Hunter on Deming

Business901 Podcast Transcription
Implementing Lean Marketing Systems

Hunter on Deming
Guest was John Hunter

Related Podcast:
Dr. Deming on Lean in 2012

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John Hunter combines technology with
management expertise to improve the
performance of organizations. He has
served as an information technology
program manager for the American
Society for Engineering Education, the
Office of Secretary of Defense Quality
Management Office and the White House
Military Office.

He has authored the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog
for years. He is the author of new blog for the W. Edwards
Deming Institute. John has facilitated seminars for the Deming
Institute, spoken at the annual Deming Institute conference and
lectured at the Deming Scholars program at Fordham University,
as well as presenting at conferences on management
improvement topics.

John got early start learning about variation, quality and
Deming's management ideas from his father: Bill Hunter. Bill's
work with the City of Madison was included in Deming's book:
Out of the Crisis, as the first known example of applying the ideas
in government. Peter Scholtes was involved in that effort (as a
city employee). Peter later went on to write the Team Handbook
and Leader's Handbook and teach with Deming at his 2 day
seminars. John created and maintained (and still maintains)
Peter's web site.

John is the founder and CEO of curiouscat.com, managing over
30 web sites on management, software development, investing,
engineering, travel and other topics.


Transcription of Podcast
Joe Dager: Welcome, everyone. This is Joe Dager, the host of
the Business901 podcast. With me today is John Hunter. John
combines technology with management expertise to improve the
performance of organizations. He has served as an information
technology program manager for the American Society for
Engineering Education, the Office of Secretary of Defense Quality
Management Office, and the White House Military Office. He has
authored "The Curious Cat Management Improvement" blog for
years, and he is also the new author of a blog for the W. Edwards
Deming Institute. John, I'd like to welcome you. Could you share
with us your background with the Deming Institute?
John Hunter: Sure, thanks. It's great to be here. The Institute
was founded just before Dr. Deming died, and there was the first
of the annual conferences. They had the first five or six in
Washington, D.C. Annual meetings continued, but they started to
move around the country. During this time, the Deming Institute
decided that one of the things that was missing was Deming had
his famous four-day seminars. So the Institute was looking at
what they could do. They decided that trying to get people to
commit four continuous days without it being Dr. Deming sitting
on the stage was going to be difficult, so they decided on a
two-and-a-half day seminar format. They told 13 of us together
in Louisville at Louisville Slugger, whose CEO has been on the
Deming Institute Boards.
We got together and with Dr. Joyce Orsini, who's at Fordham
University. She is also the President of the Deming Institute, and
I'm pretty sure she's been the president since the very beginning,
and continues today.
She led this group, and idea was that we would design a two and
half-day seminar based on Deming's four-day seminar, and from
this group of people; we would present the seminar for the


Institute. I was involved with that, and have been giving those
seminars and then the latest thing is working on the Deming
Institute blog, which I think is going to be a very exciting thing.
Joe: From your childhood, you were involved with Deming,
weren't you?
John: Actually, right now, I'm living in Johor Bahru, Malaysia.
I'm sitting in my condo, and looking out my window. I see Johor
Bahru. In the distance, I see Singapore. When I was a little kid, I
spent a year and half in Singapore. My father was teaching,
probably, chemical engineering. He was also involved in trying to
get a quality community set up in Singapore. There's actually a
paper on that topic at ASQ on setting up a quality organization for
developing countries. During that time, my father was writing
back and forth with Dr. Deming. My father was a professor of
statistics, and chemical engineering, and industrial engineering.
Dr. Deming was obviously a statistician, and most of the people
that taught with Dr. Deming on the stage with him were
statisticians actually. You don't really have to be, but that's the
way it turned out.
As a kid in Singapore, I didn't really directly pick up on any of
this. I was young. As I grew up, my father continued this interest.
I was involved in learning about these ideas as a kid. I remember
still in second grade my father came into school to give one of
these parents teaching the kids. What he did was an experiment
that was essentially about understanding variation for kids.
Rolling dice, and understanding that people have a tendency,
especially kids, to think things like the number six come up a lot.
But if you roll the dice, unless the dice is biased, you'll see that,
no, every single number one through six is just as likely to come
up as any other. As I was growing up, I picked up on this Deming
stuff from him all the way along. There were things like that.


