Deming

Howie Makem

Dec 16 2012

Deming’s Point 10 of 14 – Eliminate slogans and exhortations

Deming’s full statement is as follows:

Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

Ben Hamper’s Rivethead

This point reminds me of Howie Makem, the quality cat lampooned by Ben Hamper in Rivethead in 1986, about the same time Deming’s Out of the Crisis was published. At the time, Ben Hamper was a riveter at GM’s Truck plant in Flint, MI, who could describe his shop floor experience with the wit of a Tom Wolfe. Rivethead was originally a column in Michael Moore’s Flint Voice, later edited into a book.

According to Hamper, the management of the plant had decided that what it needed to improve quality was a mascot for workers to rally around, and organized a naming contest, of which “Howie Makem” was the winning entry. The mascot then materialized as a man in a cat suit with a large Q embroidered on a red cape walking the floor and exhorting operators to improve quality amid jeers, catcalls and the occasional bolt throw. Howie Makem is one of the few artifacts of which no picture can be found on Google, which is why I had to draw it from Hamper’s description.

Spending time and money on slogans, mascots, banners and monogrammed shirts or mugs is predicated on the assumptions (1) that quality and productivity problems are primarily due to lack of motivation in shop floor operators and (2) that it can be changed by the same kind of marketing campaign that works for selling detergents. Deming’s and Hamper’s point is that it is counterproductive and that these assumptions are false.

The key points that I see about appropriate public relations and communications around Lean are as follows:

Do it first, play it back later

Improvement does need marketing and promotion inside the company, to customers, and to suppliers, but not at the start of the effort, and not in this form.

The beginning of an improvement program like Lean transformation is when it is most likely to fail. At that time, the organization, from management to line workers, has everything to learn about its technical and managerial content, as well as the art of implementing it. It is then that they will make the most mistakes and therefore least need publicity. The first pilot projects only need to be known and understood by those who are directly involved, and should not be announced upfront with a marching band at an all-hands meeting. You are much better off trumpeting results once the projects are successes that can inspire others. And even then, it is not done with slogans but by testimonials of participants, demonstrating the improvements directly on the floor or in video recordings.

With outsiders as well, you do it first and play it back later. You don’t announce what you are going to do, but, once it is done, you make it a field trip destination for local schoolchildren as well as other industrial tourists.

Car companies and public relations on manufacturing

Toyota plants have visitor centers with posters on the products and cartoons explaining the production system to children and have a whole staff of professional tour guides taking groups on a set path through the plant, wearing headsets to hear the explanations. These tours are part of public relations and not given by retirees, as is the case at many other companies.

Porsches-Leipzig-plant
Porsche Leipzig

Porsche in Leipzig charges customers €1,000 extra to spend a day at the plant to pick up their Panameras or Cayennes, during which they get a tour of the shop floor featuring their version of Lean, a lunch at top of the visitor center, and an hour with a driving pro on the test track to learn how best to drive their new car in various conditions.A striking feature of this plant site, is that it is dominated by the round, inverted diamond shape of the visitor center, on the top left of the photogaph, between the test track on the left and the production shops on the right.

g.-volkswagen-transparent-assembly-plant-in-dresden
VW transparent assembly plant in Dresden

This is part of a new marketing trend in Germany, where, rather than hide plants away, you locate the cleanest, most automated and most spectacular processes where your customers, or even the public at large, can see them. In this spirit, Volkswagen has located a plant downtown Dresden, with glass walls for passersby to see the final assembly of cars.

Motorcycle homecoming at Honda in Marysville in 2005
Motorcycle homecoming, Honda Marysville, 2005

Honda pioneered a different form of promotion of its manufacturing system to end users with its homecomings at the Honda motorcycle plant in Marysville, OH, where, once a year, they hosted bikers who see the production lines and meet the operators who built their bikes. The same approach was later emulated by the now defunct Saturn division of GM.

