Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 6, 1994 TAG: 9401110243
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A13 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY WALTON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Thus did W. Edwards Deming, the renowned international quality expert and adviser to Japan, preface his most recent book, ``The New Economics,'' published last year. Deming died on Dec. 20 at the age of 93.
Although he lectured and wrote for managers, Deming cared deeply about workers, who were in his view demeaned and demoralized by shortsighted, ill-conceived policies that ignored their on-the-job expertise and pitted them against each other when raises were handed out.
His staunch conviction that people truly wanted to do their best work - but were thwarted by poor management - constitutes the most radical, and overlooked, facet of his philosophy. Companies were much more content with Deming's tried and true statistical techniques. To believe in their people and demonstrate that faith, employers would have to make them stakeholders in the workplace and abandon authoritarian decisions.
He thought the job of a company was to stay in business and provide jobs. To that end, he offered a definition of quality that was at once simple and profound. ``A product or a service possesses quality if it helps somebody and enjoys a good and sustainable market.''
A statistician by profession, Deming saw companies as a network of delicate systems in need of continual improvement. Workers labored in these systems, subject to forces beyond their control. Only managers could change the systems. And they should do so only based on careful analysis of data. He was scornful of those who did anything less.
His books and lectures were larded with stories from beleaguered employees. A production worker was saddled for seven years with a malfunctioning conveyor that forced him to handle blistering-hot material by hand - greatly slowing production, as one might imagine. Management ignored his pleas for help.
An airline reservation clerk was given a quota of 25 calls per hour rather than a mandate to serve travelers. Her job, Deming said, was to answer the 25 calls.
Workers were expected to perform their jobs without training or to follow opaque, written instructions. Offices and factories were riddled with fear. Arbitrary goals were given without a method to achieve them. Departments were put in competition with each other. Ridiculous slogans were offered exhorting employees to produce zero defects.
Deming found it necessary repeatedly to remind audiences that in any group of people, no matter how bright, how skilled or how hard-working, precisely half were below average. This is a sobering thought applied to, say, airline pilots. Safety depends on making sure the worst performer is competent.
Instead, Americans tend to punish those below the midpoint and challenge others to rise even higher, a statistical impossibility. Employees who rate poorly in performance reviews become bitter and alienated. Deming was flatly against the use of merit ratings in any form. Just stop, was his advice.
In recent years, he was appalled by competition in education. Schoolchildren, he said, are permanently scarred by being told they are below average. He did not give grades to his graduate students at New York University.
During this time of widespread layoffs even at profitable companies, including ones like Xerox and Procter & Gamble, who had sent many people to his four-day seminars, Deming saw little reason for optimism. Had they, as it seemed, learned nothing?
``Sacking people'' in the name of reducing waste, he wrote, may achieve the anticipated savings in the short term but cause widespread demoralization among those who remained. ``In addition, the people that are laid off take with them their knowledge and expertise.''
Deming's humanism extended to his private life. In his travels, he took care to learn the names of waiters and hotel clerks and greet them by name on subsequent trips. He wrote thank-you notes.
His belief that no company could prevail without enlisting workers was what drew me to his philosophy in the mid-1980s. I came to know his kind and generous side. But he could be impatient at my failure to instantly grasp a philosophical tenet. And he fancied himself a writer, never hesitating to edit my manuscripts for style as well as accuracy.
When I used the word ``implement'' he crossed it out and scrawled in the margin, ``farm tool.'' He had a curious aversion to contractions. It was never ``that's'' but ``that is.'' ``I never use contractions,'' he thundered.
Deming was not a humble man. He did not discourage the use of the honorific ``Dr.'' in front of his name, though he was a Ph.D., not a medical doctor.
He could almost always make room in a crammed schedule to receive yet another honorary degree.
The expert on management had only one employee, his secretary of 38 years, Cecelia Kilian, who used to say they got along so well because he was never there. He concluded a four-day seminar in California just 10 days before his death. When in Washington, he worked out of the basement of his home. He leaves behind no organization, no institute, no anointed successor.
Few among the hundreds of U.S. companies and organizations who turned to the Deming philosophy in the 1980s under heightened competition from Japan and elsewhere had the tenacity to follow through. To the degree some did so - Ford Motor Co. is doubtless his most notable client - they have become kinder, gentler and more successful companies, with a brighter future.
\ Mary Walton, author of ``The Deming Management Method'' and ``Deming Management at Work,'' wrote this article for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
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