Gary Drumm – PMP, ITIL

Dr. W. Edwards Deming was considered by many to be the father of many of today’s most widely-used process frameworks such as Six Sigma, TQM, and ITIL.  During WWII, he helped the U.S. improve production systems by implementing his now famous 14 points.

So what are the 14 points?  Here’s my summary and interpretation of each…

1 ) Create consistency of purpose for the improvement of products and services.

People work more efficiently and effectively if they have and understand the purpose.  If you communicate with your people that your intention in improving your products or services will serve a purpose for them, if you can get them behind your vision, then they will work towards helping you develop better products and services.

2 ) Adopt a new philosophy of cooperation

Cooperation means simply that everyone is working together.  Executives, management, employees, suppliers, vendors, sales, shipping, all work like a well oiled machine when everyone has a singular purpose and vision.  We’ll go into a little more detail on this in point #9.

3 ) Cease dependence on mass inspection to achieve quality

Quality, simply put, should be put into the production side of the equation.  You should continually try to improve your production or service delivery systems so that you’re producing a quality product before the product comes off the line or a customer service rep ever answers the phone.

4 ) End the practice of awarding business on price alone

Businesses need to control costs to stay in business, however; basing your purchasing decisions on price alone is short-sighted and can ultimately cost your everything.  While costs are important, there are other factors that must be taken into consideration: Can the supplier deliver a quality product on time?  What is the supplier’s return policy?  Is the supplier committed to working in partnership with you in order to help you achieve your goals, or are you just another sale?  If you get a great price on a widget, but the widget is defective and takes you twice the time to get it fixed, then you end up paying even more in opportunity costs and possibly even derailing your project or production.  The old adage “You get what you pay for” is more true than some executives and managers realize.

5 ) Improve constantly and forever: production, service, and planning

In project management, planning is critical to the successful delivery of the project.  If you have a team that can execute flawlessly, but they execute a poorly developed project plan, then you will have completed the project efficiently and effectively, but it will be the wrong project.  Planning is the lynch pin. Constantly work to improve your planning  If your planning is solid, you will deliver a better product or service.

6 ) Institute training

I wrote another article on this blog titled “Why Is Training Undervalued On Technology Projects?“.  In the article I contend that the primary reason is because companies do not want to invest in their people.  Companies seem to feel that investing in their people is a “cost center” since it does not directly produce a profit.  But this goes deeper.  Many of today’s companies view their employees as expendable, they’re ALL cost centers.  Since there’s so little loyalty from today’s companies, there’s little loyalty from today’s employees.  After all, why should I remain loyal to a company that will not return the sentiment?  Training is an investment, just like putting money in stocks, bonds, and precious metals, except you’re investing in people.  If you invest in your people, your people will feel like they are valued, like they’re not just cogs in a machine.  Then not only will they work to produce better results, but they will work harder to achieve your company’s goal.  Training is an investment that pays dividends on multiple levels.

7 ) Adopt and institute leadership for the management of people

Leadership does not means telling people what to do.  Leadership is about showing people your vision and asking them to contribute towards accomplishing it.  Leadship requires integrity, passion, and clarity.  It also requires a sense of fair play.  Have you ever heard the saying “If you lie to your kids, you’re kids will grow up and lie to you”?  Not being honest with employees is, in my opinion, one of the biggest problems facing business today.  The Mushroom Theory of Management should be abolished!  

Greed is another big problem facing corporate America today.  Business is in business to make money, I certainly agree with that concept. But business has to do business with people.  If you’re doing business with people, there must be a sense of fair play.  While executives have certainly earned their big bonuses and stock options, most of the time, that does not preclude others, who have provided significant results, within the organization from experiencing the same success.  There’s a problem when one executive has millions of shares of stock and his top underling manager only has a few thousand. 

Obviously I could write a book on leadership, which is outside of the scope of this little blog post (which is sitting at 888 words right now), so I’ll sum it up with one word: Integrity.  Integrity is doing what is right even when no one is looking. 

