Deming’s 14 points to managers for transforming business effectiveness

Along with PDSA, W. Edwards Deming is also famous for his 14 points to managers for transforming business effectiveness^[1]. These points aim to change the focus of management from growth through financial returns, to the more Agile approach of growth through investment, innovation and strong staff engagement.

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive, 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 a price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards 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 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, in order 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.
11. a. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership. b. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
12. a. 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. b. 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.

Despite being written nearly 40 years ago, leadership agility encapsulate most of these principles. For example, the Agile Retrospective process of review and reflect creates a culture of continuous quality and process improvement while the creation of effective, cross-functional and empowered teams, that have the authority and accountability to deliver, is at the very heart of business agility.

[1] Out of the Crisis, Deming, pp.23-24: Fourteen Points© Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of MIT Press (1982).