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Deming's
7 Deadly
Diseases
Yonatan
Reshef
Faculty of Business
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
- Lack of constancy of purpose to plan product and service that will
have a market and keep the company in business and provide jobs.
Quality is "the flavor of the month." It breeds a BOHICA (Bend Over! Here It Comes Again) mentality.
- Emphasis on short-term profits which
breeds short term thinking (just the
opposite from constancy of purpose to stay in business). It is fed by fear
of unfriendly takeover, and by push from bankers and owners for
dividends. The more important it seems to improve the next quarterly
"bottom line," the more likely it is to happen, even if the methods used
will destroy (e.g., downsizing, use of cheap materials, lying) the company later on.
- Personal review system, or evaluation of performance, merit rating,
annual review, or annual appraisal, by whatever name, for people in
management, the effects of which are devastating. Management by
objectives, on a go, no-go basis, is the same thing by another name. Management by fear would still be better.
If
the performance review stresses short term profits, quality will not be
important to the worker. To achieve higher profits, and quickly, employees
might use cheap materials, cut corners, lie. In addition,
performance reviews stress individual performance over the team effort that a quality job requires. Finally, if a process is stable, individual
performance will vary randomly about the process mean, with half the
workers being above average and half below average. Unless the normal
variation is taken into account, people might be rewarded and punished
on the basis of random chance.
- Mobility of management: job hopping.
Mobility of management works against the manager becoming familiar with
the process/people he manages, which works against him recognizing
opportunities for improvement and having enough knowledge to help the
workers improve their performance. Also, since he will be moving on, his interest will be in the short
term rather than long term performance of the company.
- Use of visible figures only for management, with little or no
consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable.
Examples:
1) By treating one customer poorly, how many potential customers have
you lost? 2) In a meeting, no one says no to the boss. What
does it mean? 3) In a class, the professor asks how many students
are unhappy with the course. No one says a negative word.
What does it mean? 4) In a country, 95% of the voters vote for
the leader. What does it mean? 5) What is the cost/benefit
of being nice/rude to workers? 6) Professor A gets high student
evaluations; professor B's evaluations are lower. What does it
mean?
- Excessive medical costs
(at the firm level and the state/national level). Potential
remedies: Stress the importance of safety and wellness at work; reform
the health care system.
- Excessive costs of warranty/liability,
fuelled by lawyers that receive contingency fees. The US has more
lawyers per capita than any other country in the world, and they spend
much of their professional time finding people to sue. The remedy
to this disease will probably have to come from the government.
As consumers we pay for the costs of warranty structures. In an
overly litigious society, business is distracted from the main goal of
serving customers with high-quality goods and services to just trying
not to be sued.
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