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.
The Whig Standard – Ontario, CA I’m always curious when I see an article like this in the news about the late Dr. W. Edwards Deming. The article, from Kingston Ontario, Canada, doesn’t reference any local companies. What prompted the…
GM preps for new hires after buyouts This is a particularly sad story. We often debate the proper role of layoffs and headcount reductions in the Lean community. It’s “conventional wisdom” perhaps in the Lean movement that we should not…
Doctor takes pulse of Lutheran Health | The Journal Gazette: Here’s an article about Dr. Mike Schatzlein, Chief executive officer for Lutheran Health Network and Dupont Hospital, in Indiana. “Schatzlein believes “lean engineering” – like that employed by manufacturers to…
Episode #43 of LeanBlog Podcast is a very special one. My guest is Mike Mickleright, writer, consultant, and performer — most interesting to me is his impersonation of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. As I wrote about before, I’ve seen his…
You might recall that I posted back in January about a “Deming impersonator” who was presenting Thank to that post, I was contacted by Mike Micklewright, the creator and performer of the impersonator (in addition to being President of his…
The W. Edwards Deming Institute This has to be the best title for a seminar ever: How to Create Unethical, Ineffective Organizations That Go Out of Business(Many Organizations Do It, But Do You Know How You Do It?) The Deming…
Employee’s suit: Company used waterboarding to motivate workers – Salt Lake TribuneThis isn’t a “Lean” article, but holy moley, you have to read the linked story and think about how a company culture gets that far off the rails. First…
Time for a low-carb Lean Six Sigma?: Stuff like this irritates me to no end: “Lean Manufacturing has us analyzing process flow and delay times at each activity within a process. And while Lean Manufacturing principles help speed things up,…
Cemetery full, mayor tells locals not to die Maybe this mayor has consumed too much Bordeaux wine. But this story is a wonderfully comical illustration of how ineffective management mandates, targets, quotas, and the fear of punishment can actually be.…
ABC News: Airport Security To Be Easier for Families? I am probably giving the Transportation Security Agency waaaaaay too much credit here, but this story made me think of the “PDCA” cycle of “Plan Do Check Act” (known as the…
If there was any value to the Industry Week commentary that tried to link Deming and Obama, it was that it prompted me to re-read some of Deming’s work, namely the “management of people” chapter from The New Economics. There’s…
The OODA Loop & You I love examples of lean thinking that come from unexpected angles. Mike Gardner at the TPM Log recently brought up one of my favorite figures from the world of folks who embody lean without knowing…
