Saturday, January 8, 2011

Understanding the Motive of Dr Deming in Japan: PEOPLE

It is my thought the main reason Dr Deming's management method has not been more widely accepted and implemented in North America is because the motivated force behind his work in Japan was not known or understood. The following exert is from "Deming Management Method" by Mary Walton. I strongly recommend all who want to learn about Dr Deming start with Mary's work.

"Japan had paid dearly for its participation in World War II. Of its major cities only Kyoto had escaped wide-scale damage from aerial bombardments, and 668,000 citizen haad died. The nation's industrial base was in ruins; agricultural production was off by a thrid. The once-prosperous populace had first gone without consumer goods, then without food for the wartime effort. Now there was little of either. The cities had been destroyed; many Japanese had scattered to the countryside. Morale had collasped. They had lost confidence in themselves and in their leaders, which perhaps explains why they greeting the Allied occupation forces with so little hostility.

Under US General Douglas MacArthur, SCAP made priorities of dismantling the military goverment and establishing a constitutional regime. When Dr. Deming arrived, two years into the occupation, little physical recovery was yet in evidence. He toook note in his diary of the suffering: 'Practically all the area of heavy industry between Tokyo and Yokhama and in every big city is a complete blank, some concrete and twisted steel left. New wooden homes are springing up like mushrooms everywhere over the seared areas. The debris is practically all cleared away; what is not being built on is in winter wheat or garden. Food was scarce. A tearoom in those days , he would later say, was exactly that-no more than tea was served. Rice, which was also in short supply, could not be served in restaurants. People were forbidden to sleep in the Tokyo train station, because so many had died, not from cold, but from hunger. He carried candy from the Army PX with him on his travels because no food was available.

The plight of the children moved him the most. On one occasion, an American captain took him to the railroad yards where twenty or thirty homeless men slept on rice mats. He saw and old man and a young boy huddled around a charcoal burner with scarcely a flame. Teh boy told the captain that he had been in an institution but the adults ate all the food so he ran away. Deming wrote in his diary, 'At 11:30 I crawled into my beautiful bed, wondering why some of the people have so many good things, while others are sleeping on mats in rags and hungry. Another time he visited and institution: "Miserable wretches in rags, most of them dying of hunger. Human being wasting away. Curous mixtures of the sick with the well, old and dying. Crazy people in dark cells, no windows because they would escape. But who said they were crazy, and who wouldn't be? He used whatever authority he had to urge that the superintendent be fired.

Then in years to come, he did not closet himself with the American colony that sprang up in post-war Japan. He delighted himself in invitations from Japanese hosts, and sought to familiarize himself with the culture, frequently attending Kabuki theater and Noh plays, exploring markets and shops, visiting temples and shrines. 'My method of learning is to become, so far as posssible Japanese, he wrote in 1956. His longtime secretary, Cecelia Kilian remembers him studying Japanese by records late at night in his Washington study."

Dr Deming went to Japan as a census worker. He was effected by the plight of people. The motivating force that tranformed him was PEOPLE. It changed him from census bureau employee to corporate consultant extrodinaire. It gave him a single mission over decades. And it was in this role he would have a most profound impact on the nation of Japan. Thirty years later (early 1980's) America would finally have their eyes opened to see the results of this transformation. The results being high quality, high market penetration and profitability. It was these results America for the most part wanted and desired. Give us the results they said without taking the time to understand the motivating force: PEOPLE.

And so US companies went to Toyota and other Japanese companies and attempted to learn and imitate their systems of "lean manufacturing" they called it. Lean manufacturing is the result of the Deming Management Method applied correctly over years. US companies imitated and developed statistical science which eventually evolved into their own brand, called Six Sigma, which goes directly in the face of Dr Deming's advice, eliminate numerical quotas. Statistics is a important part of the Deming Management Method, but a part nonetheless. They picked and chose portions of the whole in an attempt to bring about the results in as short as time as possible. Their results were usually not sustainable or evolved into the next fad. It is now assumed that management fads are a necessary part of management. You have to have fads to loook at your company a different way, they say. Go to most companies and look on the managers' desk for the book on the current fad. The sustainability of  quality is directly proportional to the commitment to PEOPLE: the employees, managers, customers, community, nation and even the globe in a large multinational corporation. When I speak of the sustainability of quality I am speaking about quality that lasts more than one generation, 30 years. This is my benchmark. This does not mean being in business for a long time, but setting a standard for quality in the industry that a company participates. Honda Motors, the number one internal combustion engine manufacturer in the world, meets this requirement now and stands out above the rest. This is my benchmark for quality in industry. But the past is not a guarantee of the future. Look at Toyota for an example of this. They have damaged their reputation considerably by practicing numerical quotas: be the number one auto manfacturer by volume in the world or "beat GM". They have lost marketshare and Some profitability, had many recalls and opened themselves up to considerable liability. But despite this, they have not stumbled so far as US auto makers have i.e. bankruptcy, mergers and buyouts. There is still an element of sustainabilty of quality in Toyota, US automakers are attempting to achieve. Remember we are looking in the 30 year range. US automakers have just begun to attempt to achieve world class quality. They are in their young adolescent years in terms of quality.

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