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Title: The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education - 2nd Edition
ISBN: 0262541165
Author:
W. Edwards Deming
Publicate Date: 2000-08-11
Publish: 2000-08-11
List Price: $27.00
Average Customer Rating: 5.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $19.30
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $19.42
Amazon Merchant Price: $24.30
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Ideas for Leadership and Top Management
I reread Deming's The New Economics the other day. For those of you unfamiliar with Deming, he is generally credited with helping to rebuild Japanese manufacturing after World War 2 and with the introduction of the quality revolution. Briefly, this book can be described as being about "people who are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management." It is basically an anti-competition, anti-top leadership book.
This book makes a great read and provides a simple introduction to Deming's approach. In his ideas, you can see a great many parallels to issues in the current economic crisis. Deming predicts such a crisis, although one could argue there have been many economic crises and predicting one about every 10 years would make you seem like a fortune teller.
One of Deming's argument, an argument echoed by Michael Moore, can be paraphrased as "everyone works hard and does a good job except top management." If we accept this argument, we have to ask why it is that only top management fails us (and it is a very hard argument to accept, but it does seem clear top management fails at times).
This goes back to our discussion of several weeks ago, and overlaps with the strategy theme. Basically, if we accept the argument that we are all ok except for top management that causes all the problems, there are several possibilities:
= Top management is evil because power corrupts.
= Top management is evil because evil people rise to the top.
= Top management is stupid because power makes us stupid.
= Top management is stupid because stupid people rise to the top.
= Modern organizations have become too large and too complex, making them nearly impossible to manage. We need to develop new methods of managing such organizations, including advanced decision aids.
Obviously, I lean toward the last one. And going back to HR and strategy, this is where HR can make a major contribution - in building comprehensive programs for succession management, including better methods. based on empirical research, of selecting, developing, and supporting leaders.
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2: Dr. Deming Fan
This book is excellently written by the late Dr. W. Edward Deming who was "heckled" out of America post-World War II by the American management leaders for his less-then-conventional managerial practices. After being heckled in America he was invited to Japan where that countries business leaders were re-building their nation. Dr. Deming's 14 Point Program was an instant success and he was soon heralded as the "Father" of modern Japanese Industrial Revolution. Japan honored him annually with the awarding of the Deming Award of Excellence. He was eventually called back to his native America where he continued to lecture until his untimely death in 1993. He was an icon of American management practices.
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3: Different and good
This book was very different from other author's quality books, and especially different from what I expected from other books that claimed to speak for Deming. There was no math (for better or worse), no goals of 6 sigma, or 8 sigma, or numerical goals at all. There was no treatment on how to rank employees, but there was a well-written section warning against this practice, and against pay-per-performance. This latter, I found veery believable. There was a good review of the diseases of companies and universities (mostly management diseases) and a clear view of how to deal with them. At the end there was also a treatment of non-management problems: product variation caused by equipment and the like. I found this last section hard to understand. Still, overall I thought I got my money's worth -- more of my money's worth from this book than from the 4 or 5 management books I'd read before.
After reading this book, I bought another Deming book, Out of the Crisis. It was similar though longer and more mathematical -- a plus for me.
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4: Deming vs. Conventional Management
"This book is for people who are living under the tyranny of the prevailing style of management," writes Deming in the preface. Deming has strong convictions, many of which are counter to conventional management thinking.
Deming does not believe in ratings and grades. He says performance is mostly attributable to the system in which that person works. "The forces of destruction that come from the present style of reward ... squeeze out from an individual, over his lifetime, his innate intrinsic motivation.... They build into him fear, self-defense, extrinsic motivation. We have been destroying our people from toddlers on through university and on the job. We must preserve the power of intrinsic motivation, dignity, cooperation, curiosity, joy in learning, that people are born with."
Nor does Deming think highly of goals. "Only the method is important, not the goal."
"It is wrong to suppose that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it - a costly myth."
"The customer is not in the pyramid. A pyramid, as an organization chart, thus destroys the system, if ever one was intended." Instead Deming uses flow diagrams.
"With shared responsibility, no one is responsible. Joint responsibility is totally different from divided responsibility... Learning under a teacher is a joint effort between teacher and pupil."
Deming makes the distinction between common causes of variation, and special causes. He quotes Brian Joiner who said, "One necessary qualification of anyone in management is to stop asking people to explain ups and downs ... that come from random variation."
Deming is a legendary name in quality management, especially in Japan through his consulting work with Japanese industry from 1950 onward. He died at age 93 before the second edition of this book went to press.
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5: The New Economics
After reading the "New Economics" by W. Edwards Deming I was very surprised. Mr. Deming's made the book very easy to read and understand. In my case it was the examples that really put things in perspective. "The Red Bead Experiment" was an example that was very good at explaining exactly what it was that, we needed to take away from the example, the difference between common cause and special cause variation. Management should be solely responsible for the well being of the production line. Personally, Deming's did a really good job in describing typical work situations that I personally am aware of. I enjoyed the way he broke everything down into its simplest form. You do not have to be an industrial engineer to understand the message he is trying to convey. The message he is trying to convey is "Team Work" because it is only when every person in the group agrees with each other that everyone can come together for one common purpose. He was very specific in the situation that he believed everything and everyone could work together. In his eyes the hierarchy had to be done away with. There was no one person that was better than the next. This one belief that I have always believed in. I appreciate his train of thought and think that if it could be applied to the small stream businesses it would be extremely effective. It sounds like Deming's was a man of the people because he described every person's job just as important as the next. It sounded like he believed in the chain of command. I enjoyed this book thoroughly and would recommend it to those trying to get a more in-depth feel to what common cause variation and special cause variation really means.
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