Podcasts about asno

Tierra de El hombre garabato y Asno de Tu otra bonita. En el repaso a la historia del pop español recordamos, entre otros, a Ethel y Los Draks (1971), Los Auténticos (1982), Mikel Erentxun (1992), Niños Eléctricos (2005), ADN (2016) o Monte Ventura (2020).

Velika večina članic Evropske unije razmišlja o uporabi začasnega odstopanja od proračunskih pravil unije za potrebe zvišanja obrambnih izdatkov, je dejal evropski komisar za gospodarstvo Valdis Dombrovskis. Članice so po njegovih besedah pozvali, naj za sprožitev nacionalne odstopne klavzule zaprosijo do konca aprila, saj želijo zagotoviti usklajeno delovanje. Druge teme: - Beograd ta konec tedna v znamenju shoda podpornikov srbskih oblasti. - Šolska stroka opozarja na nedomišljenost uvedbe predmeta Tehnika in digitalne tehnologije v 7. razred - S prepovedjo elektronskih cigaret z vsemi aromami, razen tobačno, naj bi zaščitili mlade.

Jest wiele badań, które pokazują, że te kraje, które skutecznie i mocno chronią własność, rozwijają się lepiej. Jak do tego mają się prawa lokatorów i strefy czystego transportu? Ale czy to znaczy, że własność musi być traktowana jak świętość i że zawsze najbardziej sprzyjająca będzie jej jak najmocniejsza ochrona? To nie jest już takie nieoczywiste. A ... Artykuł WN 083 Święta własność prywatna pochodzi z serwisu Bartłomiej Biga.

Svet je v pričakovanju ruskega odgovora na ameriško-ukrajinski dogovor o 30-dnevnem premirju. Ameriški predstavniki so se odpravili v Moskvo, ruski predsednik Vladimir Putin pa je obiskal vojake v regiji Kursk. Operacija proti ukrajinski vojski, ki je tja vdrla avgusta, je po davišnjih navedbah Kremlja v sklepni fazi. V oddaji pa tudi o tem: - Parlament Republike Srbske sprožil postopek za spremembo ustave - Na vladi danes predlog o gostinstvu, ki omejuje kratkotrajni najem stanovanj - Rokometaši v kvalifikacijah za evropsko prvenstvo do pomembne zmage v Skopju

Esta semana Jose, más solo que Shrek antes de conocer a Asno, hace repaso habitual por las noticias semanales del sector y también por las noticias con olor a cacota. Reaccionamos a los trailers de The Last of Us y de Death Stranding 2 (qué ganitas, ay omá!), terminamos al fin el Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth... Y os contamos sobre Cobra Kai, DareDevil Born Again y Anora, la triunfadora de la última edición de los Oscars. Todo ello, mientras charlamos con nuestra excelente comunidad. Gracias chavales, se os quiere!! - INTRO (VERSIÓN EXTENDIDA) (00:00:00) - PRESENTACIÓN Y RESUMEN (00:02:36) - OJETE AVIZOR (00:04:09) - Comic-Con en Málaga! / Velada año 5 de Ibai en Sevilla! / Futura Xbox portátil / Día de Mario / Hentai fuera de la eShop (00:22:37) - REACCIONES a los trailers de la 2ª Temporada de The Last of Us y Death Stranding 2 On the beach. - NOTICIAS DE MIERDA (01:07:10) - Vinculación de cuenta Xbox en Forza Horizon 5 de Play / Futuro del PSSR / Filtración de Sony usando IA / Gears of War Collection sin multi? / Cierres de Ballistic Moon y Super Mega Team - THE FUTURE IS NOW (01:26:58) - Like a Dragon Infinite Wealth al fin terminado! - ¿QUÉ PASARÁ, QUÉ MISTERIO HABRÁ...? (01:41:27) - El futuro incierto de este canal de Twitch... - ENDING (01:48:05) PD: Twitch ha silenciado del minuto 33 al 36 por derechos de autor en el trailer de Death Stranding... En YouTube (excepto en Rusia) sí se puede ver, porque al no monetizar no se ha bloqueado. ⏬¡Síguenos o pasa el rato con nosotros aquí!⏬ - Twitch: https://twitch.tv/ILTjuegos - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@iltjuegos - iVoox: https://www.ivoox.com/podcast-iltjuegos_sq_f1446764_1.html - Spotify: http://spotify.iltjuegos.com - Apple Podcasts: http://itunes.iltjuegos.com - TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@iltjuegos - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iltjuegos - X (Twitter): https://x.com/iltjuegos - Telegram: https://t.me/ILTjuegos ❤️Agradecimientos❤️ - Gracias a tod@s por vernos o escucharnos cada semana. - Gracias a Arcade Planet por patrocinar el programa. - Gracias a Jose Manuel Fernández 'Spidey' por el tema chiptune del outro y a todo Metodologic por estar siempre ahí. - Gracias a Suno por brindarnos una IA para hacer el tema de la intro "Los chachos se han pasado al Twitch". - Gracias a https://ocremix.org y a todos los artistas que aparecen en el streaming con sus creaciones como cama musical y que hacen este programa mejor. Si estás escuchando la versión podcast de este streaming, recordarte que puedes consultar los artistas de todos los temas a través de la versión streaming (Twitch o YouTube) de este episodio de ILT Juegos.

No ano em que cada mês parece ter 3000 dias, chegou o carnaval. Exceto nos lugares que já têm blocos e festas desde a virada do ano. Quem sou eu para julgar? Esse é o assunto de hoje, mas antes…Recadinhos➡ Estou publicando cris dicas em geral — mas normalmente livros — no meu canal do Instagram e no site crisdicas.com.br. Algumas indicações podem ter link de afiliados para eu ganhar uma comissão, mas todas são sinceras.➡ Não se esquece do nosso Discord, o melhor canto da Internet. O mais novo canal é o #comidinhas, onde o Robinho Bravo meio que ressuscitou o Coisas da Rua e todo mundo dá dicas de restaurantes e receitas.➡ Amanhã começa a nova fase do Clube de Cultura do Boa Noite Internet, com o livro Nação Dopamina.➡ Depois do carnaval, vou abrir a nova turma do Apresentashow, meu curso ao vivo que vai te ensinar a fazer apresentações no trabalho que são um espetáculo. Já deixa seu e-mail na lista de espera para ficar sabendo antes de todo mundo. Como sempre faço, vou dar sessões de mentoria grátis para as primeiras 10 pessoas que se matricularem.O Boa Noite Internet é uma publicação apoiada pelos leitores. Para receber novos posts e apoiar meu trabalho, cadastre-se em uma assinatura gratuita ou paga.Qual vai ser sua fantasia de carnaval?Quando eu era criança, eu tinha uma boa relação com o carnaval — tirando a parte de que meu aniversário muitas vezes era “atrapalhado” pela data. Porque… né? Carnaval! Verão, música, todo mundo alegre. Tentar ficar acordado para ver os desfiles na Globo, ser mandado pro quarto quando começavam as transmissões dos bailes de clube. Ir nas versões infantis destes bailes fantasiado de policial americano. Fora que a semana de carnaval era mais uma desculpa para ir encontrar a primalhada em Miguel Pereira e só curtir a vida mágica dos anos 1970 e 80.Na adolescência, me achei O Inteligentão quando entendi a conexão entre carnaval e quaresma. Não era a páscoa que vinha 40 dias depois do carnaval, mas o carnaval que acontecia 40 dias antes da páscoa. A festa era a despedida dos prazeres antes do período de abstinência radical. Foi assim que virei o adolescente chato que dizia: “Sabia que o carnaval é uma festa religiosa?” Já sou palestrinha desde cedo, como vocês podem ver.Até que, não tem tanto tempo assim, entendi que o carnaval não é só uma despedida da farra antes do jejum, é mais que a famosa “festa de Baco”. É um momento em que estamos autorizados a experimentar identidades diferentes das dos outros 360 dias do ano. De deixar de “ser” para somente “estar”.Sempre me chamou a atenção a contradição de o mesmo homem que seria considerado menos masculino (a maior desgraça possível na nossa sociedade) por usar uma camiseta rosa no trabalho poder sair de Sabrina Sato completa no bloco e ninguém questionar. Na quarta-feira, a fantasia volta para o armário (ou direto pro lixo), assim como a mudança. O que aconteceu no carnaval, acaba no carnaval.Ou uma pessoa com quem me relacionei no século passado, que hoje entendo que era uma das figuras mais conservadoras que já conheci. Mas que contava com orgulho como adorava sair em trio elétrico cheirando loló e competindo com as amigas pra ver quem beijava mais. E tudo bem, não havia conflito nem hipocrisia. É só carnaval.O carnaval não é só a festa da bebida ou da pegação — mas se quiser, pode. É o festival do “viva outras vidas”, materializado nas fantasias, só que muito mais do que “eu sou o Superomi”.Essa ideia de troca de papéis é antiga. Em Roma, séculos antes de Cristo, a Saturnália já promovia uma inversão social temporária. Durante esta festa, celebrada no solstício de inverno (a época do Natal, que também foi influenciado pelo festival de Saturno), os romanos suspendiam as regras da sociedade. Escravos e senhores trocavam de lugar — não só simbolicamente, mas em aspectos práticos da vida. Os escravos podiam comer à mesa com seus senhores, vestir suas roupas, falar sem restrições e até dar ordens. Os senhores os serviam. Lojas, escolas e tribunais fechavam. Guerras eram interrompidas.Os romanos usavam o pileus — um chapéu cônico que simbolizava a liberdade — e trocavam presentes simples como velas e pequenas estatuetas. As ruas se enchiam, a cidade inteira se entregava a banquetes, bebedeiras e jogos de azar, normalmente restritos. Um “rei da folia” era escolhido por sorteio para presidir