Companies in other industries rarely go this far, particularly when their products do not excite the public’s imagination. Bart Simpson’s class goes on a field trip to a box factory, which does not generate much enthusiasm.

Promotion of Lean efforts by component suppliers

If you make components to sell to OEMs rather than to consumers, the promotion of your Lean programs takes a different form, with customers sending teams of auditors to assess whether you are “Lean enough” to do business with, and they may send you supplier support engineers to help you implement Lean to their satisfaction. This means that you must present your plant in a way that allows the auditors to check all the marks needed to give you the right score, even if it means setting up a Potemkin village with tools that you don’t think are essential to your business.

Working with your customers’ supplier support organization — or supporting your own suppliers — is a different process, requiring a deeper level of involvement, and it is not a matter of public relations for either side, and should not be treated as one. The customer provides free consulting to help the supplier increase productivity and improve quality. In exchange, the supplier reduces prices by a fixed ratio every year, calculated so that the improvements are to economic benefit of both sides. The customer pays less, while the supplier makes more profits. It is a win-win, but not an easy system to set up and operate. It involves top management, engineering on both sides, purchasing on the customer side, and customer service on the supplier side, and it is not run by Public Relations.

By • Asenta selection, Deming • 9 • Tags: , , , , ,

Bureaucracy_box_art

Nov 28 2012

Deming’s Point 9 of 14 – Break down barriers between departments

(Featured image from the  Bureaucracy game, by Douglas Adams)

Deming’s complete statement of Point 9 is as follows:

“Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems in production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.”

Within a large organization, it is common for departments to work at cross purposes. Each department is a functional silo, working towards goals that may be inconsistent with the interests of the whole. Deming gives many examples of disasters that occur as a consequence, and exhorts his readers to break down the barriers to keep them from happening. As with his other points, he makes no recommendation on how to accomplish this.

Let us examine several approaches that have been tried, and the issues that organizations encountered when they did:

Eliminating silos in the organization

This is not a problem for small companies. As long as the entire management team fits within a small conference room, there are few opportunities to erect barriers. In a large company where it is a problem, the most obvious solution is to organize by what is variously called business teams, business processes, value streams, or focused factories.

You dissolve the functional departments and organize multifunction teams that bring all the required talent to bear on the core activities. In a manufacturing company, for example, all the resources needed to make a family of products from start to finish — including engineers, maintenance and quality technicians, schedulers, etc. — report to one “value stream manager,” and there cannot be barriers between silos because there are no silos.

It’s like the Mission Impossible TV series, with the disguise specialist and the explosives expert working together towards a common goal, as opposed to being in separate facilities and exchanging service requests in triplicate. This is a popular picture in the US and the approach is often used in a variety of contexts, such as emergency response, as in Apollo 13, or product development, for Data General’s MV-8000 computer in 1980 in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, or the 1996 Taurus at Ford in Mary Walton’s Car.

The movie Apollo 13 shows a seemingly too-good-to-be-true team that is thrown together to find a way to fit the square connector of the command module air scrubber to the round hole used on the lunar module, using nothing but the odds and ends available to the astronauts on the crippled spacecraft. But the story is true, and we have a picture of the actual device the astronauts built.

This was the philosophy of Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Each business was to be broken down into processes turning some input into an externally visible output. Manufacturing, in BPR, did not qualify as a process. Instead, it was subsumed into the order-fulfillment process.

Making functional departments work

But it is not a panacea. The development of the 1996 Taurus took 30 months, and it was a major improvement over previous products at Ford, but still not down to the 24 months used at Toyota for the Rav4, and Toyota uses a traditional structure with functional departments communicating through memos.

In addition, according to Mary Walton, Ford’s integrated, collocated team made design decisions that made manufacturing more difficult. She explains in particular that the sculptured shape of the side panels made them more difficult to stamp, and this happened even though manufacturing was represented in the team. As a work of art, the 1996 Taurus was stunning. As a commercial product, however, it was lackluster, losing the previous versions’ bestseller status in the US market to the more “boring” Honda Accord and Toyota Camry in 1997.