As I grew up it was more of the management stuff. I would talk
to him about the consulting he was doing. He wrote a book with
George Box and Stu Hunter, "Statistics for Experimenters," that
is, in my opinion but also in many, many people's opinion, the
book for design of experiments, which is very big in Six Sigma.
My father was involved with a lot of the early Six Sigma stuff.
Chicago is where Motorola was based, outside of Chicago
somewhere I think, and one of the things I remember is him
coming back from a trip down there. One of the things they
talked about was at that time Motorola, I think was still
manufacturing TVs. Their cost of manufacturing was higher than
the retail price in the stores, and it's like, "This is not going to
work."
Out of the crisis, pages 245 to 247 there's a bit on the First
Street Garage in Madison, Wisconsin. My father was involved in
that when I was a kid. Basically, we came back from Nigeria,
which he'd spent another year there teaching. When he came
back to Madison, one of the things that he decided was he really
liked Madison, and he wanted to give back to Madison. He'd been
a professor at the University of Madison.
So he talked to the mayor about using some of these ideas to
improve Madison's services. The mayor went along with this idea.
So they applied some of these ideas at the city of Madison, and
that write up was in "Out of the Crisis." I think it's the first known
instance of applying Deming's ideas in a government
organization.

Interesting, at that project, Peter Scholtes was a city employee at
that time, and he worked on this project. My father actually knew
him before that, so I think it was them together, deciding, picking
what project to work on and they picked the First Street Garage.
After that, for the people that don't know, Peter Scholtes was a
co-author of the team handbook while he was at Joiner

Associates with Brian Joiner. Peter also taught on the stage with
Deming at the two-day seminars.

He then also wrote what is my absolute favorite management
book, "The Leader's Handbook," by Peter Scholtes. That was
successful, and they had several more.
The mayor of Madison, Joe Sensenbrenner, wrote up that
"Bringing Quality." I think the title was "Bringing Quality to City
Hall" or something like that. There was actually a Harvard
Business Review article, so that you can get online.
It was a couple of years; I think, of them doing stuff, but during
this one summer, they had another training session. I actually
went to one of those training sessions to learn more about
exactly what was going on. And at that time, I think I was in high
school, maybe I was in college.
Joe: Will the blog be more than let's say just Doctor Deming
excerpts? What is the blog going to be about?

John: It's one of the things that I'm a little touchy about
because I am opinionated and I can't help being opinionated. It's
going to come through. That means that when I'm going to write,
I want it to be about applying Deming's ideas. But Deming's ideas
are not static, and even the first day The New Economics came
out, trying to interpret that, you have to use your own judgment.
I am trying to have direct sources of material, so excerpts and
quotes directly from Dr. Deming, or videos of Dr. Deming. But
also, there will be a lot of my opinions coming through. And that's
actually in the first blog post.
I mentioned that concept that it was going to be me. I don't mind
at all people disagreeing with, in fact; I encourage it. I want it to
be a discussion, people disagreeing with the way I say something
or even with the way what Deming says.


I don't want it to be some debate of "What you said isn't exactly
what Deming said." If they're trying to make a point, that's
perfectly fine, but I understand that what I'm going to be doing is
going to be my opinion.
I'm probably a little oversensitive to it because historically, I've
seen what happens. I'm opinionated, and so I'll say things and
it's very...without a lot of ambiguity. There's something directly
to disagree with, and that's fine.
I'm trying to make clear you're arguing with what my opinion is
of what Deming said, not what Deming said himself, unless you're
talking about a specific quote or something that he had.
One of the things that's really important is that Deming continued
to learn his entire life. He was teaching these things in his 90s.
He taught the four-day seminars and while he was doing that, he
was learning and adjusting and changing.
If you tried to stop and say no, The New Economics is the last
written thing, we're going to just use that, it isn't Deming
management.
His design was not that I designed a perfect system, now we're
done. It was this is what we have right now, and he would have
continued to learn and adapt and change.
I will try to be significantly more of the Deming message on the
Deming blog. I have another thing that I've done on my personal
blog, years ago, was I've added my own two additions to the
deadly diseases. I happen to believe that if Deming was alive, he
would agree with these two additions, but that's my opinion.
Other people can disagree.