o caos festivo.Quando o cristianismo virou a religião oficial do império, a igreja tentou substituir essas festas pagãs por celebrações em nome de Jesus, mas o espírito de inversão social já estava enraizado na cultura. Assim, o desejo humano de escapar temporariamente das regras encontrou novos caminhos, novos nomes e novas datas no calendário, mesmo na própria estrutura eclesiástica. Na Europa medieval, a mais famosa destas festas foi a festum fatuorum, a “Festa dos Tolos”, celebrada por clérigos em igrejas da França. Durante um dia, os padres de menor hierarquia zombavam de seus superiores, escolhiam um “Bispo dos Tolos” e realizavam paródias de cerimônias religiosas. Não só o sagrado virava profano, o sério se transformava em cômico.Existia também a Festa do Asno (festum asinorum, porque tudo fica mais católico em latim), onde um burrico era levado para dentro da igreja e celebrado como figura central, em homenagem ao corajoso animal que carregou a Sagrada Família na fuga para o Egito. Ao final da missa, em vez de dizer “vão em paz”, o padre zurrava três vezes, e o público respondia também com zurros no lugar do tradicional “amém”. A Igreja acabou proibindo as duas celebrações nos anos 1400, mas a ideia de um período de licença social não desapareceu.O nosso Rei Momo é a personificação moderna desta tradição de troca-troca. Ele não é o rei de verdade, mas por quatro dias recebe as chaves da cidade e instala seu reinado temporário. A confusão começa, a ordem é invertida, a zoeira impera. A origem do personagem está em Momo, deus grego da zombaria e do sarcasmo, o primeiro sarcasticuzão, sempre pronto pra apontar defeitos, mesmo nos outros deuses — que levou, ora ora, à sua expulsão do Olimpo. Quando a figura chegou ao Brasil no século 19, a ideia era coroar um homem gordo, bonachão, comilão e beberrão para simbolizar os excessos permitidos naqueles dias. É o anti-rei perfeito, que governa não pela austeridade, mas pela permissividade. A escolha do Momo carioca é evento oficial da prefeitura.E tem que ser. A coroação do Rei Momo é um ritual carregado de significado. O prefeito entrega as chaves da cidade ao rei da folia, numa encenação que diz algo como: “O poder real fica suspenso. Agora quem manda é a festa.”Em um mundo cada vez mais centrado na identidade, o carnaval é a hora de ser quem você não é, em uma sociedade que, ali, não funciona mais nas regras anteriores. Mas nem todo mundo se aproveita disso e fica preso nos seus personagens. É por isso que tenho uma leve implicância com um bloco de São Paulo que só toca “punk e rock pesado” (em ritmo de carnaval). Porque seus fundadores não querem ouvir essas “músicas chatas”, sejam elas marchinhas, sambas ou Ivete. Era pra ser inclusivo, achei só preconceituoso.Se o carnaval é o momento de dissolvermos nossas identidades para tentar outras experiências, toca Arerê sim, pô! Deixa os Ratos de Porão pro resto do ano. Mas tudo bem, sábado pularemos lá, porque carnaval também é estar com a nossa galera. Tenho até amigos que são roqueiros.Toda essa história de inversão da ordem se encaixa com o cristianismo ser considerado “a religião do perdão”. Jesus morreu pelos nossos pecados. Jesus existe para perdoar nossos pecados. E o carnaval é o maior perdão do ano. Enquanto aquela prefeita do Maranhão quer trocar o carnaval por um evento gospel (parece que vai rolar mesmo), dá para tentar ver o feriado não como uma contradição aos valores cristãos, mas seu complemento necessário. E se a reza ficasse pra, sei lá, pensando alto aqui, os 40 dias depois do carnaval? Desruptei agora, diz aí.Mas calma. Carnaval não é bagunça. É o famoso “se combinar direitinho…”, mas tem que combinar. Quando eu era um garoto juvenil, comecei a namorar uma menina poucas semanas antes do carnaval. Ela já estava com viagem marcada para a Região dos Lagos e, quando nos encontramos na quarta-feira, tinha um cara na porta da casa dela. Foi o primeiro “é meu primo” da minha carreira. Tudo bem, eu sobrevivi. Era só ter combinado.Então, apesar de todo esse papo de inversão, o carnaval também tem que ter muito respeito. Não é porque na quarta-feira tudo está perdoado que você vai beijar quem não quer ser beijado, ou abusar do espaço do amiguinho. Fantasia não é salvo-conduto. “Não é não” segue valendo. A inversão de papéis funciona ao haver consentimento de todas as partes envolvidas.O que me traz de volta ao cara que se veste de mulher no carnaval, mas não “vira gay” no resto do ano. A questão não é tão simples quanto parece. Ele pode se vestir de mulher, de indígena ou de qualquer fantasia sem consequências de longo prazo. A quarta-feira chega, ele volta ao terno, à vida normal, ao privilégio. O mesmo não acontece no sentido inverso, né? Eu fico aqui imaginando uma cena de carnaval onde um cara vestido de mulher é assediado por uma mulher vestida de homem.O carnaval é uma tentativa de quebra das relações de poder, mas essas relações continuam existindo, é claro. O cidadão romano sabe que não virou escravo para sempre. É só brincadeirinha. Idolatramos drag queens e pessoas trans por quatro dias para, logo depois, voltarmos a uma sociedade que as marginaliza. Vivemos no país que lidera o ranking de assassinatos de pessoas trans.Lá atrás, o carnaval era um jeito dos reis e papas dizerem “aproveitem aí, acreditem que vocês agora estão no poder”. Será que mudou? O negro vira estrela da TV, a mulher vira rainha (da bateria), o morador da comunidade é destaque do samba-enredo. Até mesmo o contraventor que financia a escola é aplaudido na avenida. Ali pode, depois volte para onde você veio, por favor.Se é assim, o carnaval é uma verdadeira quebra ou só uma válvula de escape que mantém tudo como sempre foi? O historiador russo Mikhail Bakhtin dizia que o riso e a festa podem ser subversivos, mas também podem servir para reforçar o sistema. A inversão temporária alivia as tensões sem ameaçar a estrutura. Se sabemos que tudo volta ao normal na quarta-feira, não há perigo real de mudança. A transgressão é permitida porque é passageira. Visto assim, o carnaval é uma festa de inversão de papéis e, por isso mesmo, um ritual de aceitação do resto do ano.Quem acompanhou o Clube de Cultura de “A crise da narração”, vai lembrar de Byung-Chul Han contando que antes da chegada do “storyselling” os feriados tinham função narrativa, contavam uma história coletiva. Hoje, viraram só mais uma data para o consumo, o próximo presente a ser comprado. Será que o carnaval é a última das festas que ainda carrega um significado, ou também virou só “vou beber muito”? Para mim, parte da resposta está em todos os “pré-carnavais” e “carnaval fora de época”. Não há calendário nem ritual, só uma balada temática.Mas esse não é o assunto de hoje. Só quero dizer o seguinte: aproveite o carnaval para tentar ser quem você não é. Pense no que a palavra fantasia pode significar. Nem que seja algo simples como “menos crítico comigo mesmo” ou “não ficar pensando no amanhã”. Imagine possibilidades. Talvez o você do carnaval tenha alguma coisa pra ensinar ao você do resto do ano. De um jeito ou de outro, tudo se acaba na quarta-feira.Por hoje é sóCuidem de si, cuidem dos seus. Mais que tudo, divirtam-se. Até a próxima.crisdias This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit boanoiteinternet.com.br/subscribe

Zwyciężczyni XIII edycji Rising Stars Prawnicy - liderzy jutra przybliża, dlaczego mediacja to skuteczna alternatywa dla procesu sądowego. Dagmara Miler, specjalistka w dziedzinie prawa własności intelektualnej, w rozmowie z Moniką Kozłowską odpowie na pytania takie jak: czy mediacja w biznesie rzeczywiście ma sens? Co jest najbardziej zaskakujące w tego typu sprawach? Dlaczego dobry pełnomocnik i mediator to klucz do rozwiązanej sprawy? Co dzieje się, kiedy emocje biorą górę podczas mediacji? Prawo na Oko - praktycznie i w punkt! AUTOREKLAMABądź na bieżąco z innowacjami prawniczymi – dołącz do naszego newslettera-->https://bit.ly/41ss0STPobierz nasz ebook i odkryj, jak efektywnie zarządzać finansami swojej kancelarii poprzez konkretne wskaźniki i cele --> https://bit.ly/3ESPWGc 

Gospodinjstva bodo za omrežnino za električno energijo januarja in februarja odštela manj. To izhaja iz danes sprejetega zakona o nujnih ukrepih za omilitev posledic obračuna visoke omrežnine za gospodinjske odjemalce. Poslanci so ga na izredni seji državnega zbora podprli brez razprave s 44 glasovi za in nobenim proti. Ukrep sicer prihaja le nekaj tednov pred iztekom regulacije cene električne energije, kar pa bo uporabnike znova udarilo po žepu. Drugi poudarki oddaje: - Po posvetu s šolniki vlada potrjevanje predloga novele zakona, ki naj bi zagotovila razvoj in kakovost šolstva, prestavila na prihodnji teden. - Poljska postaja vodilna obrambna sila Evropske unije in na čelu povezave poziva druge članice k dvigu stroškov za obrambo. - Proruandski uporniki prekršili premirje na vzhodu DR Kongo; iz mesta Goma poročajo o množičnih posilstvih in pobojih žensk.

