Dr. Deming, The American Who Taught the Japanese About Quality.

Rafael Aguayo

ISBN 0-8184-0519-8.

Read: 1992 September – 1993 February.

Reviewed: 1993 April 3.

This book is a good introduction to Deming (Total Quality Management, TQM) principles and techniques by one of his closer disciples. The style is not “by example” but topical.

The basic thrust is that there are several bad paradigms in use in American business today and, although they have their own problems, the Japanese, who listened to Deming from the 1950s, have beat us at our own game by understanding better how things really work.

I won’t reproduce the 14 key principles or the seven deadly sins here (I already have them in my “revolution” notebook elsewhere). They are discussed, each by each and throughout in mixes.

Starting with the definition of quality, more like “good work” rather than “superior classification,” all of the standard stuff is covered. Where does quality come from? It comes from the initial construction, not from inspections. How should you get supplies and how should you treat your own customers? Long term, you don’t necessarily want to be buying from the lowest bidder this week. The system is most of the problem and the system, if it is under anybody’s control, is under the control of management.

The idea of “tampering” is fully explained, doing subterfuge to make the system that doesn’t work look like it is working. Employees should be treated like they are the workers and like they know something rather than like machines who do as they are told and are punished if their performance isn’t greater than the built-in system margins. (Reminds me of WW II management.)

Hardly a page goes by that the annual performance review isn’t ridiculed, to which I could only say, “Amen!” This led me to my own boss’s office for an afternoon chat about how TQM is going to affect this facet of our life at JPL (answer: there will be no effect). (Oh, and at JPL it’s the “Total Quality Advantage” TQA, so, we can’t even spell TQM.)

An appendix is devoted to the effect that TQM could have even on public policy if properly embraced.

I bought and read this book because JPL, among many other companies, is trying to convert itself to TQM (TQA). Unfortunately, my cynicism about the fairness of life has only increased from the experience. After reading the book and being inspired and educated about some common-sensicle things that ought to be happening, I then went through our three-day training class (facilitated by Chris Carl, Deputy Administrator in 31) and this, coupled with lots of briefings and debriefings with other employees, and my own work experience in many venues, leads me to believe that TQM, if it does anything but waste three days of everyone’s time, is going to cause us damage because it was sold to our management as what they need for the employees to do to make things better, not what management needs to do to radically change the system (and themselves).

This book is an excellent introduction to the Deming concepts. I’m loaning it to Charley Dunn Monday, but will the bureaucracy change? We’ll see, but I don’t have much hope.

Postscript 2007 July 14: JPL is not a manufacturing business or a place that does anything so routinely that meaningful statistics are even possible. Anything (except the cafeterias) that are routine operations are contracted out. If you are manufacturing a thousand cars per day statistical quality control can be meaningfully employed. If you manufacturer one space probe per decade, or even two per year, there are things to be learned in the process and applied to future work, but not statistically speaking.

Of course, there was no fundamental change at JPL as a result of spending 15,000 work-days learning about the Total Quality Advantage. In a couple of years it was on to the next fad, “Re-engineering.” At that point, I realized that corporate management consultants were an industry unto themselves and they had to generate a new paradigm to train the world in every three or four years. Since then we’ve had ISO-9000 compliance, and most recently CMMI, among other such fads. I paid no attention to re-engineering, suffered the intrusions of ISO-9000, and have come to the point where I tell my management, “If I can demonstrate to myself that any of this helps my processes, I’m happy, but I’m not buying anything wholesale.”

Something Deming liked to do in his lectures as a demonstration about not misinterpreting statistical information was to set up a task that has a big random component to it like throwing balls at targets on a grid or, come to think of it, hitting home runs. He would have volunteers come up from the audience and train them to do this task. If a volunteer did a little better than average, he would praise and “promote” then. If a volunteer did a little worse than average, he would berate and demote them. Of course, these rewards were random, luck of the day, and the audience could see it.

The basic take away lesson from TQM was that if you have a bunch of people doing the same sorts of jobs (like bank tellers) and some of them do statistically better, you need to go find out what they are doing and make that part of everybody’s procedure. Conversely, the standard American response would be to promote them to a management job for which they might or might not be well suited and take them out of the environment in which they were doing so well. If someone is underperforming, you need to go in and figure out what most of the people are doing that this one isn’t and make corrections, not demote, berate, or fire them. If the job isn’t within their skill-set, they should be moved, of course, or never put in it to begin with, another management responsibility.

So, with statistical analysis of job performance, and the meaning of “one sigma” and “six sigma” understood, it is meaningless to do things like put up posters that say, “Our goal is zero defects!” or “zero errors!” Bank tellers, in one instance, when faced with a corporate goal of “Zero Errors!” set up an underground economy where there was a pool of money that tellers could borrow from or contribute to when their drawers didn’t balance. When management found out about this after six months, they abolished the stupid goal and the resulting system.

These take away lessons and images have stayed with me for fourteen years and have been helpful to me so I can still append them today.

When one of the organizations at JPL (I think it was payroll or some other business system) announced that their TQM goal was zero errors, I instantly realized that either no one in the organization had read the book or knew what they were talking about, or that someone had set up their manager to be a stool pigeon. That was the turning point for me with management fads. There’s something good in anybody’s ideas, but let’s not spend our careers figuring out how to do the work, let’s actually do it and let’s not spend our time making silly, unsubstantiated pronouncements.