Mariner has pulled another book from his library to review while multiple inches of rain continue to fall. It is the book that set mariner’s style of management during his career. Adam Smith is credited for defining free market capitalism and John Maynard Keynes rewrote competitive economics to get the US out of the Great Depression but Deming changed the workplace.
“W. Edwards Deming was assigned to rejuvenate Japan, a nation totally destroyed in the world’s first nuclear war. W. Edwards Deming played a significant role in Japan’s post-WWII economic resurgence, which led to widespread adoption of his philosophy in the U.S. during the later years of his life. His basic message was that focusing on quality would decrease cost and increase both productivity and market share. However, he argued that problems with quality were usually management’s fault rather than that of the workers on the floor. Management needed to transform itself and its practices into a quality-oriented enterprise. Quality should not be entrusted to a quality control department, but rather to a collaborative effort involving management, supervision, purchasing, and production workers. Quality inspections should be eliminated in favor of building quality into the product during the manufacturing process.” [Engineering and Science Hall of Fame]
Especially during the mid-century wars, production was very much a hierarchical process. This was because speed was of the essence; decisions were made quickly because wars and all of society affected by wars had to be supplied worldwide. Management structures within corporations were strictly top down and subordinates had little to do with the decision-making. Deming’s reputation was highly regarded; his approach slowly crept into American production theory.
What made Deming’s life experience different from typical economic philosophers was that he not only had to build a new economy for Japan but a new nation as well. His theories of management have been flavored with Japan’s hardship after the war. As the Hall of Fame suggested, Deming’s approach was to know as much as possible about the product, assign responsibility throughout the organization, all with the purpose of superior quality in the marketplace.
At mariner’s level of employment, this meant ‘team management’. First, unusual for the time, was to provide a document which defined goals, objectives and tasks – all based on product performance and resource management. These documents could be large and often detailed. When mariner had the contract with Taiwan to build a new computer system, the first month was spent in the US with Taiwanese and US planners laying out the goals and processes of the project.
As the project progressed, decisions were made by teams assigned to a set of tasks. Each team had a dutch uncle advisor who was a specialist, hired by mariner and representatives from Taiwan. The important aspect was to make sure the team knew it had the responsibility to deliver the goals laid out in the planning documents. Each employee had an assigned task to deliver and participated in team coordination.
Even today, if he had a significant goal to achieve, he would use the ‘team method’.
Books are telomeres.
Ancient Mariner