Poslanci državnega zbora so dopoldne na kratki izredni seji brez razprave s 44 glasovi za in nobenim proti sprejeli zakon o nujnih ukrepih za omilitev posledic obračuna visoke omrežnine za gospodinjske odjemalce. Zakon prinaša znižanje najvišjih tarif za obračunsko moč za januar in februar, kar bo gospodinjstvom prineslo nekoliko nižje položnice za ta dva meseca. Izpad v višini 19 milijonov evrov bo pokril sistemski operater prenosnega omrežja Eles. Druge teme: - Šolniki z novelo o organizaciji in financiranju vzgoje in izobraževanja zadovoljni, a so pričakovali več. - Izraelski obrambni minister vojski odredil priprave na odhod Palestincev iz Gaze. - Krajane Apač razburja obnova vojaškega strelišča, danes pričakujejo pojasnila.

Asno de Tu otra bonita y La escalera azul de Éxtasis. En el recorrido por la historia del pop español recordamos, entre otros, a Los Pekenikes (1962), Rubi (1983), Carlos Berlanga (1990), Johnny Betadine (2005), Gallos (2017) o Lisasinson (2023).

Leszek Balcerowicz architekt polskiej transformacji gospodarczej w rozmowie z Szymonem Glonkiem w Obiektywnie o Biznesie podzielił się refleksjami na temat polskiej gospodarki. Dyskusje dotyczyły reform z lat 90., obecnych wyzwań budżetowych, inwestycji, polityki społecznej oraz roli państwa w gospodarce. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

V delu gospodarstva so se stroški za omrežnine nesorazmerno zvišali brez možnosti prilagoditve in brez prehodnega obdobja - tako pravijo na gospodarski zbornici. Od pristojnih pričakujejo, da začasno uvedejo staro metodologijo obračunavanja, hkrati pa pripravijo povsem nov omrežninski akt, ki bo upošteval značilnosti gospodarstva. Anketa, ki so jo opravili pri 58-ih podjetjih, kaže, da so se stroški najbolj zvišali tem, ki so priključeni na srednjo in visoko napetost in ne obremenjujejo distribucijskega omrežja. Drugi poudarki oddaje: - Socialni partnerji skoraj v celoti uskladili predlog novele zakona o zdravstveni dejavnosti. - "Slovenija, mala na Zemlji, vendar velika v Vesolju" odmevalo na uradnem dogodku ob začetku polnopravnega članstva v Evropski vesoljski agenciji. - Minulo leto tudi uradno najtoplejše; povprečna temperatura za več kot stopinjo in pol presegla tisto v predindustrijskem obdobju.

In the final episode of the series, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss the difference between typical companies using traditional management and more successful Deming-style companies. If productivity and performance are so much better, why do companies stick with traditional management? TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I continue my discussion and conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize winning author of The Lean CEO. And ladies and gentlemen, I just received my copy finally. Productivity Reimagined, it just arrived from Amazon. You can get it there. And that's the latest book that he's come out with. And this is exploring applying Lean and Deming Management Principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is moving forward with productivity. Jacob, take it away.   0:00:41.7 Jacob Stoller: Oh, thank you, Andrew. Great to be here once again. Yeah. Moving forward. That's really Chapter 13. Whether you consider that, hopefully you consider 13 lucky as I think they do in Italy.   0:00:57.4 AS: We do in Thailand.   0:01:00.4 JS: Oh, really? Wonderful. Okay. Perfect. Anyway, so I wrote in the book, I sort of defined where we're trying to go by describing two companies; a typical company, and then the company that we would aspire to for maximum productivity. So I'm gonna read those, just to illustrate. "Company A follows traditional top-down management practices. Leaders determine how the work is to be done, and give orders to their staff accordingly. Individuals, functional groups and departments are treated as independent entities under centralized control. Pay and promotion are determined by individual performance according to a set of predetermined criteria. Employees are ranked and encouraged to compete with each other." So that's company A, your typical company, which probably comprises what percentage would you say? 90%? 95%?   0:02:03.8 AS: 97.9%   0:02:04.4 JS: Okay. Okay. Let's look at where we'd like to go from there. "Company B is managed as an interactive system where people and functional teams depend on each other. Supervisors aren't expected to have all the answers, and they rely on frontline workers to share their workplace knowledge and take an active role in improving their work processes. All employees know they are part of a team culture pursuing common goals and solving problems together to move the company forward." Okay, so that's really, that's where we wanna be. And the reason you would want to go there is because if you take those two companies and they have similar resources, similar markets, perhaps operating in similar region, company B will outproduce company A 10 times out of 10. It's a more productive model, and it's proven to work. So why don't people do it?   0:03:16.3 JS: Well, there's some thinking that gets in the way, some sort of systemic kinds of barriers that are out there. So even people who aspire to making a company better, and I think there are a lot of people out there that think that, but they run into these barriers, and I'm just gonna review them again because we've gone through them in some detail. But the myth of segmented success, that's the really kind of the exact opposite of a company as a system. It's this idea that all the parts are interchangeable. You can take a department, you can give each department separate goals, and they'll all make their goals and it'll all add up. That's the myth, of course. So the myth of segmented success. We have really stemming out of that the myth of the bottom line.   0:04:11.9 JS: And because of that segmented structure, we believe that we can use finance as a proxy for all the quantitative, all the accomplishments of all these different segments. It all adds up. It's arithmetic. We figure, so why not? We just take, everyone makes their numbers, and then they all make their numbers and they all celebrate together. That's the myth, of course. The bottom line doesn't tell you what's really going on in the company. The top-down knowledge myth they run into, and that's this whole idea that managers are supposed to know all the answers, and their job is to tell people what to do. And it's not just people with MBAs. It's people with degrees in psychology and maybe working in HR. It's engineers, it's any person with professional training, figures that they have not only the privilege, but a duty to actually tell people what to do. And if I'm not telling people what to do, I'm probably not doing my job and somebody's going to be looking over my shoulder. So a big fear around that.   0:05:31.6 JS: Myth number four is the myth of sticks and carrots. And this is this idea of Homo Economicus, the idea that people act in their own financial interest and it's perfectly predictable. Performance is down? Well, let's just pay them more or maybe we need some threats here. Maybe we need to threaten them, or maybe we need to get some competition. So somebody is gonna be a little bit worried looking over their shoulder that they might get fired. Fear is a big factor here, obviously. Finally, there's the myth of tech omnipotence. And this stems right from the myth of segmented success. This idea we can take a process and we can swap out technology, we can put in technology and swap out people. We can reduce head count by 5, 10, 15 people and put in a machine in its place. That's been the business case for technology for decades. And we still have a very strong belief in that. So that's kind of what we're stuck with, those myths. And we really have to crush those myths as we go along.   0:06:42.5 AS: You know, Jacob, I was just at a meeting yesterday with a very senior executive at a very large company in Thailand. And I was just talking to him, it's off the record, so we were just chatting, but he was talking about the challenges that they're facing, and I said, so how are your KPIs? And he said, KPIs are just killing us. They're causing us to be siloed. It's setting up competition in the company. People can't work together. And I asked him this question, like, what can you do about it? He says, not much. What am I gonna do? Remove the KPI system? No. We know...   0:07:31.1 JS: Isn't that interesting?   0:07:34.8 AS: That ultimately that's probably one of the best things that they could do and get people to work together. But it just, you know, he said something to me that just made me think about, for the listeners and the viewers out there who are running small and medium-sized businesses who feel disadvantaged so many times when they're fighting against the big giants...   0:07:53.6 JS: Yeah.   0:07:53.6 AS: Take comfort that you can change your business. But many of these big companies, they just can't. And they won't.   0:08:01.2 JS: Yeah.   0:08:03.5 AS: And they never will. So that's what's so great about these types of principles, both Lean, what you're talking about, Deming, is that if you're a business owner, it's a family business, it's your private business or a group of people that you have real control over the business, you can implement these things. And you can build your business to be great.   0:08:23.7 JS: That's interesting, Andrew. I've talked in my book, I've talked with some smaller manufacturers, and at least a couple of them have said they're getting refugees from large corporations. And he'll interview these people and say, well, I can't give you, you know, you won't have 500 people reporting to you or anything. And they say, I don't care. I said, I really, you know, I've had it with this corporate stuff, and they want to be part of a culture that makes a difference. And so that's maybe catching on. I mean, interesting that the gentleman you're talking with also recognized that.   0:09:00.3 AS: Yeah. And he's just as, his hands are tied in some ways. And, so, but that to me is hopeful for the rest of the businesses that can change. And the other thing I was, you know, I always end with my favorite quote from Dr. Deming, which is that people are entitled to joy in work. Yesterday I was speaking to about 75 students in my Ethics in Finance class, and it's the kickoff day. And so it's a real fun, and I talk about a bunch of things, but the one thing I said is that ever since I graduated from university, all I really wanted was a job that I enjoyed, at a place that I enjoyed doing it, with the people I enjoyed doing it with. That's all I wanted. I wanted joy in work and I got it because I walked away from the places and the people where it wasn't happening, and I walked towards the places where I had the opportunity to enjoy it. Of course it helps that I found my love, which is being a financial analyst. It's just, I understand that so well, but this is where I think I want us to think about hope and potential for happiness in work and all of that. And so I know you've got some more steps that you've got to help people. So maybe we move into that.   0:10:27.7 JS: Sure. Sure. Well, and it would be interesting, this gentleman you talked with, I wonder if he's visited any companies that we would admire that are using Deming principles, or maybe...   