W. Edwards Deming was one of the world’s great management experts, and his thinking helped shape the Baldrige Criteria. Like his friend and peer, Joseph Juran, Deming believed that nearly every problem an organization faces is a problem of management. And he didn’t have a very high opinion of management.

Art Petty reminds us that Deming remains very relevant on his blog, Management Excellence (click here). He links to a 15-minute video in which Deming describes management’s five deadly diseases (click here for video). Despite Deming’s strange speaking style, the video is interesting because he forcefully makes his case against management problems he had identified during decades of work with all types of organizations.

The five deadly diseases are:

• Lack of constancy of purpose. People haven’t decided what business they are in and as a result, they are unable to plan for the future.

• Emphasis on short-term problems—also known as worshiping the quarterly dividend. Leaders have no plan to stay in business by improving the quality of their products and services. Such short-term thinking produces unemployment, which is a sign of bad management, which means there’s a whole lot of bad management still going on in this country today.

• Annual rating of performance. It’s an arbitrary and unjust system that annihilates long-term planning and teamwork. People work in fear. As Deming said, rewarding performance sounds great but it can’t be done.

• Mobility of management. It takes a long time to understand how a company works. Annual performance ratings encourage management mobility, which leaves too few people who really understand a company’s problems.

• Use of visible figures only. Deming talks about unknown and unknowable figures, like how much business a happy customer does or the multiplying effect of an unhappy customer. We’re teaching the use of visible figures, not transformation.

“When you think of all the underuse, abuse, and misuse of the people of this country, this may be the world’s most underdeveloped nation,” Deming says. “It’s about time for American management to wake up.”

The interview was done in 1984. It could have been done in 2010.

To read more about how to lead, click on these articles:

• Making Change Happen
• The Priorities of Leadership
• Why Organizations Fail
• A Leader’s Job
• What Makes a Good Manager?
• 10 Critical Questions: Senior Leadership

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