Tag: Deming

W. Edwards Deming: Leadership, Quality, and Continuous Improvement

W. Edwards Deming’s ideas about leadership, systems, variation, and psychology continue to shape how organizations pursue quality and improvement. This archive brings together blog posts, podcasts, and reflections exploring Deming’s teachings—and how they apply to Lean, healthcare, management, and continuous improvement today. Many of these posts challenge common misinterpretations of Deming’s work, emphasizing that quality cannot be delegated and that improvement starts with leadership.

Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: May 29, 2026

0
Thanks, as always, to Ryan McCormack for this. He always shares so much good reading, listening, and viewing here! Subscribe to get these directly...

What Do You Know? And How Do You Know It?

0
Two questions from a few Toyota mentors -- and the Deming idea behind them. You can usually feel it before you can name it. The improvement...

When Following “Best Practices” Is the Real Mistake: What Lean Practitioners...

0
Eric Ries is best known as the author of The Lean Startup -- the book that gave a generation of founders a shared vocabulary...

Deming’s Long Shadow: Twenty Years of Conversations

0
Mike Stoecklein recalls a story secondhand. It was, he thinks, at one of the last four-day seminars W. Edwards Deming ever gave. Deming was...

A Free Red Bead Game Simulator: Try Dr. Deming’s Experiment Online

0
A hospital VP I worked with once told her board the number of infections had dropped from 4 to 3. She got a small...

Don’t Use AI to Automate a Bad Process — Including Performance...

1
Follow this workflow with me for a second: An employee uses AI to write a summary of their accomplishments. Their manager uses AI to...

The ER Wait Time Metric That Can Hide Deteriorating Patient Experience

2
If your emergency department metric improved this quarter and you felt good about it, the problem might not be your emergency department. It might be...

Stop Reacting to Red Light Metrics: Why ‘Two Reds in a...

1
tl;dr: The "two consecutive reds" rule persists because reacting feels like leadership -- but it generates wasted investigations, false success stories, and eroded trust....

What Deming and Fujio Cho Agreed On: Stop Demotivating People

0
TL;DR: Deming and Toyota's Fujio Cho asked the same uncomfortable question: why do management systems destroy motivation in people who started out wanting to...

Create Your Own Lean System — But Don’t Lose Sight of...

0
TL;DR: In a 1993 speech, Toyota leader Fujio Cho said organizations can create their own Lean systems, but success depends on three principles: leaders...

You Can’t Punish Your Way to Pride: Deming, Toyota, and Learning...

1
Fear Drives Compliance -- Respect Builds Pride, Learning, and Improvement TL;DR: Don Ephlin once wrote, "You can't punish your way to pride." That insight still...

Ryan McCormack’s Operational Excellence Mixtape: January 9, 2026

0
Summary: Today's "mixtape" post brings together timely ideas on continuous improvement, leadership, productivity, and workplace culture. From avoiding "blank slate" metrics and rethinking PDCA/PDSA...
An AI that won't just give you the answer. That's what makes it useful.Free Demo -- Learn More
+ +
lean coach ad hand drawn