0:10:39.1 AS: Well, it may give it away, but this company in the past has fully implemented the teachings of Dr. Deming.   0:10:49.2 JS: Oh, really?   0:10:51.5 AS: But they had a changeover in management, and they completely walked away from this and implemented the KPI system.   0:11:00.9 JS: Yeah. Oh my. Isn't that something? Yeah, that happens. That happens for sure. And we've had, you know, in my last book, The Lean CEO, I found some people, number of companies had fallen off the ladder. And gosh, the Shingo Institute had a real problem with that. People were winning Shingo prizes and then they were falling off the ladder, and they changed their emphasis on criteria now, and now they really emphasize culture. You can't just follow the principles, but you really have to get the culture, and they really grill them on that. So, interesting. Interesting.   0:11:38.2 AS: Yeah.   0:11:41.0 JS: But the first step, the reason I asked you if they've visited anybody is really, I think if you're starting from scratch at company A, I think the first thing is to go visit companies.   0:11:48.6 AS: Yep.   0:11:49.5 JS: I mean, you've got to see what's going on in companies that are different to even appreciate what's possible. And it's...   0:12:00.6 AS: 'Cause it's inspiring.   0:12:00.7 JS: It's not only inspiring, but you see things that you wouldn't expect to see. And I think what they said, what these folks have told me over and over again is that what you see is you actually feel it. There's a culture in there, there's a kind of an atmosphere when you walk in the door. And that's what really wows people. I hear that over and over again. So you have to feel that, you can't write that down, or you can't explain that in a talk. So I think that's really the first step. And fortunately, companies that have gone through these transformations are happy to welcome people to come visit, because it helps them reinforce their culture as well. So it's a reinforcing kind of thing. I think after you've done that, gone the rounds a bit, that's when you really need to assess where you are and what you wanna be. And I think there has to be some honest criticism about the kind of company you are. I don't know if you wanna call it soul-searching, but there's not a realization that we don't wanna go on as we were, you're really not gonna do much. So that's, I think, critically important. You're smiling. Do you have a story there?   0:13:20.8 AS: No, but I'm just, you know, it makes sense. It makes sense. I did actually, you know, in Thailand there was a company that I saw in the newspaper many years ago that it came out in the newspaper that they won the Deming Prize from Japan, from the Union of Scientists in Japan. And so I just called the company and I said, congratulations. And they said, great, thank you. And then I said, and I talked to the CEO of the company, and then I said, could I bring my staff from my coffee, you know, management team from the coffee business to come and see you guys? And he said, yeah. And that started a lifelong friendship with a guy named Srini, who was the guy who won that. He passed away about a year or two ago. And I featured him in my book on Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points. But the idea is...   0:14:11.0 JS: Oh yeah...   0:14:12.7 AS: Go out and...   0:14:14.0 JS: I love that book.   0:14:16.2 AS: Explore and see it, see what's out there.   0:14:16.3 JS: Yeah. For sure.   0:14:17.5 AS: Because you also, when you go out and explore, you also find out, hey, we're pretty good at some of these things and there's things that we're doing well, you know?   0:14:23.5 JS: Of course, of course. So once you've assessed your state, I think it's very, very important, even before you start talking to your people, 'cause it's gonna be a transformation, you're gonna demand an awful lot from your people, you've really got to know where you're going, and you have to establish a vision. And companies have different ways of doing that. But the one thing I would emphasize is that it's gotta be a vision with substance. And I think Dr. Deming would say, by what method? [laughter] You say where you're going. Right? So, for example, a hospital. I saw a hospital that did a very good job of that, establishing a vision, and they wanted to be the safest and most compassionate hospital in their region. They said, well, what would that look like?   0:15:13.3 JS: And they looked at, well, okay, safety would obviously be big. There would be fiscal responsibility. Wait time is a big issue in healthcare, be no waiting. I think there may have been one more as well. But anyway, they established these kinds of what I would call aspirational goals. It's where we, really where we want to be, and it's gotta be something that inspires employees, right? You wanna be a compassionate, safe place for patients to come. I mean, that's what people want. So then what they do is they took it a level down, and they said, okay, well, if we're going to have an exemplary safety record, what would that look like? How would we measure it? And they have safe... The health organizations have safety statistics. So, they have an institution, that third party organization that would report on the numbers, so they could set some targets according to that. And then they go down even further. They say, okay, safety. What are the things that we need to do? What are some of our weaknesses? So they say, well, patient falls was one of them. They have things like medication error, hospital acquired illnesses. So all this goes under the idea of no harm to patients, right?   0:16:44.0 AS: Yeah.   0:16:45.3 JS: All goes together. So, they then started to work on the most pressing one. You know, work on targets, do projects together, PDSA kinds of projects. And they chipped away at it and eventually with a number of projects, they were very successful. But I think the key, of course, is that problems in workplaces and hospitals, maybe especially, are very granular in lots and lots of things, so you need all hands on deck. But they were very, very successful at getting a very high rating just through these efforts. So, that's...   [overlapping conversation]   0:17:28.8 AS: Yeah, the vision with substance is a great one because I think lots of visions are flaky, and we've been working on the vision for Coffee Works, for my company, and that is we supply coffee to every leading brand in Thailand. And that's something that we can visualize, the employees can visualize, they can also see who we don't serve. And also when we lose a customer that's a leading brand, we can say we messed up, but when your contract's up with our competitor, we're gonna be back because we supply every leading brand in Thailand.   0:18:08.0 JS: Right, right.   0:18:10.3 AS: So, substance, vision. Yep.   0:18:13.3 JS: Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And I guess you share that, been sharing that kind of vision with your people for a long time, right?   0:18:18.3 AS: Yep.   0:18:21.6 JS: But I mean, would you say, how important would you say vision is? I mean...   0:18:23.2 AS: I think it's critical. And I think that part of what happens is that many companies start with a vision, and then they get, it's just so easy to get distracted. And there's so many, you know, business just grows complex, and then all of a sudden you feel like, we can do all of this, we can do this, we can do that, we can do this, we can do that. The best book on this is Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. And he talks a lot about what are bad strategies, and he talks about these fluffy visions that really don't help anybody. And so getting a vision with substance, I think is critical.   0:18:58.0 JS: Okay. So we got our vision, it's got real teeth. It's something that we can stand in front of our people and say, here's what we're going to do. And they won't say, oh, this is just another flavor of the month. They'll realize that we're serious and we're gonna do this. The next step, number four, is building trust. And that's extremely important. And one of the manufacturer actually told me a wonderful story about this. He was working in a very... Had a plant in a very rough neighborhood in Baltimore. And when he took over that plant as a general manager, there was terrible culture. People were... He said there was racism and there were just people quitting all the time. And just walking out the door, not showing up to work. You know, the workers hated management.   0:19:56.7 JS: So this guy went in onto the shop floors. I'm your new general manager. And he said he spent the first three or four months just talking to them about their lives. You know, he was committed to the Lean methodology, but he didn't talk about methods, how we're gonna do things different. He just found out what's important to these people. And a lot of 'em were financially strapped. They were in poor neighborhoods. So the direction was really how to make this company more profitable so we can pay you more. And that was kind of a guiding vision and remarkably successful how it did. How he won the people over. And I think there's so many people out there asking people to do things. And, you know, you really have to... Takes a lot of trust. I mean, you're gonna say, I'm gonna admit when I've made a mistake, I'm not gonna cover it up and you're not gonna fire me. You know, that's never happened. So...   0:21:02.9 AS: And I can tell you, for the listeners and the viewers out there, here's a good inspiring movie to get you an idea of thinking about how to get out on the shop floor and understand from the inside what's happening in the business. And the movie came out in 1980, and it's called Brubaker by Robert Redford. And it's the story of a new prisoner warden.   0:21:25.2 JS: Oh, I never saw it.   0:21:27.0 AS: Yeah. Prison warden who goes in as a prisoner, and the governor of the state has sent him in as a prisoner. And so he lives a prisoner's life for, I don't know how long it was, a week, a couple weeks, a month, until eventually he, you know, reveals himself and then takes over. And then he knew all the corruption and all the problems and all the issues, and he went about solving 'em. It's an inspiring movie.   0:21:54.2 JS: Yeah. And more recently, there was a program, I've seen a couple of episodes of Undercover CEO, you know, where CEO actually goes into the workplace in disguise and flips burgers or whatever. And then discovers what's really going on in the company.   0:22:09.2 AS: Yeah, that's a great. That's probably even more applicable.   0:22:11.2 JS: Yeah. Right. So building trust is just... It's very personal. And from that point, you start to make changes. But those changes... My favorite examples, I don't know if this is a general rule, but some of the best examples I've seen are working on safety. You work on safety because improving processes to make them safer is actually kind of like a gateway drug to doing continuous improvement, right? You start to understand what processes are, but first of all, people are improving the process in their own interest.   