8 ) Drive our fear and build trust so that everyone can work more effectively

This point goes back to some of what I stated in point 7.  One cannot work effectively if they’re in constant fear of losing their job.  I’ve always tried to operate under the principle that fear is just “False Evidence Appearing Real”, it’s just your mind messing with you.  Yet there are legitimate issues where the company or management creates fear.  Being a tyrannical boss, demanding quotas or goals that cannot possibly be met, setting your people up for failure by giving 100% of the responsibility but none of the authority to get it done.  If you’re living in constant fear, it affects your decisions.  Business is about risk.  If you’re afraid of taking a risk because you’re afraid of losing your job, you’ll never do the things necessary to increase your business.  The mind simply cannot function in a constant state of fear.

9 ) Break down barriers between departments

In the IT world, there are silos of information.  People tend to protect their turf, probably because of fear. This protectionism causes massive communication breakdowns that lead to disastrous results.  If the IT department, for example, puts up a barriers between itself and HR, then getting new hires set up with equipment could take twice as long.  Conversely, if HR sets up barriers between itself and IT, and does not communicate new hires until the last minute, then IT will not be ready for the new hire coming on board and, again, getting them set up will take twice as long.  Breaking down barriers is really about trust and communication.  It’s about developing processes that negate silos and mini-kingdoms, and if no one’s living in fear, they won’t be as prone to protect their area, which makes everything run more smoothly.

10 ) Eliminate slogans and targets asking for zero defects or new levels of productivity

Fact: Zero defects is a physical impossibility.  There will ALWAYS be some degree of defect. Six Sigma addresses this beautifully.  When six sigma is achieved,  99.9997% of your output is defect free.  Meaning that 3 widgets out of 1 million have defects.  If you can produce 1 million of ANYTHING and ONLY have 3 defects, you’ve achieved an incredibly high standard of productivity and quality!  But that quality is built into the production itself.  In service delivery, problems are going to happen.  Things are going to go wrong.  No matter how much you plan for it, or how diligently you proactively search for potential issues, something is going to fail.  Zero defects, and unreasonably high levels of productivity are impossible.  Impossible goals produce fear.  Fear destroys trust.  The destruction of trust causes silos… Is any of this stuff starting to make sense?

11 ) Eliminate numerical goals, quotas, and management by objective

Numbers don’t lie.  Numbers are cold hard facts. Numbers don’t care what happened, they don’t account for circumstances, family emergencies, or a bad month for the sales staff.  So why on earth do we establish goals and quotas on numbers?  We do it because it’s easy.  It’s easier to say “We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired!” (Quoted from Glengarry Glen Ross).  Competition is a good thing.  It drives us to succeed, but our objective should not necessarily be to beat the “other guy”, but rather beat ourselves.  Human achievement comes from improving one’s self, not stepping on everyone else to get what you want.

12 ) Remove barriers that rob people of joy in their work

Fear, barriers, distrust, disloyalty, quotas… these all culminate into robbing people of finding joy in their work.  If you want your people to perform at their peak, you need to remove these things.  Computer guys do what they do because they love doing it.  I do what I do because I LOVE doing it.  I even told one company that I would do it for free if I could afford it, and I meant it.  I love what I do so much, that I would do it for free.  But start throwing up a bunch of hurdles in front of me that keep me from getting my job done, make me feel like I’m being set up for failure, or start making me wonder whether or not I can trust you and I’m going to wear down. We all do.  From the lowest paid employee to the top executive, to the President of the United States.  It’s human nature.

13 ) Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement

Education makes you feel better about yourself.  It makes you feel as though you’re progressing as a person.  It’s the ultimate self-improvement program.  But education doesn’t just make you feel as though you’re progressing, you actually ARE progressing.  If your company is committed to your success, then odds are the company will be extremely successful.  What makes the “best companies to work for” the best companies to work for? Simply put, the people love being there.  They’re passionate about the company.  But why?  Often times it’s because they feel safe, they feel valued, they feel that they can do what they do and find purpose in their work.  They’re not just a cog in the machine.  You don’t invest in improving the cog, you simply replace it when it wears out.  You invest in improving people.  People are not part of your business, they ARE your business.  Invest in your people and they will invest themselves in your company.  And if the people invest themselves in your company, they’ll be investing themselves in your vision, and that brings your vision to fruition.