I believe that excessive CEO pay has become destructive and
obviously out of whack, I think it's fundamentally not possible to
have respect for people in the Deming and Lean sense and take


so much money from the company that most CEOs do now; that’s
a deadly disease. And it's even more than just the CEO. It
escalates all the executive salaries and they then have very short
term focus in order to try to overcome this, and all sorts of bad
things happen from it. I think it raises to the level of becoming a
deadly disease.
The other one, this one there's a little...The evidence, I think it's
easier to challenge this one, is I think the intellectual property
system is completely messed up. It is destroying innovation
instead of helping innovation. I think there's less certainty that
Deming would have thought that was a problem. Almost certainly
not put that on the Deming blog, because I think that's stretching
too far into my opinion versus just talking about Deming's
management ideas. So, that's one of the lines I'm trying to draw
is trying to make the Deming blog itself a little more focused.

Joe: I think all bloggers have to have an opinion; that's what
makes a blog special.
John: I agree.
Joe: I always think of Lean and Dr. Deming being so
intertwined. Could you explain that and maybe explain some
differences?
John: Yes, this is one area where I think I disagree with a
significant portion of the Deming community. Dr. Deming was
extremely vocal about the problems with TQM, and with the
Baldridge Award and with Six Sigma. And in my opinion, many of
the Deming communities stretched that to Lean. I think that's
wrong. To me, Deming's ideas are not prescriptive at all. Lean is
just renaming the Toyota production system. The Toyota
production system is the best, in my opinion, long-term
application of the Deming management system. There are things
about the Toyota production system that don't align perfectly


with Deming's ideas. There are also things in Lean that Deming
doesn't really talk about.

When I think of Lean, the first thing, I think of is Toyota, and I
see, OK, so the stuff comes from Toyota, so you have Toyota as a
preeminent example, and I think there're all sorts of wonderful
stuff that Toyota does. When you get from Toyota into Lean, you
then start to get, well, what still counts as Lean? How little can
we do, how different can it be, and how watered-down can it be?
I see plenty of problems with many, many implementations of
Lean. They are surface, they're just using a few tools, and they
don't have respect for people. They don't understand variation,
which understanding variation is a big thing in Deming; I think
it's a much smaller thing in Lean.
But it's understood by Toyota. I think because Toyota doesn't talk
about it much, I think in Lean it gets downplayed. And for the
companies whose processes are not as solidly working as
Toyota's, they run into some problems.

There're two big problems with Lean, in my opinion, in the actual
implementation. One is I don't know of any management system
that most of the implementations of it aren't bad. So, when you
talk about Lean, if you go to 50 percent of the companies and
point out 40 things that are pitiful about their current Lean
implementation, I'm not surprised. In my opinion, that's not a
criticism of Lean, that's a criticism of the way they implemented it
at that particular company.

Now, the other problem is that Toyota did some things so well
that they started not to pay that much attention to it, so when
others come and look at Toyota and try to copy Toyota, they
don't see it. Toyota in my understanding doesn't use control
charts nearly as much as any other Deming-type organizations
do. I think the reason for that is Toyota's processes got to be so


good that the payback was not as big spending time worrying
about so many control charts.

They downplayed it because their processes were working so
well, and they have so many other supporting elements that
make it so that you don't have to rely as much on a control chart.
That is fine for Toyota, but for a company that is not as
sophisticated, not having control charts is a big problem, and
Lean makes them much less effective. I think that when people
try to look at Toyota and copy Toyota, one of the things they
forget is, we're not Toyota to start with. Some of the things that
Toyota doesn't have to do, we might have to do. We need
training wheels; Toyota doesn't. So, I think that's one of the
places where people make mistakes.
Divergence between Toyota and Deming I think are on perfectly
acceptable decisions by Toyota, and then there are some things I
don't agree with, but I can understand that Toyota does things
that way. I think Toyota still uses to a greater extent than
Deming would advise annual performance reviews. Toyota uses
targets more than Deming would like.
Now, I've written about this on my Curious Cat blog. Deming's
ideas are all based upon the management system that's actually
in place in your organization. There are many problems with
using targets in the way that distorts behavior inside the
organization. But if you have processes in place to avoid many of
the pitfalls of things like targets, targets can provide use in
scoping what the problem is, what you're aiming to do so that if
you are trying to achieve five-percent improvement on this
particular process, each year for the next four years, that will
shape how you try to attack that problem differently than if you
say, we need to reduce the time and cost of this process by 50
percent this year.


You have to take a totally different approach to those two efforts,
and Toyota does a good job of understanding that and making
those choices, and also of not being in the position of, oh, you
know what? We had a target of reducing this by 50 percent. Well,
we've gotten to 40 percent, now we can do a lot of really bad
stuff to get to 50 percent, so we can check off that we made it, or
we can accept that we're going to keep trying to do the right
things. If we only get the 40 percent, we only get the 40
percent."
Toyota will do that. They will only get the 40 percent. A lot of
other companies will make the bad choice to get the 50 percent
largely because of things like bonuses being tied to it, the
person's future promotion being tied to failing to meet the silly
arbitrary target of 50 percent. I think that there are differences in
the way that Toyota chooses to do some things.

There's a great quote from one of the Toyotas. I can't totally
remember it. It was when I think, he got the personal Deming
Award at that presentation by JUSE, the Union of Japanese
Scientists and Engineers. They're the ones who give out the
Deming Prize each year, and they also give a Deming Award to
individuals. Essentially we think of Deming's ideas each day as
we're applying these things.
I think that, especially in the older school, Toyota did. They had
an absolute understanding of Deming, and they were customizing
it for Toyota. I think, to some extent, the current crop of people
at Toyota, a lot of them, have a lot of understanding of Deming.
But I think that me being a Deming person, I think Toyota would
benefit from having a lot of the newer people pay a little more
attention to Deming's ideas.
Joe: Do you think Deming would be happy with the outcomes
that Toyota's generating? Would he be tickled by that?
John: Yes. No.

I think he'd be happy. I don't think he'd be tickled to death. A
number of things about Deming that personally are very close to
the way that I see things, so often would jump to the same
conclusions Deming did. Deming would be happy with good
results, but he would never be satisfied. I'm the same way. I
think that he would be happy with a lot of the good things that
Toyota has done. But just like Tai Chi Ono, he'd never be
satisfied. He would always be thinking that things could be done
better. Things could be improved. One thing that, to me, is just
obviously bad about the Toyota set up now is the dealer network,
especially in the U. S. I just don't know about the rest of the
world. It's basically pitiful and has been pitiful for 50 years.
Toyota is trapped. Essentially, the political system in the United
States makes it very difficult for car manufacturers to have
decent control over a big part of the customer experience, which
is buying your car and having your car serviced and paid
attention to. So Toyota has a real challenge. I don't know the
solution to providing good-quality interaction directly with me as
the customer when I want to buy a Toyota or when I want to
have my car serviced or whatever.
It's still Toyota's problem to deal with, in my opinion, and it's a
failure of Toyota to have not dealt with that better than they
have. Now it's an extremely difficult position to put Toyota in. I
think most people would let Toyota slide and say, "Well, what can
they do? That's out of their hands."
I think that Dr. Deming was extremely hard on giving executives
a pass on something that is not well done. I think he would have
a similar opinion about that problem. I think there is still plenty
for Toyota to do. One of the big things that people miss about
Deming is he was extremely tolerant. He had respect for all the
workers but really for the people who were on the factory floor or
at the front line.


He didn't criticize them. But for executives he had an extremely
high level of expectation, and I do, too. It's one of the things
where again I think I disagree with the Deming community, but I
think Deming was on my side. But that's my opinion. He was not
easy on executives. He did not accept that the failures that they
made that then resulted in layoffs were just, "Well, that's a
systems problem."

Deming was very big into most of the time you have to focus on
fixing the system. You don't blame the worker because that's not
effective. You need to improve the system. In my opinion,
Deming didn't state this that I know extremely well, which is one
of the reasons why I think in the Deming community, there's not
a big acceptance of the idea that executives are held to a higher
bar.
But the way that I look at it is executives are the ones that are
influencing the shape that system takes. While the problem may
be caused by the system and that there are many things that
they personally can't control, they're still in my opinion
responsible for those outcomes. I will be hard on those
executives, and Deming was hard on those executives even if the
challenges are really hard to deal with.
You have the job of CEO. It's hard and you have to be willing
from my perspective to accept that the expectations of you are
very high, hard, and very challenging. There are things that you
have to figure out solutions to that are not easy, like how to deal
with the dealer networks' problem when you have very little
control.

The states have all sorts of rules, the dealers who give tons of
money to the state legislatures have set it up so it's very difficult
for the car manufactures, any of them--Toyota, Ford, GM,
Honda--to create a network that is serving their customers. The


dealers have their essentially franchise, and changing how they
do business is very difficult.

Joe: When we talk about Lean and Toyota and Dr. Deming's
management system, is that the shortcoming of it, is on the
demand side? Because they've done extremely well on the supply
side, I would say.

John: On this I agree with you. I think they've done extremely
well really across the board. This particular thing I think they
would have dealt with if it wasn't for the political issue that's
challenging to get at. But Lean in general, when I look at other
implementations, applying Lean in a manufacturing environment
is in some sense very easy compared to putting it in your sales
department because there are so many good examples. Many of
the tools that exist right now tie directly to a manufacturing
environment. There are so many experienced consultants on
exactly what to do in many different manufacturing situations. I
think that Lean is still more developed in that manufacturing
production kind of set up.

Another thing where Deming communities sometimes overreach,
in my opinion, is on individuals. I think individuals like Taiichi
Ohno make a huge difference in what's happened.
I believe if you took Tai Chi Ono, and instead of him being alive,
then he was alive today, and he was focused on things like sales
and software development, we would have all sorts of great new
insight into those areas that would allow us to make a lot of great
strides that he made largely in production.
I don't think it's a weakness in Lean, but I think that there's been
more effort and more people have done a lot of great work in
manufacturing. So there's a lot of good stuff there.
One of the things that I find funny with Lean in the software
development world is Toyota was not in the big forefront in

software development using Lean principles or really in many
aspects of using software, in my opinion. They have lots of really
good engineering design. I mean they came up with things like
Prius. They're doing all sorts of great work with robotics looking
way out into the future.
Software development they have not been spectacularly great.
They have, from my limited knowledge, seen that, "Hey, look. A
lot of people have taken Lean ideas, applied them to software
development. They're doing a lot of really great, cool, and
interesting things." Then Toyota's software development people
have looked at those ideas and tried to adopt some of those ideas
themselves, which is great and wonderful.
But it also shows there's another area where I think Toyota, even
though they're Toyota-- they're what Lean came from --didn't
necessarily apply it perfectly inside their own organization.
Joe: Why do you think Dr. Deming's teachings seemed to have
flourished so much more than the others? You think of Dr. Juran
or Crosby. Is it just because of Toyota's success or?
John: No, because I think most people don't even really
understand the connection between Toyota and Deming. Toyota I
think won the first Deming Prize. Honda paid attention to
Deming, and Honda does lots of great stuff, but they are not as
tied to Deming's ideas. Why did Deming flourish? Well, I think, in
my opinion, because his ideas are more effective. That's the
bottom line. One thing is I think some people would disagree,
especially those that don't understand how tied good Lean stuff is
to Deming. I think Deming was very open to learning, adapting,
and changing. So he learned and adapted from lots of really good
people.

Ackoff is one that I would put in as someone who there's so much
to learn from. Deming was smart enough to learn from him,
adapt, and pay attention, and I think he did that more than many

of the others because some of these things come down to just
what happens.

For whatever reason, Deming didn't believe in setting up a
Deming consultancy and having a whole bunch of people work for
him and do stuff for him. The Deming Prize, which is another
thing that keeps his name alive and paid attention to, was
created by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers.
They're the ones who sponsored Deming's talks in the 1950s, and
I think they made publications from those talks and then sold
them. They had a profit. So they then decided to set up this
Deming Prize, so that keeps his name in there. But in the last five
or six years I see Deming's name coming up in two contexts, and
I don't see really hardly anything from any of the other people.
It's coming up from the people in Agile software development
that are, in my opinion, more sophisticated. They first start to use
some of these Agile software development principles, and then
programmers and software developers, who I've been working
with a lot in the last 10 years; I love them.
One of the things that's great about them is they have a thirst for
knowledge and quest for learning at all times. So they have gone
out and keep learning. In doing that, one of the things they found
was, "Hey, this Deming guy has a lot of stuff that's very related
to what we're doing it. In fact, a lot of it sprang from Deming," so
a lot of the really good people in that community have gotten
onto Deming, and are looking into it, and talking about it.