0:22:50.8 AS: Yep.   0:22:52.2 JS: So you get them very good at making these changes, proposing changes, speaking out, pointing out when other people are not following safety guidelines. Understanding that something has to stop when safety is not there. No, you build on the trust you created and you start to change the culture around that. So that's number five. So you notice I've gone five steps and we haven't introduced any methods or anything. You know, it's...   0:23:23.8 AS: What I noticed from those first five is that they're really all things that senior management need to do before they go out with all their exciting new ideas and start training people and start really bringing that out in a much more aggressive way.   0:23:41.5 JS: Exactly. So really step six is train and transform. And that's when we do all the... That's when we draw the diagrams, and that's when we start the PDSA training or the Kaizen events or whichever type of transformation you're doing. That's when we start to train the workforce and we start to undergo the transformation. So that's all the work, but the transforming work. But we've done enormous preparation before we get there. And I think that's what I've seen is the best way to do it. So we train and transform, and then of course we have to remove barriers as they come. So it might be removing some aspects of the accounting system because they might be holding us back. So you run into the barriers and you take on those barriers as you run into them and you build momentum.   0:24:36.3 AS: Yep.   0:24:38.6 JS: So step seven really is you're building this momentum and you raise the bar. You've done something and now you raise your standards and continue to raise them. And that leads you to a continually improving organization where you're always expecting to get better. People have a joy in work because they know that they're part of making something better. And you continue raising the bar 'cause people like a challenge.   0:25:07.9 AS: Yep.   0:25:08.5 JS: As long as it's a safe environment and as long as it's a team kind of self-supporting workplace. So finally we get to share and learn. So we've gone full circle. You know, you've got... You've gone through a transformation, you're proud of your work, and you start to open the door to visitors because that's where you really reinforce the culture. And, I don't know, you have... You say you have visitors at the coffee place?   0:25:45.9 AS: Yeah. I mean, for me, I just love going to companies that do like to share and learn. And I like to do that too. We get students, a lot of times it'll be like executive MBA students coming to Thailand and others that I'll bring out to the factory, so to get them to see how we do things. But I just personally love to... Well, it's great when you go out to a place, and there's a lot of factories in Thailand for sure where you can just see that they have a vision of what they're doing and they clearly communicate it. I had a company that I saw in the financial data many years ago when I was an analyst that really did something very odd, which was their cash conversion cycle was negative. Normally it's a positive thing for a manufacturing company 'cause they have a lot of inventory and accounts receivable and the like.   0:26:34.9 AS: And so I went out and I met with the CEO and then I said, how did you do this? He said, it took us five years, but we brought our inventory down to seven days of inventory. And how did you do it? And he took me out on the factory floor to meet all the different people doing it. And he said, I put people in teams and they work together and they try to figure out how do we reduce the inventory here? I help them see the overhead cost that's coming from the executives so they could calculate a P&L and understand like, how can they make their section, you know, better? And then he had some of the guys come and speak and explain what they were doing, some of the supervisors and managers on the shop floor. And I was like, wow, this was impressive. So love that sharing and learning.   0:27:22.7 JS: Yeah. No, it's great. And I've had wonderful visits where people are so excited about their work that you think, wow. And of course that means they're really, really productive. I mean, they just... They're doing it because they love it and it's... You can't compare with that kind of creativity that you get from that. So I guess that I'd like to talk a little about the competitive advantages here of taking this journey and, you know, that's the whole point. Productivity becomes your competitive advantage. You outproduce other companies with similar resources. And I believe that the way the world is changing right now, that competitive advantage for company B type companies is going to grow as things... And I have four reasons I cite for that.   0:28:21.0 JS: Reason one is flexibility, adaptability, agility, whatever you wanna call it. You know, we're going with manufacturing and services too much more into high mix, low volume type scenarios. So the mass production machinery approach has just become less and less relevant to manufacturing and also with services as well because it's not... It's less a ones size fits all kinda world. That's one very strong reason. The ability to hire talent. You know, we're just starting to see that. You know, people don't wanna work for these corporations that they feel don't have purpose. And couple of manufacturers actually told me, and this is in the US, I don't know how that compares with Thailand, but in the US he said there's a real crisis not just 'cause people maybe don't have jobs, but because people don't have purpose in their work, so people go home depressed, they take drugs and they've done medical studies on this.   0:29:30.3 JS: You know, if you don't have purpose in your work and you're doing something even though you know it's dumb and you're doing it anyway, just, you know, because to please the boss or whatever, that places huge stress on people. And there are actually medical... They've done medical studies on that, people who work in those kinds of jobs, on the negative effects. So anyway, I think getting the best talent, I hear that more and more anyone I talk to, and I think that's gonna be more and more of a factor. There's a whole deglobalization process going on right now. A lot of reshoring here in North America. People, you know, companies really realizing that sort of the fallacy of having these very, very long supply chains. So it's all about now shortening that supply chain, having immediate suppliers that are close.   0:30:23.9 JS: I mean, that's the only way you're gonna get your inventory turns down to 50 or whatever your friend was talking about. Right? And finally on climate change, that's getting tougher and tougher to deal with. And it's not just about governments not acting, but it's going to be scarcity of resources. It's going to be having to run businesses in difficult climate circumstances. It's gonna be government regulation. It's going to be whether people will come and work for companies that aren't making... Doing their bit to combat this. So those four reasons, I think that's a competitive advantage that's going to grow. And I think it's urgent that corporations act, and Dr. Deming warned that there'd be a crisis coming if companies kept running the way they were, and the crisis is here. We've arrived and, you know, the statistics are terrible. Don't have to bore you with those, but, you know, it's a very rough world and we need, obviously governments will have to act, but we need better companies. Now... Sorry, go ahead.   0:31:48.2 AS: I was... Yeah, that's why he entitled this book Out of the Crisis 'cause there was a crisis then, and the fact is there's still, and it's so many things are harder too particularly in the US with reshoring and that type of thing because education has been decimated also in the US so it's very hard to bring back, you know, engineering prowess and things like that, so. Yep.   0:32:14.1 JS: Yeah, for sure. So I... My sort of wrap up comment would be, answer to your question, not really a question, but your title, you talked about boosting Lean with Deming. So, you know, when we chat about this, but you know what, I was thinking about this, what as a person who wrote about Lean initially and then took a much deeper dive into Deming, what does Deming add, from my perspective? And what excites me the most about Dr. Deming is that I think he was less interested in maybe methods and more interested in fundamental truths. I mean, he really, I think put forward what are really fundamental truths about people, about the physical world and about how people in the physical world interact. And these are, like I say, this is not slogans or anything like this, this is science. I mean, these are proven scientific principles and I think those principles underline any method you use. You know, if you're really following that. And I'm not a Deming scholar enough to be able to say that that's what he meant by profound knowledge. But when you use the term profound knowledge, that's what that means to me. It means just a very fundamental knowledge of the way things work.   0:33:49.8 AS: Yeah. Well, it's exciting to think about how we can learn from what you've written about and what you've talked about. So ladies and gentlemen, the book is Productivity Reimagined: Shattering Performance Myths to Achieve Sustainable Growth. And I've really enjoyed our time, Jacob, to go through all the different myths and to hear the way you look at things which is coming from your direction originally, the Lean direction, and then bringing that thinking together with the teachings of Dr. Deming. So I just wanna thank you and give you the last word. If you'd like to wrap up for the listeners and the viewers to say, what's the main message you wanna get, want them to get out of all the... Out of the book and out of all of our discussion? How would you wrap it up?   0:34:45.4 JS: I would wrap it up by saying, let's look for those fundamental truths. You know, let's not look for slogans, let's not look for techniques. Let's look at what's really true about humans, about the physical world, and let's build our future based on that.   0:35:04.2 AS: Well, Jacob, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion right now and the prior discussions about each part of your book and the myths and the like. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey, and you can find Jacob's book, Productivity Reimagined, at jacobstoller.com. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

