Deming's Total Quality Management and 14 Points of Management

What it does:

Deming's Total Quality Management is a powerful way for organizations to improve the quality of the products and services they offer.

Its other names:
TQM, Deming Cycle, PDSA (for Plan, Do, Study and Act; see below), Continuous Improvement.

Where it comes from:
W. Edwards Deming was one of the most influential thinkers in the history of American and international business. A member of the American forces that occupied Japan at the end of WWII, Deming stayed behind to advise emerging Japanese companies on quality management. In the process he invented Total Quality Management, as explained below. When he returned to the United States he was hailed as a visionary thinker. In 1982, he published his book Out of the Crisis, now available in a new edition from MIT Press.

Summary:
Deming's PDSA Cycle offers an approach that leader to Total Quality Management, sometimes called continuous improvement. An organization that continuously takes part in the following four cyclical activities will continuously elevate the quality of its offerings:

- Plan -- Prepare and plan in a structured way by learning from the past and setting benchmarks for change.
- Do -- If your goal is far-reaching, start small and evaluate your results before going wider.
- Study -- Analyze the results of what you have done and find out how to apply what you have learned to future activities.
- Act -- Do what you need to do to make your process better and easier to replicate.

Deming's 14 Points of Management can be summed up in these quotes from his book Out of the Crisis:

1. "Create constancy of purpose towards improvement." Management must make quality improvement an ongoing policy, not something that is attempted and then discarded.
2. "Adopt the new philosophy". Management should actually adopt his philosophy, rather than merely expect the workforce to do so.
3. "Cease dependence on inspection." If manufacturing is closely regulated and controlled, it will be less necessary to inspect individual products. Defects will be reduced.
4. "Move towards a single supplier for any one item." Strong relations with dependable suppliers are vital.
5. "Improve constantly and forever." Make an ongoing commitment to TQM.
6. "Institute training on the job." If people are trained well and uniformly, they will achieve uniformly high results.
7. "Institute leadership". Deming makes a distinction between leadership and mere supervision. Leaders are results-oriented, not supervision-oriented.
8. "Drive out fear." Management by fear keeps workers from acting in the organization''s best interests. Quality suffers.
9. "Break down barriers between departments." Cross-departmental and cross-functional teams achieve quality. Divisiveness works against it.
10. "Eliminate slogans." It is fine to be inspiring and motivational, but haranguing workers with slogans is ineffective. It is better to improve the processes they work within.
11. "Eliminate management by objectives." Numerical quotas are counterproductive. When people hurry to meet them, quality falls.
12. "Remove barriers to pride of workmanship." Worker satisfaction leads to pride in quality. This results, in part, when the other Points of Management described here are put into practice.
13. "Institute education and self-improvement." An organization that encourages learning is one in which quality will rise.
14. "The transformation is everyone''s job." Commitment to quality resides at all levels, from top management to front-line employees.

What else you need to know:
David Ricardo built his economic theories in a simpler world where fewer players were competing to gain control of the world's limited resources, such as wheat and wool. Nevertheless, his basic approach is sound: It is more efficient to do things that promise you the greatest return for the least effort.