The Curse of W. Edwards Deming
- July 28th, 2010
- Posted in Systems Thinking Concepts
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We all know about the sports famous curses:
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- The Bambino Curse- From the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees by the Boston Red Sox. Subsequently, one of the great sports draughts where the Yankees would win 26 World Series and the Boston Red Sox did not win one for 86 years (ending in 2004).
- The Andretti Curse – Mario Andretti won the Indianapolis 500 in 1969, but despite 25 years of efforts he was unable to win again.
- The Curse of 1940 – Cited as the reason for the New York Rangers inability to win the Stanley Cup until 1994.
Many other curses with strange names and funny stories like the Curse of Biddy Early, the Buffalo Sports Curse, Curse of the Billy Goat, the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx and the list goes on. However, I believe we are under the W. Edwards Deming Curse.
It was Deming that said we have been in economic decline since 1968, which he noted as the high water mark for the US. Just as General Lewis Armistead’s fall at Gettysburg marked the decline of the South during the Civil War.
It hasn’t been a complete disaster with a few rays of sunshine here and there. But government deficits have built.
A tiny country with few resources (Japan) has brought manufacturing to its knees . . . and do we really want to talk about how poor service is in the US? The fall has been incremental so many haven’t felt the decline just as a frog that boils in the kettle doesn’t feel small changes in heat.
What have we missed? We have had fads like lean, six sigma, TQM and an assortment of promising strategies to break the curse. Yet, we wallow in the cesspool of an economic conundrum that has everyone turning to China to fund government deficits and manufacture cheap products. In service, we outsource to cheap labor countries based on our thinking that economies of scale and quarterly dividends will right the ship.
The source of the Curse has been blamed on the lazy, overpaid and uneducated worker. Most of the improvement fads place emphasis on the front-line measuring productivity, copying and cutting costs (and heads). Yet costs continue to rise and creative ways to make short-term profits improve are embraced. Only to compromise the long-term and the day of reckoning has come.
So, if the Curse of W. Edwards Deming doesn’t manifest itself in the front-line where is our opportunity to do what the Red Sox did? Break the Curse.
For many it lies in the things that haven’t changed, Dr. Deming warned that management must reinvent itself. Doing so with an emphasis to create value and jobs and something for the greater good. Rather than the bottom-line thinking that has crushed both value and jobs.
Management has to begin to understand that economies are in the flow, not the scale. The functional separation of work started by Frederick Taylor at the turn of the last century is stagnant. Leading management to reinventing itself by redesigning the work and its own thinking.
Whether this Curse lifts or not, depends largely in part on whether curiosity leads us to experiment with our thinking.
Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion! Click on comments below.
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Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.
Hi Tripp, no better in the UK at the moment. The public sector is in decline and the private sector is struggling but few want to try different methods. I wonder how bad it will have to get before managers realise that the change must come from the them not the economy.
Nice work on the blog keep it coming.
Stuart
Good stuff. First, Deming may have indentified 68 as highwater, but in retrospect that’s not even close by virtually any indicators. Second, if there is a decline in the power of the USA, it is simply following the natural economic decline of an empire whose time is over, as has been the case for England for decades.
If you want to identify root causes of decline beyond the transient, you probably have to look at culture, values, etc, and how a country can become overwhelmed by values that imperil it.
It’s irreversible, I think. India and China have cultures, values and controls to overwhelm the West. Just check out graduation statistics for the various countries in tech.
As for Deming,, just a shame that the ideas have gotten lost, at least when he was right, with the process pushed along by overzealous Deming Church zealots. Sigh.