Join Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz as they discuss what actions (or inactions) make us worse than thieves and how that relates to expiration dates, and acceptability vs desirability. Plus, stories about job swapping, Achieving Competitive Excellence, and birthdays. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is Episode 9, and it's entitled "Worse Than a Thief." Bill, take it away.   0:00:27.2 Bill Bellows: Welcome, Andrew. I haven't seen you in a while, and great to be back.   0:00:29.1 AS: It's been a while.   0:00:32.0 BB: Here we are. Episode 9 already. Gosh, [chuckle] time flies when we're having fun. First, let me say a shout out to people who are reaching out to me on LinkedIn. I spoke with another one of them this afternoon. It's always exciting to connect with them. And then I ideally connect in a regular basis and help them as best I can, and learn from them as best I can.   0:01:03.0 AS: Yep.   0:01:03.2 BB: So, for those who are thinking about it, they keep hearing you say, "Hey, you know how to reach Bill? Find him on LinkedIn." So, a reminder for those who are waiting for a nudge, here's a nudge. So, "Worse than a thief" is an expression that Dr. Taguchi used when he say, Andrew, "Don't be worse than a thief." And we'll get to that, but let me just give our audience some context on that.   0:01:37.8 AS: Yep.   0:01:39.0 BB: Dr. Taguchi would say... And actually, I don't know if Dr. Taguchi explained it. Someone explained it to me this way. He said a thief could be someone who steals your wallet, finds $20; which means they're up 20, you're down 20; which people refer to as "zero sum gain." Right? So, the thief's gain is my loss, zero sum. What could be worse than that? Well, "worse than a thief" would be a situation where what someone gains is nothing compared to what I lose. A simple example is, [chuckle] I'm not the only one who does this, but if I'm going to the supermarket and I get out of the car and I see a nail in the parking lot or a piece of glass in the parking lot on my way in. So, I'm not talking about walking all around the parking lot. I'm talking about if on my way into the store I see a nail, something that could puncture a foot, a tire, and I spend a few seconds to pick it up, throw it in the trash can right by the door, then my theory is the reason I do that, the reason others do that, is the belief that that little bit of time that I am spending doing that could potentially save someone far more than the few seconds it took me.   0:03:20.9 BB: Well, "worse than a thief" would be, I see that broken bottle, let's say a bunch of shards of glass. And having worked at my father's gas station, I've seen... A nail on a tire is one thing. Nail creates a puncture. A piece of glass in a tire creates a fracture. A piece of glass can destroy a tire 'cause you get a crack and it spreads, and that's hard to repair. A puncture with a nail, yeah, it's inconvenient, but that doesn't destroy the tire. So, I'm overly sensitive when I see pieces of glass in a parking lot, that that could ruin a tire.   0:04:04.8 AS: And ruin a day.   0:04:06.2 BB: Ruin a day, oh yeah. And so the idea is that for someone to not take the time, and the time they save cost you more than they saved, that's worse than a thief.   0:04:19.8 AS: Right.   0:04:20.0 BB: So, if I meet a set of requirements, leave the bowling ball in the doorway, deliver minimally, but in the world of acceptability, what do we call that, Andrew? It's good.   0:04:35.3 AS: It's good.   0:04:36.0 BB: Right? It's good. It's just within requirements, but good.   0:04:41.8 AS: It's not beyond looking good.   0:04:43.9 BB: And forget about beyond looking good; this is looking good. So, I leave the bowling ball in the doorway. I deliver to you the absolute minimum, which is still good. So, your response to that, Andrew, is, "Thank you, Bill." [chuckle]   0:05:00.0 AS: Yeah.   0:05:00.1 BB: And I'm not saying you know what I did, but let's say the situation where I am unaware of the loss function. I'm unaware that what I'm doing is make making your life worse.   0:05:12.2 AS: Right.   0:05:13.3 BB: But the idea is that my shortcut to deliver the D minus; D minus, minus, minus, minus, minus. 'Cause that's still not an F. What Taguchi is talking about is that the amount of resources I save, may be a fraction of what it cost you in terms of extra effort to use it. So, my savings of an hour, a minute, a second causing you far more than I saved, is worse than a thief. But in the world of acceptability, there is no such thing. In the world of acceptability, a little bit within requirements on the low side, a little bit within requirements on the high side, it's all the same. Again, there may be a situation where if you're putting a shelf on a piece of wood on a wall as a shelf and it's a little bit longer, a little bit long on either side, that may not have an impact; may not be touching anything on either side. It doesn't have to fit in.   0:06:25.9 BB: Now, this past weekend, our son and I were installing a new floor at our daughter's condo, and we wanted the pieces to fit in-between other pieces and this laminate floor which is a [chuckle] lot of work. Our son is turning into quite the artist when it comes to woodworking and things. But it's very precise getting things just right, just right, just right. And that attention to detail, that attention to making sure the gaps are just right, minding the gap and not the part. And there were pieces of this floor that he was trying to install. And it was driving him nuts, and finally... He's trying to figure it out and he finally figured it out what was going on. 'Cause he wanted that floor and the spacing between not just to meet requirements [chuckle] not that our daughter gave him and set the requirement, but he wanted the floor in those gaps to be invisible. He wanted things to... Right? He had a higher level, a higher standard.   0:07:25.3 BB: Now, this is the same kid who when he was 13 left the bowling ball in the doorway. But I would've done that. You would've done that. So, anyway, that's the difference between... Another reminder of, one, the difference between acceptability and desirability. But to add to this idea of "worse than a thief," embedded in the concept of desirability is not to be worse than a thief, is to understand the consequences of your action on others, and the amount of time and your decision on how you deliver it and how you meet the requirements. The idea is that, the less time you take in order to save at your end might be causing the person downstream in your organization more than you're saving.   0:08:22.8 AS: In other words, something small, you could adjust something small that would have a huge impact down the line, and you just didn't... You don't know about it.   0:08:32.2 BB: Again, that's why I go back to the nail in the parking lot. To not pick up the nail could cause someone so much more than the few seconds you didn't spend. But again, that could be...   [overlapping conversation]   0:08:44.0 AS: And one of the things that makes it easier or better for a working environment is you know your downstream.   0:08:51.8 BB: Yes.   0:08:51.8 AS: When you're walking in the parking lot, you don't know your downstream; it's just anybody generally, and hopefully I've stopped something from happening here, but you're never gonna know and all that. But with a business, you know your downstream, you know your upstream, and that communication can produce a really, really exciting result because you can see it and feel it.   0:09:11.8 BB: Well, and thank you for bringing that up, because I've got notes from... Since the last time we met, I keep a file for the next sessions we're gonna do. And so as things, ideas come up from people that I'm meeting on LinkedIn or elsewhere, then I, "Oh, let me throw that in." And so I throw it into a Word file for the next time. And so somewhere, I can't remember who, but since the last time we spoke, someone shared with me... Hold on, let me find it here. Okay. In their organization, they do staff rotation. They move people around in their organization. And the question had to do with, "Isn't that what Dr. Deming would promote? Is having people move around the organization?" And I said... Hold on, I gotta sneeze. I said, "Well, if I am the person that makes the parts that you have to assemble, and I make them just within requirements unaware of the downstream impact... " I don't know where they are within the requirements, let's say.   0:10:30.0 BB: All I know is that they're acceptable. I machine it, I measure it, the inspection says it's good, I don't know where within it's good. I don't know. So, I'm unaware. All I know is that it met the requirements. And I hand off to you on a regular basis, and then the boss comes along and says, "Bill, I wanna have you go do Andrew's job." So, now, I'm on the receiving end. And maybe you are upstream doing what I used to do. And you are likewise unaware that... You don't know that you're delivering acceptability. All you know is all the parts you deliver are good. You're trained the same way I'm trained, I'm doing your job. Does that change anything? [chuckle] If I take on your job and let's say, banging it together, whereas the week before you were banging it together, does that rotation create the conversation?   0:11:27.2 AS: So, you're saying rotation for the sake of rotation is not necessarily valuable if in fact, what could be more value is just the two of us sitting down and saying, "So what is it that you're doing with yours and what do you need?" and maybe visiting the other side or something like that.   0:11:44.9 BB: My point is, until the thought occurs to either one of us on the distinction between acceptable and desirable, neither one of us is the wiser as to why we do what we do. So, having people move around the organization and take on different roles, absent an understanding of this contrast, absent an understanding of what Dr. Deming is talking about, which includes these distinctions, that's not gonna do anything.   0:12:16.0 AS: Right.   0:12:16.8 BB: I would say it's a nice idea, and you hear about that all the time about oh the CEO's gonna go work at the front desk. But if the CEO goes to the front desk, again, unless he or she has a sense of what could be, that things could be smoother than what they are because of where they've worked before and it's so much smoother over there, that could lead to why at the Atlanta office does it take so much longer than the LA office. Now I'm beginning to wonder what might be causing that difference. But if I just take on your job for the first time, or if you and I every other week change jobs. So, I'm doing your job, we are both doing assembly, we're both making the parts. Absent an understanding of the contrast between a Deming environment or a non-Deming environment, which would include an appreciation of what Dr. Deming would call the System of Profound Knowledge and the elements of psychology and systems and variation, the theory of knowledge, just not enough. Insufficient. Nice idea. But it's when at Rocketdyne we would call "reforming."   0:13:39.0 BB: And we started 'cause Russ... Dr. Deming talks about transformation, and Russ talks about reforming. And so I started thinking, "How would I explain what... " I just thought it was too... My interpretation of what Dr. Deming is saying of the individual transform will begin to see things differently, okay. My interpretation is, I begin to hear things differently, I begin to hear the contrast between somebody referring to their son as "their son" versus "our son," my idea versus our idea; I start paying attention to pronouns, so I start hearing things differently; I start to think about, see things as a system a little... I become more aware, visually more aware.   0:14:43.9 BB: And to me, another aspect I think about relative to transformation is that, if I'm the professor and you're the student in a class, or in any situation, I don't see... I think about how I've contributed to whatever it is you're doing. I have somehow created the headache that you're experiencing. If I'm upstream of you in the organization, whether that's me delivering a report or a tool, or I'm the professor delivering the lecture, I began to realize that your issues I've created, and I begin to see things as a... I begin to see that I am part of the issue, Part of the solution, part of the problem. When I explained to students this, I began to realize as a professor that I am not an observer of your learning, asking "How did you do on the exam?" I am a participant in your learning, saying "How did we do in the lecture?" And to me, that's all part of this transformation.   