The reality is that organization structure does not determine outcomes. The caliber of the individuals, their motivations for the roles they are playing, and their interaction protocols are at least as important. In their July, 1998 Harvard Business Review article , D.K.Sobek, J. Liker, and A.C. Ward listed the following practices as key to Toyota’s performance in product development:

  1. Written communication with single-sheet A3 reports in standard formats.
  2. Engineering supervision by practicing, hands-on engineers.
  3. A chief engineer (shusa, or 主査) for each project who is an experienced designer with a proven ability to integrate different technologies into a product. The shusa has a team of 5 to 15 members coordinating the work of hundreds who remain in functional departments.
  4. Engineers who develop their skills through on-the-job training, mentoring, and rotation within their functional department, with senior managers rotating between departments.
  5. High-level project plans with a small number of milestones, giving each department flexibility on detailed tasks.
  6. Checklists of design standards embodying the lessons learned in previous projects.

Obstacles to organization by process or value stream

The Toyota example is about product development. But what about other activities like operations? When you attempt to organize everything by business process, or by value stream, in most cases you encounter some functional departments that you technically cannot or should not break up.

Most machine shops have a central heat treatment facility. Induction hardening can, for some work, distribute heat treatment among different production lines and break down the “heat treat silo,” but a given shop may make products to which it is not applicable, its customers may not approve the process, or it may not have the skills or resources to implement it. Electroplating and painting commonly are similar challenges. As a result, the plant ends up with a few common services organized as functional departments along with lines that take a family of products through a sequence of operations.

Among support functions, the picture is also mixed. Production scheduling at the detailed level, for example, works better when the schedulers work directly for the manager of a production line than in a central department, because local scheduling is a simpler problem and the relevant specifics of machine behaviors are more accessible. On the other hand, breaking down a maintenance department and making the technicians report to production managers may not enhance their responsiveness when, for example, the group assigned to a line is short of the critical mass needed to have at least one technician standing by for the next emergency.

Other departments remain organized centrally because of the information they have access to, like Human Resources, Accounting, or Technical Data Management; others, because of external entities they deal with, like Shipping and Receiving.

Skills maintenance, continuing education and career planning

When breaking down a functional department and reassigning its members to teams organized around processes, we also need to consider how it affects the people to whom we do it. Professionals like medical doctors or lawyers work for clients who have little or no knowledge of their specialties, but it is then up to them to decide how much of their revenue to spend or maintaining their skills. They choose which magazines tp subscribe to and which conferences to attend, without asking anybody’s permission.

An engineer reporting to a production manager also works for one “client” who does not have the same expertise, but as an employee. If this engineer wants to attend a conference, the first step is to get approval for the time and money it will consume, from a manager with no knowledge of whether it is a good idea.

In the long term, what career does this engineer have to look forward to? The manager needs the engineer’s skills here and now but is ill equipped to provide guidance, compared to an engineering manager whose background and experience are in the same field.

For this reason, some companies have adopted matrix organizations, in which specialists report “solid-line” to a process owner who needs their skills in operations or on projects, and “dotted-line” to a functional manager for skills maintenance and career development. In a diagram, as follows, this structure looks simple and attractive:In reality, of course, it is a more complex form of organization than a simple hierarchy, and conducive to all sorts of tensions regarding authority and responsibility.

Project transitions

Project work — like product development, new product introduction, or new plant setup — differs from operations in that it ends when a goal is reached, which may be a working prototype, a target takt time in production for the new product, or for the new plant. At that point, the teams are disbanded and their members move on.

This is a particularly sensitive transition to manage when you collocate a multifunction project team in one big room, because its members bond both with the project and with each other, and receive the ending like a psychological blow on the scale of the loss of a family member. This is another reason why they need to retain a connection with their functional peers.

