Total Quality Management Thinker
W. Edwards Deming defined quality as follows
“Good quality means a predictable degree of uniformity and dependability with a quality standard suited to the customer. The underlying philosophy of all definitions is the same – consistency of conformance and performance, and keeping the customer in mind.”
W. Edwards Deming’s 13 Topics for Total Quality Management
- Create a constant purpose toward improvement.
- Adopt the new philosophy.
- Stop depending on inspections.
- Use a single supplier for any one item
- Improve constantly and forever.
- Use training on the job.
- Implement leadership.
- Eliminate fear.
- Break down barriers between departments.
- Get rid of unclear slogans.
- Remove barriers to pride of workmanship.
- Implement education and self-improvement.
- Make “transformation” everyone’s job.
Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better.
The greatest waste … is failure to use the abilities of people…to learn about their frustrations and about the contributions that they are eager to make.
Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.
Improve quality, you automatically improve productivity.
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
The ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.
Manage the cause, not the result.
Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process.
...a person and an organization must have goals, take actions to achieve those goals, gather evidence of achievement, study and reflect on the data and from that take actions again. Thus, they are in a continuous feedback spiral toward continuous improvement. This is what 'Kaizan' means.
The most valuable "currency" of any organization is the initiative and creativity of its members. Every leader has the solemn moral responsibility to develop these to the maximum in all his people. This is the leader's highest priority.
A bad system will beat a good person every time.
The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort.
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