0:15:53.0 BB: Now, the other word, "reform," which is associated with things I've heard from Russ. He talks about... Yeah, I'll just pause there. But I started thinking, well, Deming's talking about how I see the world, how I begin to see relationships differently, think about variation differently. That's a personal transformation. Reforming, and others began to explain to people at Rocketdyne and I do with clients and students is, reforming is when you and I swap jobs. Reforming is when I look at the process and get rid of a few steps. Reforming is changing titles. Reforming is painting something, [chuckle] changing the color. I think I shared, maybe in the first podcast series, I was doing a multi-day, one-on-one seminar with a pediatrician in Kazakhstan, who came to London to meet me and a bunch of other friends to learn more about Dr. Deming's work. And the entire thing was done through a translator.   0:17:07.1 BB: And so I would ask a question in English, it would be translated to Russian then back to me in English. And so at some point, I said to Ivan Klimenko, a wonderful, wonderful guy. I said, "Ivan," I said [chuckle] to Yuri, the translator, I said, "Ask Ivan, what's the fastest way for a Red Pen Company, a non-Deming company, a "Me" organization, to become a Blue Pen Company, otherwise known as a Deming company or "We" organization." And these are terms that we talked about in the first series; I don't think in this series. But, anyway, I said, "So what's the fastest way for a non-Deming company to become a Deming company? A Red Pen Company to become a Blue Pen Company?"   0:17:44.9 BB: And so he asked, and I'm listening to the translation. And he says, "Okay, I give up." I said, "Spray paint." [chuckle] And that's what reforming is: Getting out the red spray paint, having things become neat, clean, and organized, and you're just going through the motions. There's no change of state. And so, "I do your job, you do my job," that's not sufficient. But get us to think about the contrast of a Deming and a non-Deming organization, then you and I changing roles could be enormously beneficial as I begin to understand what it's like to be on the receiving end. Now, we're talking. And I think I mentioned in a previous podcast, I had a woman attend one of the classes I did at Rocketdyne, and she said, "Bill, in our organization, we have compassion for one another." It's the same thing. It's not sufficient. And that's me saying, "Andrew, I feel really bad. I lost a lot of sleep last night thinking about how much time you spend banging together all those parts that I give you. And if there was anything I could do to make things better, I would love to help you. But at the end of the day, Andrew, all the parts I gave you are good, right? I don't give you bad stuff, right? Have I ever given you a defective part, Andrew?"   0:19:12.0 AS: Nope.   0:19:13.1 BB: "So, everything's good, right? Everything's good that I give you? Well, then, if I could help you, but I don't know what else to do. Everything I give you is good. So, it must be on your end." [laughter]   [overlapping conversation]   0:19:24.1 AS: And I'm busy. Yeah.   0:19:26.6 BB: Must be on you. And that's what I'm talking about. Now, if I understand that I'm contributing to your headache, I'm contributing to the trouble you're having with an example, now I'm inspired; now I understand there's something on me. [chuckle] But, short of that, nice idea, it's not helping.   0:19:50.0 BB: [laughter] So, the story I wanted to share before we're talking about this role-changing. Again, role-changing by itself, nah, not sufficient. So, see if this sounds familiar. It has to do with acceptability. I'm pretty certain it's part of the first series. I wanna make sure it's part of the second series. So, I was in a seminar at Rocketdyne on something to do with quality. And I think United Technologies had purchased Rocketdyne. They were bringing to us their new quality management system. Not just any quality management system, Andrew. This was called ACE, A-C-E. And, when we first learned about this, I remember being in a room when their United Technologies, ACE experts started to explain it. And some of my colleagues said, "Well, what is ACE?" They said, "Well, it's Achieving Competitive Excellence." "Well, what is it? What is it, 'competitive... '"   0:20:52.2 AS: It sounds like you wanna put that up on the wall as a slogan.   0:20:56.0 BB: It was a slogan, "Achieving Competitive Excellence." And people says, "Well, what is it?" I said, "Well, it's Lean Six Sigma." Well, so why do you call it ACE? Well, our arch rivals, General Electric. they call it Lean Six Sigma. We ain't gonna call it Lean Six Sigma. So, we're calling it ACE, A-C-E, Achieving Competitive Excellence. But it's the same thing as Lean Six Sigma. [chuckle] And so we had all this mandatory ACE training that we would all sit through and pray that the rosters were never lost, were never lost so we wouldn't have to take the training again. So, in the training, there was a discussion of, how does the environment impact quality? And I don't know how it came up, but similar, there's a conversation about the environment could affect quality. And, so when that was raised, I think it was a question that came up.   0:21:56.9 BB: How does the environment affect quality? The physical environment: How hot it is, how cold it is. So, one of the attendees says, "I've got an example." He says, "I worked for a Boeing supplier," and it might have been, "I worked for Boeing in Australia." I know he said he worked in Australia. They made parts, big parts, very tall parts like a 15, 20... Very long section. And I think he said it had to do with the tails, part of the tail for Boeing airplane. [chuckle] He says, "When we would measure it," he said, "we knew that if we took the measurement first thing in the morning before the sun came up and it started to get hot, then there's a good chance that the length would meet requirements. And, we knew that once that part saw the heat of the sun and expanded, then it wouldn't meet requirements. So, we measured it first thing in the morning, [laughter] and that's an example of how the environment affects quality." And, my first thought when I heard that was, "You can't make that story up, that I will keep measuring it until it meets requirements." That, Andrew, is me shipping acceptability. Do I care at all about how that part is used, Andrew? [chuckle]   0:23:18.7 AS: Nope.   0:23:19.9 BB: Do I know how that part is installed? Am I watching you install it and go through all, you know, hammer it? Nope. No. Again, even if I did, would I think twice that I measured it before the sun came up and that might be causing the issue? No, that still would not occur to me. But the other thing I wanted to bring up on this, on the topic of ACE, remember what ACE stands for?   0:23:46.0 AS: Achieving Competitive...   0:23:50.0 BB: Excellence.   0:23:50.3 AS: Excellence.   0:23:51.8 BB: So, Rocketdyne was owned by United Technologies of Pratt and Whitney, division of West Palm Beach, for 10 years or so? 10 long years. ACE, ACE, ACE, ACE, ACE. So, I kept thinking, [chuckle] I said to some of my Deming colleagues, "There's gotta be another acronym which is A-C-E." Achieving Competitive... What? What might be another E word? 'Cause it's not... Instead of ACE, Achieving Competitive Excellence, I kept thinking of this, what might be another way of what this is really all about? And it dawned me. The embarrassment is how long it took me to come up with what ACE translated to. And it was "Achieving Compliance Excellence." [chuckle]   0:24:42.9 AS: Excellent.   0:24:45.0 BB: Does it meet requirements? Yes. And so what is compliance excellence? It gets us back to acceptability. So, traditional quality compliance. But then while I was on the thought of Achieving Compliance Excellence, and then, well, there's a place for meeting requirements. There's a place for compliance excellence. I'm not throwing it out the window. I would say, if I ask you, Andrew, how far it is to the closest airport and you say 42 miles, 42 kilometers, or you say it takes an hour, then embedded in that model is "A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour, a mile is a mile, and all the miles are the same." Well, maybe they aren't. Maybe they aren't. Maybe I'm walking that distance, and I'm going uphill and downhill. Maybe I'm driving that distance. And those changes in elevation don't matter as much. So, then, what I thought was, there's Achieving Compliance Excellence that's acceptability, and then there's Achieving Contextual Excellence, which is my understanding of the context.   0:25:56.7 BB: And given my understanding of the context, if you say to me, "How far is it to the nearest airport?" I say, "Well, tell me more about the context of your question. Are you driving there? Are you riding your bike there? Are you walking there?" 'Cause then I'm realizing that every mile with Compliance Excellence, I just treat it as "a mile is a mile is a mile." They're all interchangeable, they're all the same. With Contextual Excellence, the context matters. And I say to you, "That's a... I mean, 42 miles, but boy, every mile is... They're brutal." And so then just the idea that context matters, that the understanding of a system matters. All right. So, next thing I wanna get to, and we've talked about this before but we never got it in, but I wanna provide, I really... Well, what I think is a neat example. [laughter] Okay. Calm down, Bill. [laughter]   0:26:54.8 AS: Yeah. You're excited about it.   0:26:57.0 BB: All right.   0:26:57.1 AS: So, about your idea... [chuckle]   0:27:00.2 BB: All right. So, again, in this spirit, my aim in conversation with you is to provide insights to people trying to bring these ideas to their organization. They're either trying to improve their own understanding, looking for better ways to explain it to others. And towards that end, here is a keeper. And for those who try this, if you have trouble, get back to me. Let me know how it goes. Here's the scenario I give people, and I've done this many, many times. What I used to do is give everyone in the room a clear transparency. That's when you had overhead projectors. [chuckle] 'Cause people say, "What is a transparency? What is an overhead projector?"   [overlapping conversation]   0:27:45.0 AS: Yeah exactly.   