leadership
...term partnership. 5. Improve constantly the system of production and service. (4) Perfection is not a one-time effort. Management is compelled to repetitively look for ways to decrease mistakes and advance quality. 6. Institute training. (4) Too often, workers have learned their job from another worker who has never trained properly. They are forced to follow meaningless instruction. They can’t do their jobs because no one tells them how. 7. Institute leadership. (4) The job of a supervisor is not to tell people what to do or to penalize them but to lead. Leading consists of helping people do a better job and of learning by objective methods that is in need of one-on-one help. 8. Drive out fear. (4) Many employees are afraid to ask questions or to take an opinion; even when they do not understand what the job is or what is correct or incorrect. People will continue to do things the wrong way, or to not do them at all. The financial loss from fear is awful. (2) It is necessary for better quality and productivity that people feel secure. (2) 9. Break down barriers between staff areas. (4) Often departments are competing with each other or have goals that conflict. They do not work as a team so they can solve or anticipate problems. Worse, one department’s goals may cause trouble for another. 10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce. (4) This never helped anybody do a good job. Allow people put up their own slogans. 11. Eliminate numerical quotas. (4) Quotas take account only of numbers, not quality or methods. They are usually a guarantee of ineffectiveness and high cost. A person, to hold a job, meets a quota at any cost, without considering damage to the company. 12. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship. (4) People are willing to do a good job and bothered when they can’t. Too often, unwise supervisors, damaged equipment, and flawed materials stand in the way. These barriers must be removed. 13. Institute a vigorous program of education and retraining. (4) Both management and the employees will have to be educated in the new methods, including teamwork and statistical techniques. 14. Take action to accomplish the transformation. (5) It will take a special top management team with a plan of action to carry out the quality mission. Workers can’t do it by themselves, nor can managers. A significant group of people in the company must understand the Fourteen Points and the Obstacles. The Obstacles: (7) 1. Neglect of long-range planning. 2. Relying on technology to solve problems. 3. Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions. 4. Excuses. The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Dr. Deming taught that by adopting appropriate principles of management, organizations could increase quality and simultaneously reduce costs. The management philosophy of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, an American physicist and statistician who taught in Japan during the decades following World War II, is already familiar to nearly all-Japanese adults and to many Americans. (3) The Japanese captured the world auto and electronics markets by following Deming's advice to practice continual improvement and think of manufacturing as a system, not as bits and pieces. (3) Workers work in the system, which management created. Management must work on the system to improve the process. To study the processes that make up their system, management must involve those who actually use those processes, the people who actually do the work. The people who build the product or provide the service are the only people who really understand the processes that management has assigned them. Dr. Deming’s theory of quality focused management changes the original role of a supervisor from giving orders and giving out punishments and rewards, to leading and supporting the workers in improving quality. Along with making changes according to the fourteen points, management must avoid or remove each of the several obstacles. Dr. Deming feels that the obstacles, like sudden improvement accomplished by affirmation of faith are somewhat easier to cure than the Obstacles, such as lack of constancy of purpose, emphasis on short-term profits, mobility of management. (1) Sadly though, several of the Obstacles are exactly what American business sch...