Conclusions

Breaking down barriers between departments for the greater good of the organization as a whole is a worthy goal, that high-level managers have been pursuing since, at least, the Roman empire. There is no simple recipe. The approaches followed by successful organizations have been subtle, nuanced, and fitted to their purposes.

By • Asenta selection, Deming • 2 • Tags: , , , , , ,

Fear - vintage-empire-state-building-construction-photos-by-lewis-wickes-hine-1931-26

Oct 27 2012

Deming’s Point 8 of 14 – Drive out fear

(Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, New York Public Library)

Deming’s complete statement of Point 8 is as follows:

“Drive out fear.”

This is a prescription that Doug Hiatt, a quality assurance manager at Boeing, found bewildering. First, he couldn’t see how fear could be “driven out,” and, second, where dangers are real, he didn’t feel that fear was something to be avoided. Deming is not arguing, however, that external threats, like competitors, should be hidden from employees to make them feel secure. In the 1980s, I worked for a software company whose managers were invariably friendly and courteous to subordinates, and where management communication was mostly “happy talk” that made especially the younger employees feel comfortable. Then, overnight, one third of them were laid off. Their sense of security was false.

Deming is advocating giving employees a genuine sense of security, which is both difficult to create and easy to shatter. Nothing can create such as sense quickly, but we can think of all sorts of human resource policies that can have this effect if carried out consistently over many years. Deming does not give us any pointer, but, in the US in 2012, few companies even try, particularly in environments like Silicon Valley.

Deming feels that fear always leads to “impaired performance and padded figures.” While the fictional Darth Vader can scare a crew into building a fully operational death star faster, the record in the real world is mixed. There, the ultimate manager by fear was probably Joseph Stalin, as shown in his January, 1940 telegram to a plant manager telling him that, unless results were produced within a tight deadline, his management team would be shot. The performance of Soviet industry supports both of Deming’s assertions.

MachiavelliBut even in the US, managers like Jack Welch, who introduced Rank-and-Yank  at GE, clearly feel that there is nothing wrong with making employees fear losing their jobs. Others like to quote Machiavelli’s “It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.” But Machiavelli’s world in 15th century Italy was more like the Game of Thrones than a contemporary manufacturing company. His prince is concerned exclusively with stabilizing his power, fending off rivals, and conquering more territory. Machiavelli’s advice is of limited value in areas like product development, marketing, manufacturing, or customer relationship management.

Intel’s Andy Grove was so famous for saying “Only the paranoid survive” that he wrote a book by this title, but the book is about business strategy, not about the way you treat employees. I had an extended project with Intel when Grove was its CEO; the Intel employees I worked with spoke of him with awe and respect, but never with fear. They trusted his steady hand steering the company and were not worried about being treated unfairly. Outside Intel, the company was perceived as secretive and aggressive, bordering on ruthless.

Does fear always impair performance? Stage fright can paralyze public speakers, stage actors or singers, but its complete absence is a sign of indifference to the audience that it doesn’t miss. The best performers are those who feel stage fright but are galvanized by it. Conversely, does the absence of fear always enhance performance? Academic tenure is the ultimate in job security. But do professors perform better once they are tenured than when they are on a tenure track pursuing it? Non-academics may be too quick to assume that they don’t. There is no valid general answer to that question. Some do and some don’t.

Deming sees a “widespread resistance to knowledge.” From the details he gives, what he means for individual contributors is that they are afraid new methods or new technology will make their hard-earned skills obsolete and threaten their positions; for managers, it is the worry that the investment in acquiring knowledge will never be recouped. These are two separate concerns.

The first fear is readily observed in organizations that hire people based on the immediate need for skills, as opposed to recruiting them for a career. If you know you are employed because you are the only one to know how to run a milling machine of a particular model, or navigate the user interface of a legacy information system, then you are naturally less than enthusiastic about the introduction of a way of working that requires you to train others to do your current job, or of new machines or systems that do not need your current skills. If company behavior over decades has built a foundation for this fear, you will not drive it out easily. It will require the establishment of new human resource policies, their communication to the work force, and their sustained practice over a long-enough period to build credibility with the work force

In operations, the managers’ primary responsibility is the output to customers, and employees do learn in the process of producing it, particularly if they rotate between stations. But even this form of knowledge acquisition is not free. It takes management attention to organize and monitor, each job an operator rotates into requires a learning period during which performance degrades, and there is always the risk that your most knowledgeable employees will leave. Other forms of knowledge acquisition include participation in improvement projects and experiments, technology watch, and formal training, in house and at public venues. All are investments in money and time, with  uncertain outcomes. Let us look at each in more detail:

  1. Improvement projects. They should always have the dual purpose of improving performance in their target area and learning by the work force. Participation in successful improvement projects develops both technical and managerial skills, in a way that pays for itself through the performance enhancements.
  2. Experiments. While experimentation is a normal part of product development, most managers do not make room for it in operations. A Lean Manufacturing plant, on the other hand,  sets aside space for it and encourage engineers or technicians to experiment with concepts, tools, machines, or systems that are  not  immediately applied in production. This is how they learn to be savvy buyers of technology, customize off-the-shelf equipment, or build from scratch machines that are not commercially available. You cannot write a discounted cash flow analysis to justify such an engineering sandbox, but you can see its impact in the proliferation of clever devices that enhance production performance on the shop floor.
  3. Technology watch. This is keeping up with new developments in one’s current specialty, by reading the trade press, attending conferences, visiting trade shows, and going on plant tours. These are activities that a manager may find difficult to justify, on the grounds that they are not anything a customer would be willing to pay for. Yet, not doing them is a sure path to technical obsolescence.
  4. Training. We discussed training issues in the review of Deming’s Point 6.

How do you “drive out” the fear of making the wrong decisions in this area?  This is particularly challenging when you break down functional silos and distribute technical specialists among the processes they serve, whose management owners rarely appreciate the need for them to stay current. If you are an extrusion engineer working for the production manager in a shop that makes extruded rubber parts for cars, you may be dedicated to making the lines perform well, but you will be isolated from professional peers. That is why some organizations either retain the functional silo structure while trying to make it work better using tools like A3 reports for better communication, or they adopt a matrix organization, in which the specialists maintain a “dotted line” reporting relationship to a technical manager whose job is to manage the maintenance and development of their skills.  A common strategy for IT in manufacturing companies is to outsource the technical work to a system integrator who is responsible for the technical skills of the contractors he sends.

Deming also describes as a loss from fear the inability to serve the best interest of the company because of rules or production quotas. It conjures up the image of Captain Queeg telling his officers how every rule in the book is there for a reason and has to be followed to the letter. Deming gives the example of a supervisor afraid to stop a machine for needed repairs because he might not fulfill his production quota. Of course, the machine breaks down and he can’t fulfill his quota anyway. But it is a dilemma. On the one hand, you want employees to use their judgement and break rules that are counterproductive. But, on the other hand, you don’t want them to think that shop operating standards and production plans are only guidelines. Finding the right balance is not easy between blind obedience to imperfect rules and absolute control by each individual of what to do and how much to produce. Here are a few pointers on how to do it:

  1. The rules have to be few in number and clearly stated. The following signs show the rules governing the use of a public park in Paris and a swimming pool in Palo Alto, CA. Every visitor to the Luxembourg gardens is expected to know nine articles of small print; the Palo Alto swimmers, seven bullet points.

