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.
Freakonomics: Official Site I know this wouldn’t count as “leisure reading” for many folks, but I’m reading (and very much enjoying) the book Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. I’m a nerd, I read books like…
Louisville Slugger: The sweet spot: As the article points out, Kentucky is quite the hotbed of lean manufacturing, with the influence of the Toyota Georgetown plant. Another company claims to have been at it longer, Hillerich and Bradsby, the maker…
Toyota: A Carmaker Wired to Win: Dan Markovitz beat me to the punch, but I also wanted to comment on some things in the article: The article says: “Visit any Toyota plant in Japan, and it’s easy to grin at…
I really dislike motivational posters, particularly those meant to inspire quality. I guess it comes from the early Deming training/indoctrination and having been around too many environments where Quality meant a poster that said “Quality is YOUR Responsibility.” Posters are…
I’ve been doing a lot of re-reading (and some fresh reading) of the concepts of W. Edwards Deming recently. I’ve decided April will be “Deming Month” on the Lean Blog. It’s not that we’ll exclusively write about Deming, but I’ll…
Investor’s Business Daily: He Pointed Firms To Quality For those of you not familiar with W. Edwards Deming, here is a nice overview article from a newspaper. Dr. Deming passed away well over a decade ago, but it’s nice to…
Got a question yesterday from Eric Christiansen, my guest for episode #18 of the LeanBlog Podcast. He asked: Can a company be considered a lean company if it does not use some method of statistical process control? I toured a…
Here is Episode #18 of the LeanBlog Podcast. My guest today is Eric Christiansen, the President of a translation services company, OmniLingua (more can be found here on their philosophy as a company, being a self-described “Deming Company.”) I was…
Deming listed the annual review process as one of the “deadly diseases” of management. From this website: “Evaluation of performance, annual review, merit rating. nourishes short-term performance annihilates long-term planning demolishes teamwork promotes competition builds fear promotes playing politics destroys…
Society of Manufacturing Engineers Catching up on some old links and articles I never did get around to publishing… here’s a good overview of error proofing (not “fool proofing” or “dummy proofing”) from the SME and their magazine. Please check…
I saw this card (click on it for a larger view) included with some medical products that were shipped to a hospital. It’s signed by a production worker (I assume) and says “I am responsible for the quality control of…
There’s a column with that title in the current issue of Business 2.0 magazine, the Nov 2006 issue. I’m re-posting this because the article is now online. The piece is about measuring the productivity of office or white collar professional…