Deming - Management Accountability

"Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste... The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste. The inevitable result is loss of market. Loss of market begets unemployment. Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through IMPROVEMENT OF PRODUCT AND SERVICE for the future, not by the quarterly dividend. It is no longer socially acceptable to dump employees on to the heap of unemployed. Loss of market, and resulting unemployment, are not foreordained. They are NOT inevitable. They are man-made. The basic cause of sickness in American industry and resulting unemployment is failure of top management to manage."- W. Edwards Deming

Everything that Deming taught is relevant and applicable today, 40+ years later, regardless of the industry, be it software development or manufacturing. This insightful and somewhat scathing excerpt above is what he chose for the first page of the preface to "Out of the Crisis."

It struck me that in today's U.S., we seem to be accepting of organizations that "dump employees," and we may even buy into the justification of reducing OPEX and increasing profit. We shouldn't.

My goal in posting this wasn't to focus on the widespread prevalence of management failures in technology but rather to get started on something that I've wanted to get started on for a long time, which is to: Highlight some of Deming's lesser-quoted wisdom and identify lessons that are particularly relevant today.