  2. The purpose of the rules must be communicated, whether it  is regulatory compliance, safety, quality, etc. If no one can explain the purpose a rule serves, then it is a candidate for elimination.
  3. A process must exist to modify or cancel rules that are obsolete, ineffective, or counterproductive. The Accidental Office Lady is a memoir of Laura Kriska’s years at Honda in Japan. As a young American college grad, one rule she found particularly objectionable was the discriminatory requirement for women to wear a uniform at work. She recounts how she used Honda’s NH Circle system to organize a group of co-workers and make a case for the elimination of uniforms as an improvement in office work, and got it approved by Honda management.

How do you recognize the presence of fear in an organization? Deming lists 14 different types of statements that he has heard from employees and considers to be expressions of fear. Following is a summary of his list:

  1. The company may go out of business.
  2. Supportive superior may leave.
  3. Putting forth an idea may be perceived as treason.
  4. May not have a raise at next review.
  5. Long-term benefit may require short-term performance drop on daily report.
  6. May not be able to answer boss’s question.
  7. Credit for contribution may go to someone else.
  8. Admitting a mistake may have adverse consequences.
  9. Boss believes in fear; management is punitive.
  10. System will not allow expansion of abilities.
  11. Company procedures are not understood; employees don’t dare ask questions.
  12. Management is mistrusted, and perceived to have a hidden agenda.
  13. Inability to fulfill production quota (Operator or Plant Manager).
  14. No time to take a careful look at the work (Engineer)

By • Deming • 7 • Tags: , , , ,

Oct 11 2012

To journalists: if you write about Lean, check your facts!

An otherwise informative newspaper story about a company’s Lean approach in a local newspaper contains the following paragraph:

“The heart of lean is kaizen, a Japanese term. ‘Kai’ means to take apart, and ‘zen’ a striving toward perfection. Kaizen is a process in which a team of employees is brought together to focus on a problem that needs solving or a process that needs improving. Improvement is continual, and that’s the striving for perfection. Edward Deming, a statistician from the U.S., brought the idea to Japan after WW II when he struggled to get American manufacturers to listen to his ideas. Lean and kaizen principles were widely adopted by Japanese manufacturers and helped Japan rebuild after the war.”

This is a remarkable paragraph. Other than saying that Kaizen is Japanese, every statement in it is inaccurate. Let us review them one by one:

  1. “The heart of lean is kaizen,..” Well, not really. It’s only part of it. You can’t implement Lean with just Kaizen, and you can practice Kaizen without being Lean.
  2. “‘Kai’ means to take apart,…” Not in my copy of Nelson’s Japanese dictionary! ‘Kai’ means change, renew, mend, not “take apart.”
  3. “…and ‘zen’ a striving toward perfection.” In the same dictionary, Zen means good, goodness, right, virtue, not “striving” for anything, let alone “perfection.”
  4. “Kaizen is a process in which a team of employees is brought together to focus on a problem…” What about Kaizens done by individuals through a suggestion system?
  5. “Edward Deming, a statistician from the U.S., brought the idea to Japan after WW II…” It’s W. Edwards Deming, and what he brought to Japan was not Kaizen but statistical quality control.
  6. “Lean and kaizen principles were widely adopted by Japanese manufacturers and helped Japan rebuild after the war.” Assumes Lean and Kaizen existed before Japan’s post-war reconstruction.

The rest of the article is actually interesting, informative, and credible about the specifics of the case. It didn’t need a paragraph of background. If, as a journalist, you write about a case of Lean implementation, don’t write such a paragraph without checking  the facts.

By • Press clippings • 2 • Tags: , ,

Ataturk teaching the latin alphabet in 1928

Oct 4 2012

Deming’s Point 6 of 14 – Institute Training on the Job

Note: The teacher in this picture is Mustapha Kemal Atatürk, founder and president of the Turkish Republic, in 1928. Until then, Turkish had been written in the Arabic script. Atatürk crisscrossed the country to personally introduce the Latin alphabet to notables in every town. At the end of his presentation, they had to choose a last name and write it on the blackboard in the new script. It may not have been on-the-job training, but it certainly is an illustration of training and of committed leadership. And it worked: 84 years later, Turkish is still written in the Latin alphabet.

