THOUGHTS ON W. EDWARDS DEMING AND OUR DIMINISHING "AFFECT"

THOUGHTS ON W. EDWARDS DEMING AND OUR DIMINISHING “AFFECT”

James R. Fisher, Jr.,

© July 13, 2008


“The only way an organization’s leaders can get there from here is to lead from a place in time that assumes you are already there, and that is determined even though it hasn’t happened yet.”

Stanley M. Davis, “Future Perfect,” 1987, p. 25.


WRITER’S COMMENT:

I had a conversation on Deming's need to go to Japan because business leaders here snubbed him in the US. I’m a fan of Deming if not an expert. I have an acquaintance with Jamie Power (JD Power & Assoc), a company started just as Deming did, by gaining work with Japan (Toyota) because American companies were too indifferent to the power of customer surveying. I like to think our business leaders have learned from this complacency, but I think that would be over-stating the case. Instead, my opinion is that start-ups have the far-seeing talent and leadership to "get" innovative management techniques, and that's why companies like Google are always popping on the scene to eat the lunch of the blue chips. It's the way of commerce: innovation brings success which brings size; that almost inevitably leads to bureaucracy and mediocrity, unless your culture is wise like 3M with innovation built right into its process. That’s how I see it. How do you see it?

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Your spirited optimism generates reflection, at first blush, pessimism on my part. You dwell on the concrete, or the behavior, while I fly off into the abstract, or the motivation. Deming never made purchase on American soil because the motivation wasn’t there.

We are not a reflective society, first, because we have never found the time; and secondly, because we never recognized the need; but most important of all, because "culture" is the cause, and culture suggests operas, literature, symphonies, abstract art, and the like, and we like things down and dirty where you don't have to rise above genital understanding.

We are however a reactive society which is motivated by fear and retribution. In my long life, I cannot point to a single major challenge in which we anticipated and dealt with rather than reacted to danger. Deming was preaching quality when quality wasn't even in our vocabulary.

My profession of OD recognized the importance of quality when it was a haphazard discipline more than a generation ago, but it was a discipline born without teeth and with bleeding gums. Not helpful.

There were pioneers, and I worked for one, a man far ahead of his time in OD.

In 1980, I directed the largest quality control circle (QCC) program in the country due to the wisdom and foresight of my mentor, the late Dr. Francis Xavier Pesuth. We had 1,000 hourly workers in quality circles as early as the late 1970s at Honeywell Avionics, Clearwater, Florida. This was before most of the country ever heard of Deming.

We used Deming's statistical quality control. In fact, Honeywell had me attend a school of Six Sigma Quality Control (i.e., quality to the sixth decimal place) to familiarize me with the technology.

Six Sigma was statistics beautifully wrought, delivered, and applied. No symphonic music was more apropos or appreciated by the engineers taking the course. I was frankly awed by the whole process.

Later, again not my daily task, I attended a seminar in New York City of Dr. J. M. Juran's statistical process control. Juran identified chronic problems and attacked them at the source in the planning and process stage (see "Juran on Planning for Quality," 1988), not the product stage.

Attacking problems at the chronic state or where they happened most frequently made perfect sense, but operationally we were making scrap first followed by endless rework. Costly? Yes. Time consuming? Yes. Juran had been on his soapbox for forty years before he got much attention, mirroring the experience of Juran.

If Honeywell seems the exception, it wasn't, and it isn't. A cruel way of putting it was that it gave managers an opportunity to display their crisis management and circular logic skills.

Juran's instruction was the pure beauty of another great mind like Deming's in profiling the statistical discipline. No one in my experience used an overhead projector more effectively, writing out his equations, schematics and graphs with a fluidity that was mesmerizing as well as informing.

THESE WERE MECHANICAL PROCESSES FOR MECHANICAL PURPOSES, and they worked as far as such processes go.

Honeywell had 2,000 support professionals who were not necessarily comfortable with the statistical approach to problem solving. Moreover, they tuned out to the quality circle format, as did the 1,000 engineers.

Engineers and other professionals did not like contrived meetings to make cosmetic changes. Blue-collar workers liked the attention, the cigarette breaks, and the condiments often provided. It was play, so why not go along?

The only problem is that 80 percent of Honeywell's workers, as with most high tech companies, were professional, whereas close to 90 percent of Japanese workers were blue collar. They were programmed to group activity.

We brought experts into Honeywell on OD from the University of Southern California who were proficient in wage and entitlement benefits, but this was HR and not OD. This didn't help with the problem.

Nor did the rhetoric or slogans (participative management, total quality management, total employee involvement, lifetime employment) improve performance. A worker was not a sanitized machine reducible to mathematics, as Einstein once alluded. The greatest mind of our age was championing our humanness, which had somehow got lost in the equation.

Every organization, and Honeywell was no exception, has a "cult of personality" (Honeywell's was engineering) with culture either taken for granted or dismissed as irrelevant, and therein lay the trouble.

Peter F. Drucker in a piece in The Wall Street Journal (March 28, 1991) made one of the most stupid statements ever made: "Don't change corporate culture. What we need is to change behavior." This inanity was the basis of my article "In Praise of Folly" (1993) for an engineering newsletter. CULTURE DICTATES BEHAVIOR. Nothing in my experience has proven truer.

So, as precious as Deming, Juran and Drucker are to the corporation, in one sense or another, they solve only half the equation, and half an equation, as we have seen, leads to the current problems on the corporate front.

