive (gain) performance, recognize internal performance even when not measured.
  6. View (perceive) performance as having no limits and resulting from a shared (person-person) effort.
  7. Advocate supporting, helping, and person centered leadership that emphasizes reducing employee confusion and internal turmoil, removing barriers,planning for personal success, and promoting solutions over problem stating.
  8. Reduce fear of employee mistakes through encouraging query
  9. Reduce barriers and resistance through encouraging direct manager-employee interaction at all levels.
  10. Eliminate company formed external goals, encourage worker formed internal goals.
  11. Eliminate numerical or line quotas, instill team goals and improvements described by the team.
  12. Provide opportunity for personal, selfish pride of workmanship and productivity, and recognize it formally.
  13. Utilize outside specialists and consultants to develop and implement training in management techniques. Ideas often stagnate within or are manipulated to retain the status quo.
  14. Start with the top management and powers. Until they commit to what lower echelons must learn and do, nothing better will occur. That’s why the previous point is made. External experts can clarify while the rank and file hesitates.

Deming outlines seven deadly diseases that he believed affected mid twentieth century management. These seem to be epidemilogical even today. Management is afflicted with these conditions that need to be faced and cured:

  1. A severe lack of constancy of purpose that creates insecurity and inaction throughout the working populace.
  2. An acute emphasis on short term profits that undermines quality.
  3. A phobic need to shortchange worker performance while neurotically taking credit for any evident progress.
  4. A snobbish need to ignore worker needs that, if met, could produce more job and personal satisfaction.
  5. A numerlogical manifestation of counting coins rather than customer needs which multiplies company problems.
  6. A chronic tendency in problem situations to rely on technology advances rather than people which increases resistance and produces other unnecessary obstacles.
  7. A plague of problem centered activity rather than solution possible orientations

    Deming produced a list of what he called his “attention obstacles”(AO’s). He criticizes management from the standpoint of being more concerned with obstacles to improvement than to the things that would remove or reduce these obstacles. It is almost as if he accuses management of needing to deal with these things to justify their being there. Among these he cites Attention TO:

    Deming demonstrated a red bead experiment requiring an observer to predict which of two colors would be randomly drawn. The results showed what he wanted to call a management analogy. He stated the following: