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Thirty years ago last Friday, 17th June 1992, I went to Seattle to attend a two-day seminar by W. Edwards Deming. At the time I was the VP of Engineering at Compass Design Automation, meaning I was in charge of all product development. I just looked on Wikipedia and Deming was born in 1900, but in October, so he was 91 years old when he presented that two-day seminar. He would pass on in December the following year at 93. In the coffee and lunch breaks at the seminar, he was gracious enough to sign copies of his books. That's my copy of Out of the Crisis in the photo below, signed by Deming on 18th June, the second day of the seminar.

Until very late in his life, he was ignored and largely unknown in his native country, the United States, but he was worshiped as a hero in Japan. Indeed, the annual Deming Prize was established in Japan in 1951, over 40 years before I was at that seminar. It is awarded both to individuals for contributions to Total Quality Management (TQM) and companies that successfully implement TQM. Deming basically invented TQM. The prize is not restricted to Japanese individuals and companies. It has been won by companies such as Florida Power & Light (the first non-Japanese winner of the prize), Lucent (the first American manufacturer to win), Tata Steel, and Pentel ("a first for the stationery industry")

His book, Out of the Crisis, was directed at American management. It was first published in 1982 and my signed copy from 1992 was its 13th printing. And since he wrote the date under his signature, that is how I know that it was 30 years ago that I was listening to him.

In the preface he is very critical of American management:

The basic cause of sickness in American industry and resulting unemployment is the failure of top management to manage.
...
The causes usually cited for failure of a company are costs of start-up, overruns on costs, depreciation of excess inventory, competition — anything but the actual cause, pure and simple bad management.
...
Dependence on protection by tariffs and laws to "buy American" only encourages incompetence.

Later in the book, he creates 14 points that are:

The basis for the transformation of American industry. This same system formed the basis for lessons for top management in Japan in 1950 and subsequent years.

He emphasized that these points apply anywhere, to organizations small and large, service and manufacturing, companies and divisions. So here are the 14 points:

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

11a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.

11b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.

12a. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

12b. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.

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

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.

You will notice that some of these principles seem more Asian than American, with a lot of focus on the organization or group rather than the individual.

One of the most memorable segments of the seminar was where members of the audience came up on stage to be "employees". Their task was to take a paddle with a couple of hundred indentations, dip it into a big box with mostly white and some red beads and "try" and get all white (good) with no red (defective). It was interesting seeing the people on stage trying so hard to avoid red beads even though it is just a statistical effect, and nothing they could do would affect the color of the beads. Deming, having obviously given this part of the course for decades (I had read about it years before) played his part perfectly, praising the person who only got one red bead as being a model employee, and berating the person who got ten red beads, and firing him by sending him back to his seat. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate that in many cases, the outcome of a job depends purely on the statistical nature of the equipment and the training the employees have been provided.

You can see a video of the bead experiment with Deming (not from the exact seminar I attended):

In practice, a lot of the detail of implementation is bound up in a process called "continuous improvement" or sometimes by its Japanese name "kanban". I won't do a deep dive into this, or this post will turn into an encyclopedia,  but here are the six principles of continuous improvement. If you want a deeper dive, try this recent blog post (December 2021) Six Core Principles of the Continuous Improvement Model.

1. Improvements are based on small changes rather than major paradigm shifts or new inventions
2. Employee ideas are valuable
3. Incremental improvements are typically inexpensive to implement
4. Employees take ownership and are involved in improvement
5. Improvement is reflective
6. Improvement is measurable and potentially repeatable

This was a message that the semiconductor industry has taken into account more and more. Almost everything is automated and so defects on the wafer are almost always either random or due to equipment drifting out of tolerance. Semiconductor manufacturing is also a process of hundreds of tiny improvements that add up to get yields to the extremely high numbers that we generally see today.

It seems that after the war, in the 1950s "Made in Japan" was synonymous with low quality. The idea anyone in the US might buy a Japanese car was laughable. In fact, when the Japanese first bought vehicles to the US, it was Honda bringing a small 125cc motorcycle. Of course, today, Toyota/Lexus is probably the most respected automotive company, especially from a quality point of view. In the 70s and 80s, Japanese memory manufacturers drove the US manufacturers out of the market, partially due to higher quality. When we bought a new rice cooker, my Chinese wife refused to buy anything other than a Japanese one. I'm not going to claim that all this results from Deming's Total Quality Management, but he set the Japanese industry on a path and a culture of quality that continues to this day, two and a half decades after his death.

Another thing I remember from the seminar was Deming talked about buying a new suit or jacket. He reached into the pocket and there were several paper tickets with things like "inspected by 0256" on them. He was adamant that this was the wrong thing to be doing. The manufacturing process needs improvement (sewing machines, irons, etc.) and inspection does nothing to achieve that. I'm not entirely sure I go along with that. In semiconductor manufacturing we do a lot of inspection as a way of driving improvements in the manufacturing process, and there is no reason that could not happen with clothing too.

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