The Quick Fix
Posted on October 10, 2005 Comments (3)
The Fall 2005 issue of the Deming Institute newsletter includes a copy of a letter Dr. Deming sent to Time magazine in 1981.
Your article about Japan in TIME for 30 March 1981 is excellent, but the paragraph concerning my work is ridiculous and can do a lot of harm to American industry at the very time when they need guidance. Dr. Deming did not just give a lecture in 1950. He gave 35 lectures in the summer of 1950 to engineers and to top management. Six months later he was there again, and six months after that yet again. He has made 19 trips to Japan. One trouble with American industry today is that top management supposes that one lecture or one day will do it. “Come, spend a day with us, and do for us what you did for Japan, that we too may be saved.”
It is not so simple. Few people in top management in America understand their responsibilities and know that they must serve a life term on quality and productivity from now on, under competent leadership.
W. Edwards Deming
Many still search for simple quick answers. Management improvement most often requires a great deal of thought, study, experimentation and effort.
3 Responses to “The Quick Fix”
Leave a Reply
RSS Feed
July 19th, 2006 @ 8:23 pm
[...] Mimicking is almost never a successful strategy. What can be successful is learning from what others do well and adopting the good ideas in ways that makes sense in your system. [...]
May 5th, 2008 @ 8:30 am
[...] Dr. Deming quotes – Instant Pudding – Deming on being Destroyed by Best Efforts – Where to Start Improvement by John Hunter [...]
November 22nd, 2010 @ 9:09 pm
[...] recipes for management. It is one of the frustrations people have with Dr. Deming: that there is no cookbook telling you what you should go do as a manager. You need to understand things like: interactions, variation, psychology, systems thinking, how we [...]