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.

Highlights from a Great Book: “The Leader’s Handbook”

"If we stopped wasting people’s time, what would they do with it?"

I've been going through the book by the late Peter Scholtes: The Leader's Handbook: Making Things Happen, Getting Things Done. His work builds upon the legendary W. Edwards Deming and Russell Ackoff, among others.

I often quote Scholtes (something also attributed to Peter Senge and others) as saying:

"People don't resist change, they resist being changed."
I think that's very insightful and that thought has led me to study change management, "motivational interviewing" and other related topics. It turns out that having the right answer and pushing it on others isn't the best strategy for effecting sustainable change. I had to learn those lessons the hard way and I'm still learning.

The Joy and the Pain of Overreacting to Metrics

As next week’s Lean Startup Week approaches, I’m pretty laser focused on preparation for my: Eric Ries, author of The Startup Way and the founder of this event, cited Dr. W. Edwards Deming multiple times in his first book The Lean Startup.…

Has the Lean Movement Failed to Learn from Dr. Deming’s Mistake?

One book about the late, great W. Edwards Deming that's been on my shelf for a while is The Deming Management Method, which was written by Mary Walton, a journalist who spent some time with Dr. Deming in the 1980s. There's a section that really made me think about Lean over the past few decades (and it might seem familiar to those who use Six Sigma or other methods).

How NOT to Improve Patient Flow: Laws, Targets, Blame, and Threats

Let's start by stating the obvious: it sucks to wait 24 hours or more on a stretcher in an emergency department hallway waiting for a real hospital bed. It's sad and frustrating to have a couple of blog readers from Canada send me this story from Quebec:

Quebec wants 24-hour cap for patients waiting on stretchers in ERs
Barrette says there would be consequences for hospital staff, doctors who don't comply

I think there's agreement that waiting 24 hours, 12 hours, or four hours for a bed after an admission is a problem. That's a problem worth working on.

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