Deming’s full, terse statement of his 6th Point is as follows:

“Institute training on the job”

“Institute” is stronger language that just “implement.” It is not just about making something happen, but  turning it into an institution. In the language of the 1980s, “on-the-job training” was synonymous with “sink or swim”:  as a rookie engineer, you were given projects, and it was up to you to figure out how to carry them out. Given that you had had your fill of classes in college, you didn’t mind. Production line operators received some mandatory orientations on things like safety gears, but relied on colleagues to figure out how to do their work. So, what was Deming talking about?

Deming’s elaboration on Point 6 actually drops the “on-the-job” and is entitled just “Institute training.” In it, explains that it is about “the foundations of training for the management and for new employees,” as opposed to continuing education. Regarding management, he points out that Japanese managers “start their careers with a long internship (4 to 12 years) on the factory floor and in other duties in the company,” implying both that it is systematic in Japan, and not done anywhere else. I once worked with a Purchasing manager in a major Japanese company who had five spent years in Design Engineering (See  Point 4), and this was part of a number of rotations preparing him for senior management positions. However, it was not systematic, in that not all professional employees went through this process.

This practice is also predicated on long-term, committed employer-employee relationships. It trains managers who know in depth how the company works and have personal ties to many of its departments, but are not necessarily at the top level of expertise in any of their specialties, and it does more to enhance their value to the company than their marketability outside of it. Similar practices are also found outside of Japan, in companies like Boeing, GM, or Unilever, for young employees identified as having “executive potential” (See Alternatives to Rank-and-Yank in Evaluating People). In Italy, I had the opportunity to work with a production supervisor in a frozen foods plant who was a young German engineer in such a program. The parameters and the management of these programs matter. They may degenerate, for example, if the time spent in each position is too short and if participants are rewarded for not making waves.

Here again, Deming is at odds with Drucker. The rotation of managers to be seasoned in the specifics of the company’s business before being promoted is contrary to Drucker’s concept of a professional manager who can run any business, and more in line with the practices of the military. When, at the end of The Practice of Management, Drucker discusses the preparation of tomorrow’s managers, which he sees as a combination of a “liberal education for use,” centered on classics and on a “basic understanding of science and scientific method,” supplemented by continuing education in advanced techniques of management. In his view, managers need to respect technical workmanship in the activity of the company, but they don’t need to possess this workmanship themselves, and their generic management skills are transferable across industries. At Apple, Steve Jobs would probably have agreed with Deming; John Sculley, with Drucker.

Deming says little on how shop floor operators should actually be trained, and  makes no reference to Training-Within-Industry (TWI), a program we would have expected him to be familiar with as a development that was contemporary to his own work in World War II, but a  Google search for “Deming +TWI” does not match any document. He bemoans companies’ failure to use people’s abilities but does not explain how training, on the job or otherwise, can remedy this.

Deming also says that training should be focused on the customer’s needs, which, influenced by TQM, we may interpret as meaning the next process.   When Deming writes “customer,” however, he does not mean it metaphorically but literally. He is actually thinking of the real customer, the one who pays and has the option to buy elsewhere. In other words, training must relate the work done at any workstation to the experience of the end user of the finished product. The farther upstream from final assembly, the more remote the connection and the more challenging it is to communicate, but the more understanding an operator has of the effect of the work, the stronger the motivation to do it well.

Even in the best companies today, much of the initial training of operators is done off-line rather than on the job. The basic employee orientation on company procedures or personal protection equipment is, of course, done offline, but so is a major part of the work itself. Machinists learn the basics of CNC turning with tabletop lathes that carve wax cylinders before moving on to actual machines, and assembly teams learn the basics of the Kanban system through simulation games.

By • Deming • 6 • Tags: , , , ,

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