14 ) Put everyone in the company to work on accomplishing the transformation

The last point is critical.  If everyone, and I mean EVERYONE is not committed to the transformation then the transformation will fail.  Sometimes, unfortunately, removing barriers means removing human barriers.  From the CEO to the janitorial staff, everyone must be on board.  If they’re not, they need to go.  But you cannot operate from the position of “everyone who’s not on board must go” if you haven’t committed to the other 14 points.  Therein lies one of the critical areas that companies often miss.  They develop things in a vacuum and then try to force everyone into the new mold.  But the new mold MUST eliminate fear, knock barriers, institute leadership, remove unrealistic goals and quotas, and demonstrate a willingness to invest in your people, otherwise it’s just totalitarianism.

Conclusion:

I think Deming’s 14 points are some of the most fundamental ideas of modern management.  In the time of kings and kingdoms, there was a strict hierarchy of command.  That hierarchy gave us slavery, brutality, and revolts.  It’s partly what lead to labor unions in the first place because management was taking advantage of the workers in sweat shops for unreasonably low wages.  But in a free society, with an educated workforce there is no need for such Draconian measures.  People want to work and they want to do a good job.  If you give them the tools they need to get it done, the protection they need to make difficult, sometimes risky decisions, and the feeling that they’re part of something bigger than themselves, they’ll help you truly achieve all of the success you could have ever imagined.

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  It’s not only good for your personal life.  It’s also good for business.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately about a concept known as “the mushroom theory of management”. Basically, the idea is that a company’s management team makes the decision to treat their employees like mushrooms: Keep them in the dark and cover them with excrement. That is to say they don’t really let their employees know what’s going on with the company and they cover them up in so much busy work that they (the employees) don’t have time to really even care.

The problem with this idea is, of course, that eventually some of your better employees are either going to get to a point where they have enough free time to care, likely because they’re very efficient at what they do, or they’re going to get promoted to a level where management has to clue them in, even if only a little bit, so they don’t mess things up by providing too much information to their staff.

This, of course, leads to distrust and paranoia. If an employee pours their whole heart into something, becomes a real thought leader within the organization, and effects massive positive change, then imagine how disheartened they become when they find out they’ve been lied to. Perhaps not lied to directly, but certainly allowed to believe whatever they wanted to believe because it was beneficial to management because the employee’s performance was good for the bottom line.

Have we become so jaded and cynical as a society that this is really what it’s all about? Governments lie. Companies lie. Communities lie. People lie. Isn’t society simply a reflection of the values of individuals? So is it the company lying to it’s people, or is it the management team as a whole? And if it’s the management team, aren’t they made of of individuals and isn’t it actually the individual manager/executive who’s doing the lying?

Call me crazy and old-fashioned, but I think leadership is about integrity. Integrity is doing what’s right when no one is watching. Doing what is right because it is right. Can we really call the people leading companies “leaders” if there is no integrity? If you’re not telling your employees the truth, are you not, in fact, lying to them? Isn’t the so-called “mushroom theory” just an institutionalized method of not being truthful and honest with those who actually do the work?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a “worker’s united” guy. I’m a management guy. I understand there are certain things you simply cannot divulge: trade secrets, potentially lucrative contracts in the works, etc. But it seems that many companies, in today’s environment, have taken the legitimate need to protect certain information and used a much broader brush to include things that they shouldn’t.

Take, for example, GM’s decision to close their plant during the summer in order to reduce inventory levels and costs. This is not a popular decision among the employees, but at least the employees have information that they can now act upon in order to prepare for the reduced income levels during the shutdown. Management made the difficult decision to perform the shutdown and communicated it accordingly.

Will their stock take a hit? Possibly. Will their employees be unhappy? Probably. But was it the right thing to do? Definitely. By providing employees and shareholders the information, they give them an opportunity. If I’m an unhappy shareholder, I can sell my stock and place my money somewhere else (I’d suggest gold and silver personally, BTW – ). If I’m an employee, I can decide whether or not I want to stay at the company.

Does GM really lose anything by being honest about the situation? Not really. They may lose employees or stockholders who are unhappy, but those who are unhappy are probably not as productive for them anyway. So perhaps this will give them an opportunity to upgrade their workforce to people who actually want to be there.

In my opinion, companies should be as transparent as possible to their employees. Transparency doesn’t mean divulging all of the secrets to everyone all the time. But it does mean you don’t try to cover things up. You face the difficult decisions head-on. You be open and honest with your employees. If difficult times are coming, you tell them about it and give them the option to make decisions for themselves.

The right thing and the easy thing are seldom, if ever, the same thing. I contend that the “mushroom theory” is the wrong thing.