W. Edwards Deming - The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

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Dr. W. Edwards Deming published books and articles in academic journals and the popular press, with frequent letters to the editors. He wrote papers for colleagues and students, and conducted hundreds of studies for clients. He also left a number of undistributed draft papers and personal letters to colleagues and businesses, as well as to his clients. He delivered abundant four-day seminars to tens of thousands of people, and spoke frequently at conferences. He criticized the status quo, and was outspoken about government and corporate policies alike. Many of his ideas are standard in business today. Many more need yet to be adopted.

Chronologically, during the late 1920s through about 1940, Demings writings were based in physics. For the next forty years his written works centered in statistics and sampling theory. It was during his last thirteen years (19801993), roughly, that he focused on the transformation of management.

Nuggets of management theory appear in Demings early statistical work that pop up again forty years later in his management writings. I believe Demings theory of management is the culmination of his lifes workeverything is in it.

This book is about Demings theory of management, in his own words, gleaned from articles and papers he wrote, and speeches he gave at conferences and seminars?little-distributed until now.

My approach: I have reviewed the Deming Collection of materials in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division in Washington DC, materials that Deming gave to me over the years, and copies of papers he handed out in classes, at various conferences, and that I have gathered from other sources. I have also reviewed hundreds of hours of video and audio recordings of his lectures to students and at conferences. More than half of Demings works are very statistical and not directly appropriate in this book for more general audiences.

After skimming thousands of documents, I reviewed in detail some 850 articles, letters, papers, cases, lectures, speeches, and notes by Deming that contained potential material for this book. Ive selected about a hundred of them for inclusion in whole or in part in this book. None of the works were in electronic format, so they had to be digitized. Several documents were sixth or seventh carbon copies, extremely difficult to readbut worth the effort to include them, I believe. Twenty of the conference films and one of the audiotapes were transcribed for excerpts to include in this book as well.

In this review of Demings works, I found that he had a propensity to reuse the same (identical) paragraphs in different articlessometimes identical titles, too, on different articles. Although he had some new content in each article, sometimes more than half of the content would be culled from other articles. Many papers were written in precomputer time, so I could see the cut and paste sections on the originals of some of the articles. Deming also paraphrased prior writings in new articles. Within a speech, especially, he often looped around and repeated the same content two or three times for effect. The looping has been removed. To minimize duplication of content in different articles included in this book, the editor took a heavier hand. As a result, the book contains very few complete articles.

Deming never missed an opportunity to include statistical theory. So, a fair amount of editing was done in this area . One cannot talk about prediction without including the rudiments of statistical theory.

Demings inimitable style of writing has not been removed deliberately. Deming eschewed contractions and used two words instead (e.g., can not, cannot, instead of cant). He used the British spelling of some words (e.g., connexion, enquire, lustre). These were often replaced by American editors, but not by all. I did not go back into edited pieces and reinstate his original style. Nor did I alter his original style when encountered, so you will see differences between articles in this respect. You will, no doubt, discover other idiosyncrasies in Demings writing.

Deming did not use the same elements of style or structure for every article. At first, I attempted to make all of the articles consistent with regard to style, so as not to disconcert the reader. That was a fiasco. Deming used style to shape the substance. The articles herein are each in their original style.

The choice of where to place each article in this book was difficult. I could make arguments for placing some articles in any one of several chapters. In the end, articles are placed where I believe they will serve the reader best.