All Posts Tagged With: "deming"
Ask What, Not Who
Several years ago I did a Baldrige assessment for a well-known service company. It was quickly apparent that a siege mentality permeated its offices with leadership blaming the production facility for problems and production blaming leadership and everybody blaming the customers, who generally disliked the company. When I presented my evaluation of the company’s management system, I told leaders they had a “culture of blameology.”
The most common question in response to any problem was, “Whose fault is it?” As a result, people kept their heads down. Nobody took initiative. Everybody avoided responsibility. Unhappy and unmotivated employees spent more time looking over their shoulders than focusing on what was in front of them.
So the first task was to change the question. Instead of asking whose fault a problem was, the more effective question is, “What’s the process?” W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran liked to point out that 80 to 90 to 95 percent of an organization’s problems are problems with the system, not with the people working in the system, so if you really have to blame someone, blame the people responsible for the system. Blame leadership. That won’t solve the problems but at least you’ll be holding the right…
6May2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedManagement’s Five Deadly Diseases
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…
What Makes a Good Manager?
“If we put all of their heads together, the great management thinkers at the end of the day give us the same, simple, and true answer,” writes Matthew Stewart in his thought-provoking book, The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009). This is his answer:
“A good manager is someone with a facility for analysis and an even greater talent for synthesis; someone who has an eye both for the details and for the one big thing that really matters; someone who is able to reflect on facts in a disinterested way, who is always dissatisfied with pat answers and the conventional wisdom, and who therefore takes a certain pleasure in knowledge itself; someone with a wide knowledge of the world and an even better knowledge of the way people work; someone who knows how to treat people with respect; someone with honesty, integrity, trustworthiness, and the other things that make up character; someone, in short, who understands oneself and the world around us well enough to know how to make it better. By this definition, of course, a good manager is nothing more or less than a good and well-educated person.”
A former management consultant,…
30Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedHealthcare and Education: Failed Systems
“It is a mistake to assume that if everybody does his job, it will be all right. The whole system may be in trouble.”
W. Edwards Deming’s observation rings true for both healthcare and education. Both have dedicated professionals doing their jobs with intelligence and passion. And yet both are failing. As Geary Rummler and Alan Brache wrote in their book, Improving Performance, “if you put a good performer against a bad system, the system will win almost every time.”
These are bad systems.
For healthcare, damning statistics bolster the calls for reform of a system nearly all of us experience as broken. We know it costs too much—almost twice as much as any other country—because our insurance rates and out-of-pocket costs keep jumping. Too many people are uninsured. Too many patient outcomes suffer by comparison with other countries. The healthcare system cannot deliver what it exists to provide.
The lies being shouted during the so-called healthcare reform debate confirm that our educational system has also failed: It has failed to teach students how to think critically. True, it hasn’t done a very good job of teaching reading, math, or science either, as a 30% dropout rate and this Fact Sheet show, and those are…
8Sep2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedProcess Management: DMAIC for Everyone
If you’ve been looking for a formal approach to process improvement, consider DMAIC. A Six Sigma approach developed by W. Edwards Deming in the 1950s, DMAIC stands for Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, and Control.
The DMAIC Process
DMAIC explores the answers to basic questions about how a process works, why it’s not working as well as it needs to be, and what needs to be done to improve it. In a nutshell, you use the DMAIC process to:
- Define the problem: What problem needs to be solved? What process or processes need to be improved?
- Measure the process to figure out what it’s capable of: What is the capability of the process?
- Analyze the process to identify defects and their root causes: When, where, and why do defect occur?
- Improve the process by eliminating the defects and addressing the root causes: What actions must be taken to eliminate defects and root causes?
- Control future process performance: What controls must be implemented to sustain the improvements?
For more information about DMAIC and how to use it, check out this article, one of many online resources that can help you get started.
31Jul2009 | Steve George | 2 comments | Continued
