Читать книгу Driving Eureka! - Doug Hall - Страница 15

Innovation Engineering applies the system thinking of Dr. W. Edwards Deming to innovation, strategy, and the way we work together. For those who don’t know of Dr. Deming, here’s a quick overview.

After World War II, the Japanese economy and manufacturing base were in shambles. The country had a negative net worth. To rebuild it, American General Douglas MacArthur supported a program to educate business leaders in smarter ways of working. In 1950, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a statistician from Powell, Wyoming, conducted a series of seminars in Japan. His mission was to teach system thinking to Japanese business leaders. He showed them how to approach manufacturing as a system of interconnected parts—instead of as a series of silos—to increase quality while also reducing costs.

The leaders of Japanese companies embraced the message. Japanese industry was so thankful for Dr. Deming’s contribution to the rebirth of their economy that they named their national quality award the Deming Prize. The Japanese emperor awarded him the Second Order of the Sacred Treasure in recognition of his contributions to Japan. Shoichiro Toyoda, the first president of the Toyota Motor Corporation, described Dr. Deming’s impact on Toyota this way:

Every day I think of what he meant to us. Deming is the core of our management.

—Shoichiro Toyoda, first president,

Toyota Motor Corporation

I believe that the key to Dr. Deming’s success was that he blended logical, rational discipline with emotional, soul-inspiring hope. He used his statistical science to enable the human spirit. At many of his four-day seminars he would start by saying: “Why are we here? We are here to come alive, to have fun, to have joy in work.”

In the early 1980s, as Dr. Deming predicted would occur, the Western world faced the invasion of higher-quality products from Japanese manufacturers at better prices. It was called the Japanese miracle. In just 30 years they had risen from the ashes of war to challenge the world.

Dr. Deming’s role in the Japanese transformation was “discovered” in the USA with the airing of an NBC White Paper documentary by Clare Crawford-Mason titled “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”

The television special featured Dr. Deming and the story of Nashua Corporation, where the CEO, Bill Conway, had hired Dr. Deming to help him transform his company. The TV special discussed Nashua’s success with applying Dr. Deming’s mindset to the company’s carbonless paper division. It was a story I knew well, as my father, M. Bradford “Buzz” Hall, had helped lead that project as director of central engineering.

The TV special made Dr. Deming, at the age of 80, the management rock star of the 1980s. He led up to 40 (four-day) Deming Seminars a year, well into his nineties. His teaching of system thinking ignited the greatest change in how companies are managed in 100 years or more.

More on the history of Dr. Deming’s work can be found in the back of this book, along with an interview with Kevin Cahill, president and executive director of the W. Edwards Deming Institute and grandson of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Additional information, including a link to the original NBC documentary, can be found at the Deming Institute website: deming.org.