In the Lean community, you have the people, who I think are
really good, know about Deming, learning about Deming, and
talking about Deming.

The advantage of this, in my opinion, is if you have the people
who have the best understanding of how to make things better
are the ones that are looking at Deming, and learning Deming,

then when they're talking about Deming, they're making people
successful, people associate good things with Dr. Deming.

If you have people that don't understand things as well, and don't
have as much success, and they are talking about Six Sigma, or
something else, well, that doesn't do Six Sigma much good.
That's when I said earlier that the real reasons, I think Deming's
ideas are prospering is because they're more effective. That's
what will win over the long-term, and their challenges with doing
Dr. Deming's ideas.
Another reason why I think Deming has had such a long-term
success is, one of the things that makes it challenging is,
Deming's ideas are not prescriptive. He doesn't have a cookbook
for, "Do X, Y, and Z, and then you'll get a bonus." It makes it
frustrating for people when they're first trying to apply things.
They read some of Deming; they listen to some of Deming, and
they don't know what to do next, and that is, I think, a fair
criticism. It's a problem that people have when they want to
implement Deming. They start to pick up some of these ideas and
like them, but they don't know what to do next.

That's a problem initially, but it actually allows for him to stay
relevant and important for a long time, because what you have to
do is understand the ideas, and you have to apply them in your
specific context yourself. That may be a bit more difficult to get
started, but it means that you're not hamstrung by some sort of
simple-minded, "You have to do X, Y, Z," and if you don't...
As the world changes, and that sort of cookbook no longer works,
well, it no longer works. Deming, it's very difficult for me to see
how that happens. However, variation is being generated; it's
going to be important. You have to understand variation. When
you're looking at human systems and having people, you have to


have an understanding of psychology, a respect for people, and
make things go together, and manage human systems well.

Deming talks about that, but he's not very specific or prescriptive
at all about, "Well, what exactly am I supposed to do?" One of my
favorite small little things from Lean is, Deming really talked
about understanding Psychology as one of his four pillars. I think
respect for people is a much more powerful label on that same
idea.
How you actually show respect for people is not very prescriptive
in Deming. It does have some things that are fairly prescriptive,
like reduce extrinsic motivation, build intrinsic motivation, and
get rid of things like performance appraisals. Get rid of arbitrary
numerical targets. Show people how they are connected.
Deming didn't use the term value stream very much, but the
same concept was definitely there. Essentially with Deming, when
he talks about joy and work, one of the keys was tying the
person to their place in the value stream, so they see that I am
providing a valuable service to this end customer at this part of
the value stream.
In the great Charlie Chaplin film "Modern Times," that sort of
design of the person being a gadget in a big huge machine,
cranking out stuff, and all you do is turn a screw all day long,
every day, every week, every year; that's not very fulfilling.
If you understand what your role is in this sort of value stream,
and how you're helping the end customer get what they want,
that does allow people to get meaning from their work.
Now, you still also want them to do more than just turn screws
every time. But that idea of connecting you to the value stream is
somewhat prescriptive in Deming, but it's so broad that I don't
see how that goes out of vogue at any point. I think that's
another reason why Deming's ideas have flourished.

Joe: I'm not sure that it was his presentation skills that
flourished, because he could be pretty dry.

John: He was very dry, but I liked it. Here's one of the things
that's funny. If you took his presentations to a speech coach,
they definitely would want to totally and completely revamp
pretty much everything. But he had a huge amount of charisma.
If you watch a five-minutes, I think all you get is this person is a
horrible speaker. But he filled these four-day seminars with
thousands of people over and over and over again.
Now, most of the people you see today, filling it with thousands
of people are very difficult. If they do fill it with thousands of
people, they're very polished. They could be a politician up there,
talking about whatever they're talking about.
Deming did have charisma, and people really did feel it when
they were around him, even though the presentation style is
extremely dry and sort of crazy.

The aim of the W. Edwards Deming Institute is to foster
understanding of the Deming System of Profound Knowledge to
advance commerce, prosperity and peace.

Now, to advance commerce, prosperity and peace was what
Deming talked about as his personal aims that he had for himself
as a consultant. I think that's incredibly powerful, and I think it
directly ties to the thing you were talking about, of his
presentation style.

There was a core respect for people that was in everything that
Deming was talking about. From that sort of core principle, the
power of the speech, or peoples' connection to the speech was
driven.