Corporate executives look for profits and as little trouble as possible during their watch. They are not intellectually inclined however bright they may be; often prisoners of summaries generated by others; and quick to jump on the bandwagon of some guru with a magic panacea (translated: results without changing anything).

While finding Honeywell professionals not buying into "teaming" and "quality circles," I read Robert E. Cole's JAPANESE BLUE COLLAR (1971) and Cole's subsequent, WORK, MOBILITY & PARTICIPATION: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE AMERICAN AND JAPANESE INDUSTRY (1979).

The books were a gold mine. Cole spent years in Japan and as an American academic. He built a convincing case that the Japanese's group norm culture and the American's individual norm culture were like water and oil. He claimed it was dangerous to see the two in the same context, and to create strategies on this faulty basis. Yet, who was listening? Not many.

Then, Tom Brokaw came on NBCTV in 1980 with the cry, "Japan Can, Why Can't We?" The country went crazy with QCC's across the land. I watched this with amazement and some despair because we had had QCC's for years and they weren't working all that well.

It would cause me to present my remarks in a speech ("Participative Management: An Adversary Point of View," March 30, 1984), which nearly got me fired.

My experience complemented by my reading found everything falling into place. Culture was critical.

CORPORATE CULTURE (1982) by Terrence Deal and Allan Kennedy, and THE JAPANESE MIND (1983) by Robert Christopher, along with scores of other books were all saying this with great clarity.

My shock was that OD could intellectualize the problem, but not exert palpable change. OD was going along to get along; was careful not to disturb the paycheck; and not create conflict with human resources, which had another role.

OD dangled between left and right brain thinking, deciding to surrender to left-brain thinking entirely as a matter of prudence. After all, were they not "social scientists"?

Typical of this approach is Dantel Hershey's "Entropy Analysis of an Aging, Evolving Corporate System" (1984). It is a statistical rendition of the problem of entropy and the need for negative entropy for regeneration of a corporation. Who understands this other than other OD practitioners?

You don't need statistical proof of entropy because it is right before your eyes. If you want to measure it, get in the trenches. Operators on the job may have no idea what "entropy" is but they can recognize it. They see it in their jobs drying up, but choose to ignore the signs. This complicity has killed the golden goose.

Some clarity of the problem was presented most recently by authors Art Padilla, Robert Hogan, and Robert Kaiser in their paper: THE TOXIC TRIANGLE: DESTRUCTIVE LEADERS, SUSCEPTIBLE FOLLOWERS AND CONDUCIVE ENVIRONMENTS (2008).

These authors did a thorough literature search to build their case, but provide little empirical evidence, the kind experience delivers. Such academics have the same problem that I have had: getting the right people's attention! Academic validation by Tom, Dick, Harry, and Jane is not enough to alert corpocracy to its troubles.

Perhaps we need another Great Depression. We're doing all the right things to see that it comes about, all the safeguards notwithstanding.

I'm an old man on the sidelines attempting to write a novel, and I watch the mystic dance of people glued to their electronic toys, and I wonder what level of Dante's Hell we're in at the moment. Then, I also wonder, where is OD when you need it?

The other day a network program had a segment on a young man who was advertising on his iPod for a girl to teach him how to kiss. He was in his twenties and claimed never to have had a girlfriend, as he was addicted to computer games.

We have had 50 years of programming into operating in suspended electronic wonders to the point of diminishing our affect. This is evident from the top of our leadership to the lowest levels of followership.

First it was television as escape from individual thought and from the self.

Then, it was fondness for the noise of loud rock music with a metaphor for drowning out the desire for the possibility of individual human exchange with others.

After that, it was the frenetic mating of bodies in free love chasing the elusive ultimate orgasm. Now, sex has about as much mystery as a glass of water

Along the way television made us passive pansies for its vibrating blankness.

Now, electronic wonders keep coming off the assembly line at a maddening rate to reduce everything to the neutrality of individual and collective meaninglessness. So, today young people hold stultifying boredom in common.

My point is that innovation is a ruse if the soul is dead. Nietzsche said "God is dead," but I don't remember him going as far as the human soul. After all, it's what makes us human, and he wrote a book "All Too Human."

I confess that the pragmatics that you describe are superfluous if there isn't a core of life to the human soul. You mention 3M, which is a good example of innovation built into its processes, as you point out, and I've witnessed first hand. But even 3M is having trouble in the present climate, as you perhaps know, and is moving away from being this distinguished exception to the rule.

By coincidence, I am writing a novel about South Africa as Nelson Mandela celebrates his 90th birthday. He was in prison in 1968 when I was there. How could a man survive more than a score of years in prison and come out emotionally balanced and disciplined with a strong affect, enough so to forgive his captors? It gives one pause.

Your thoughts on innovation might include Mandela's reflection on leadership (Time, July 21, 2008):

(1) Courage is not the absence of fear. It's inspiring others to move beyond it.

(2) Lead from the front, but don't leave your base behind.

(3) Lead from the back, and let others believe they are in front.

(4) Know your enemy, and learn about his favorite sport.

(5) Keep your friends close, and your rivals closer.

(6) Appearances matter, and remember to smile.

(7) Nothing is black or white.

(8) Quitting is leading too.

There is so much wisdom here, so many ways to read these points other than that provided by Time, as they spell out so clearly what I've been attempting to convey about leadership. After nine books, I've not come close to the quiet wisdom of this quiet man.