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.
Are there parallels between medicine and organizations when we look at the tension between heroism and the sometimes boring work of preventing problems and improving things? I comment on an article by Dr. Atul Gawande…
Yesterday, the W. Edwards Deming Institute published the second in my series of three posts for them: "The Failure of "The Livonia Philosophy" at my GM Plant." Read more...
My favorite book, as I've written about before, is not a "Lean book" -- it's Understanding Variation: The Key to Managing Chaos by Donald J. Wheeler, PhD. It might look like a book about statistics...
I'm extremely honored that The W. Edwards Deming Institute published my first blog post in a series of three that I've written for them, to be published over the next month or so.
John W. Parks IV, pictured at left, is a Professor of Percussion at Florida State University. He was one of my favorite people during my time as an undergraduate student at Northwestern University. I played drums in the marching band there…
I first blogged about this article back in 2009 and it’s still online: “Keen to Be Lean“ The sub headline talks about hospitals being “desperate to cut costs.” Has that changed? I wish the motivation was more often about hospitals…
Here’s Part 2 of a post about the original NUMMI Team Member Handbook from 1984 (see Part 1 here). This, and other documents I’ll be blogging about, are part of Don Ephlin’s UAW office papers, archived at the Walter P. Reuther…
Dr. W. Edwards Deming used to warn against replacing intrinsic motivation with extrinsic rewards and incentives. Brian Joiner (author of Fourth Generation Management), who worked with Deming, warned that setting targets and quotas can lead to three things: improving the…
TL;DR: Lean isn’t about “idiot-proofing” work–it’s about respecting people. True Lean focuses on improving systems (through mistake-proofing and better design), not blaming or deceiving workers. When leaders treat people as capable professionals and fix processes instead of people, quality, learning,…
This article caught my eye recently:
We Can Still Do It: Dr. Deming’s Legacy
(via LInkedIn)
Thanks to my friends at the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value for putting together this video with me, filmed at the last Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (hope to see you there next June). The video was a chance to talk…
tl;dr: Wells Fargo didn’t have a “bad apples” problem–it had a bad management system. Unrealistic sales quotas and fear-driven incentives made gaming the numbers easier than doing the right thing. The Wells Fargo scandal is a textbook example of how…