Now, thousands of people went to these things. And there were
hundreds, or at a specific one, thousands that just didn't like this
stuff at all, crazy bunch of Looney Toons.
But lots of people connected to it very passionately and would go
back to more and more of them. I know my father went to at
least five or six of these four-day seminars. They would have
notes and keep going forever.
But Deming's connection to a very deep understanding is
something that I share. And the idea, it sounds commerce,
prosperity and peace, sounds like some highfaluting, unattainable
goal; I think, to most people. And it's a problem that people
would see a name like that and say that's way too grandiose, it's
going to stop you from being able to make any progress or do
anything.

But I think its core to what Deming was about. And it's very hard
for people to understand, especially people who grew up rich their
whole life.

Deming grew up in rural Iowa; I think it was, or Wyoming. Life
was hard. The Great Depression went on. Then, there was World
War Two. Then he was over in Japan, recovering from the
disaster of World War Two.
He helped the War Department on production matters during the
war, and then he was in Japan and further developing his
management system.

Peace is not something pulled out of the air. He sat through
World War One and World War Two. He was deeply involved in
Japan for decades, recovering from a massively destructive war.

He also traveled to the Third World, which I did and my father
did, and there are billions of people today that don't have running
water and don't have enough food.


Commerce and prosperity are what will allow those people to
have running water, running electricity and food. Peace is what
will allow those people to enjoy their lives.
I think that it's difficult for most people to connect to that idea,
but I think it was core in everything Deming was doing, and I
believe that it came through in his presentations. That was one of
the reasons why his not very dramatic and not polished
presentation style still drew people in.
He didn't really talk about those ideas at all, but I think people
can sense it over time, and you see that he had a connection to
these peoples' lives who were working in the Ford plant, who
were being...having their life sucked out of them in these very
unforgiving plants that many of our large organizations had back
then, and to some extent, still do today.

I think it fundamentally came from world wars and the Great
Depression and seeing Japan. But I think then he came back and
saw that you need to have joy in work. And that, for me, is the
key.
This was a long time ago, when I was first trying to figure out
what I wanted to do and how these things tied together. I really
like Deming's ideas, and I like that they're effective, but what I
care about is really those things, commerce, prosperity, peace,
joy in work, and joy in life. If I found something that will be more
effective tomorrow, I have no problem abandoning Deming's stuff
and going to something new and different. I don't think it'll
happen. I think there will be new ideas that can be plugged, but it
isn't my beliefs.
My desire is not to further Deming's ideas. It's to do these other
things, commerce, prosperity, and peace, and I think Deming's
ideas are the best way to get there. I think that's what Deming
was trying to do when he was finding every good idea he could to
help make that happen, but his driving force; I think, was trying

to make people's lives better, and that's very different than most
consultants' driving force, especially today.

It's very difficult for people today to grow up in the United States
and appreciate the value of prosperity and peace to the billions of
people in the world, but I don't think it was difficult for Deming to
understand.

Joe: I think that's a great thought to leave the podcast end on,
actually, John. Where is Deming Blog located? How can someone
read it and contact you?
John: The Deming Blog is at blog.deming.org. For me, you can
probably just search for John Hunter, but it's JohnHunter.com.
That will link to all sorts of stuff that I am involved in.
Joe: I hope to have you on another podcast. I think you have
a...
John: That would be great.
Joe: To talk about some of the things that you do. Your Curious
Cat blog has been around for an awful long time. You've done a
lot of things in...whether you want to call it management, Dr.
Deming, or Lean. You're a great wealth of knowledge there. I
want to thank you very much and I appreciate it.
This podcast will be available in the Business901 blog site and
also the Business901 iTunes store. So thanks, John.
John: Great. Thank you.



Joseph T. Dager
Business901
Phone: 260-918-0438
Skype: Biz901
Fax: 260-818-2022
Email: jtdager@business901.com
Website: http://www.business901.com
Twitter: @business901

Joe Dager is president of Business901, a firm specializing in
bringing the continuous improvement process to the sales and
marketing arena. He takes his process thinking of over thirty
years in marketing within a wide variety of industries and applies
it through Lean Marketing and Lean Service Design.

Visit the Lean Marketing Lab: Being part of this community will
allow you to interact with like-minded individuals and
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Hunter on Deming

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