0:27:46.8 BB: It's a clear piece of plastic, like the size of a sheet of paper. And on that sheet, on that piece of plastic was a vertical line and a horizontal line. I could call it set a set of axes, X-Y axis. And the vertical axis I called "flavor." And the horizontal axis, I called "time." And, so everyone, when they would walk into a seminar, would get a clear transparency. I give them a pen to write on this transparency. And I'd say to them, "Here's what I want you to imagine. The horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis is flavor." And I would hold up a can of soda and I'd say, "Imagine. Imagine, inside this can, imagine before the lid is put on, soda is added to this can," any kind of soda. Right? "Imagine soda's in the can. Imagine in the can is a probe, a flavor meter. And the flavor meter is connected to the pen in your hand." And what that... Wirelessly, Andrew. So, there's this probe that goes into the soda, into the can. It is, let's say, with Bluetooth technology connected to the pen in your hand, such that you have the ability with this magic pen to trace out what the flavor of the soda in the can is at any point in time.   0:29:31.0 BB: And so I would put on the vertical axis, right, the Y axis, I would put a little tick mark, maybe three quarters of the way up the vertical axis. And so everyone started at that tick mark. And I would say, "Okay, get your pen ready, get it on the tick mark. This flavor meter is inside the can. It's transmitting to your hand and the pen the flavor of Pepsi. If I was to seal this can, put the lid on it, and I say, 'Now the device is activated.' As soon as I put the lid on the can, the pen is activated and your hand starts to trace out what is the flavor of the soda doing over time." And I would say, "If you think the flavor gets better, then you have a curve going up. If you think the flavor of the soda's getting worse, then it goes down. If you think it stays the same, it just goes across."   0:30:37.1 BB: And I would just say, "What I want each of you to do, as soon as that can is sealed, I want you to imagine what the flavor of Pepsi, Coke, whatever it is, I want you to... " The question is, "What do you think the flavor of soda is doing in a sealed can over time?" And I would say, "Don't ask any questions. Just do that." Now, most of the people just take that and they just draw something. They might draw something flat going across. [chuckle] Now and then somebody would say, [chuckle] "Is the can in a refrigerator?" [chuckle] And my response is, "Don't complicate this."   [laughter]   0:31:26.1 BB: So, I just throw that out. Most people just take that and just trace something out. And for the one who says, "Is it refrigerated? What's the timescale? Is the horizontal axis years or minutes?" I'd say, "Don't complicate it." [chuckle]   0:31:46.8 AS: "And don't ask questions."   0:31:48.9 BB: "And don't ask... " But you can bring me over and I'll ask you a question. You can ask your questions, I would just say, "Don't complicate it." So, what do we do? Everyone gets a few minutes, they draw it. I take all those transparencies that you can see through, and I put them on top of one another. And I can now hold them up to the room and people can see what I'm holding up. They can see all the different curves.   0:32:17.0 AS: Right.   0:32:18.0 BB: 'Cause they all start at the same point. And then I would say to the audience, "What do they all have in common?" Well, they all start at the same point. "What else do they have in common? What do they all have in common?" And people are like, "I don't know." Some of them are flat. They go across, the flavor doesn't change. Most of them think it goes down at some rate.   0:32:43.4 AS: Yep.   0:32:45.0 BB: Either concave down or convex down. Now and then, somebody will say it goes up and up and up; might go up and then down. But most people think it goes down over time. That's the leading answer. The second leading answer is it's constant. Up and down, rarely. So, I've done that. I've had people do that. I used to have a stack of 500 of transparencies. I used to save them and just go through them. I've done it, let's say in round numbers, 1,500 to 2,000 people. So, all the curves start at that tick mark in the 99.9999% of them either go down or go across. What's cool is, all those curves are smooth. Meaning, very smoothly up, very smoothly across, very smoothly down. Mathematically, that's called a "continuous function." And what I explained to them is, if I draw a vertical line halfway across the horizontal axis, and I look at every one of those curves, because the curves are smooth, if I draw a vertical line and how each curve, your profile and all the others go across that line, immediately to the left and immediately to the right, it's the same value because the curve is smooth.   0:34:28.3 BB: But I don't ask them to draw a smooth curve. I just say, "What do you think the flavor does over time?" They always, with three exceptions, draw a smooth curve. And so when I ask them what do they have in common, you get, "They start at the same point." Nope, that's not it. I don't know if anyone's ever articulated, "They're all continuous functions." Very rarely. So, then I explained, "They're all continuous functions. But I didn't ask you to draw a continuous function." Well, when I point out to them that three times, three times, Andrew, out of nearly 2,000, somebody drew a curve that goes starting at the tick mark, zero time, and it goes straight across halfway across the page at the same level, and then drops down to zero instantly, it's what's known mathematically as a "step function."   0:35:26.9 BB: So, it goes across, goes across, and then in zero time drops down to zero and then continues. So, three out of nearly 2,000 people drew a curve that wasn't smooth. Again, mathematically known as a step function. And each time I went up to that person and I said, and I comment on it, and each of them said, there's a point at which it goes bad. And each of them had a job in a quality organization. [chuckle] And so why is this important? Because in industry, there's this thing known as an "expiration date." What is an expiration date? It's the date past which you cannot use the chemical, the thing. And what's the assumption? The assumption is, a second before midnight on that date, Andrew, you could use that chemical, that acid, that glue, whatever it is in our product; a second before midnight, before the expiration date, you can use that. But a second after midnight, we put this tape and we call it "defective." And so I've worked with companies that are in the chemical business, and they literally have this tape. At the expiration date, we don't use it. A second before midnight, we do. And so what you have is a sense that it goes from good to bad, you know how fast, Andrew?   0:37:15.0 AS: Tick of a clock.   0:37:17.0 BB: Faster than that, Andrew. Zero time.   0:37:21.0 AS: Yeah.   0:37:22.0 BB: Zero time. And so what I ask people is, "Can you think of any phenomenon that happens in zero time?" And people call that's... "Well, the driver was killed instantly." No, it wasn't zero time. "Well, someone is shot." It's not zero time. And so what's cool is, when I ask people to describe a phenomenon, describe any physical phenomenon that happens in zero time, that we go from one location to another, from one state to another in zero time, I've not been stumped on that. Although actually, [chuckle] there are some situations where that happens. Well, the reason that's important for our audience is, that's a demonstration that expiration-date thinking is an organizational construct. It's not a physical construct. Milk goes bad fast. [chuckle] I'll admit, the expiration date on the half gallon of milk, it goes bad fast.   0:38:27.2 BB: But a second before midnight and a second after midnight, it's still the same. So, expiration-date thinking is what acceptability is about; that everything is good, equally good, but once we go across that expiration date, Andrew, then the flavor changes suddenly. And so what I used to kid people is, imagine if that really happened, right? Then we'd have this contest. I'd say, "Andrew, I had a can of Pepsi recently. And have you ever done this, Andrew? You get the can of Pepsi that has the expiration date on it. And if you listen to it at midnight, on the expiration date, you listen closely, you can hear it go from good to bad, Andrew." [chuckle] Would that be awesome? [chuckle] So, I was sharing some of this recently with our good friend, Christina, at The Deming Institute office.   0:39:31.0 AS: Yep.   0:39:32.7 BB: And it happened to be her birthday. And, so I sent her a note and I said, "Happy birthday." And I said, "So, did you change age immediately on the second you were born?" 'Cause she said, 'cause I think she said something like, "My mom reached out to me and she reminded me exactly what time I was born." And I said, "Oh," I said, "so did you feel the change in age as you crossed that?" And she said, she said, "Hi, Bill. Of course, I felt instantly different on my birthday. My mom even told me what time, so I'd know exactly when to feel different." [chuckle] Now, so here's a question for you, Andrew. Can you think of a situation where something changes from one value to another in zero time? In zero time. Again, we don't go from living to dying in zero time. The change of Pepsi doesn't go from one value to another in zero time. The quality of any product is not changing, you go from one side to the other. But can you think of anything that actually happens in zero time: Across that line, it goes from one value to another?   0:41:05.0 AS: Nope, I can't.   0:41:08.8 BB: Oh, come on, Andrew. You ready?   0:41:16.2 AS: Go for it.   0:41:20.0 BB: Did you ever hear of the German novelist, Thomas Mann, M-A-N-N?   0:41:24.0 AS: No.   0:41:25.7 BB: All right. I wrote this down as a closing thought; it may not be the closing thought. We'll just throw it in right now. So, this in an article [chuckle] I wrote for the Lean Management Journal.   0:41:38.0 AS: By the way, it's gotta be the closing thought because we're running out of time. So, perfect.   0:41:43.7 BB: Fantastic! Well, then here's my closing thought, Andrew. You want my closing thought?   0:41:47.1 AS: Do it.   0:41:48.1 BB: All right. So, from an article I wrote for the Lean Management Journal, so here's the quote. "I have witnessed industrial chemicals in full use right up to the expiration date, and then banned from use and tagged for immediate disposal with a passing of the expiration date only seconds before the chemicals were freely used. While they may rapidly sour, it is unlikely that they expire with a big bang, all in keeping with a sentiment of German novelist Thomas Mann's observation about New Year's Eve," Andrew. What he said was, "Time has no divisions to market's passage. There's never a thunderstorm or a blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when the century begins, it is only we mere mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols." So, at midnight on December 31st, a fraction of a second before midnight, we're in 2024 and we go to 2025 in zero time, Andrew. So, legally things change as you go across a line. You go from the United States to Mexico across a line of zero thickness. So, legally things across a line change instantly.   0:43:17.0 AS: Well.   0:43:18.0 BB: A coupon, Andrew, expires at midnight. [laughter]   0:43:22.7 AS: Yep. All right. Well, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, as he mentioned at the beginning, just reach out to him on LinkedIn. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Dobrze znane nam kryształy przestrzenne tworzą się w wyniku oddziaływania między atomami i spontanicznej samoorganizacji atomów w przestrzeni. Kryształem czasowym nazywamy regularną strukturę która powstaje w wyniku samoorganizacji układu atomów w czasie - mówi RMF FM Prof. Krzysztof Sacha z Instytutu Fizyki Teoretycznej UJ, jeden z laureatów Nagrody Fundacji na rzecz Nauki Polskiej 2024, nazywanej czasem Polskim Noblem. Grupa badawcza prof. Sachy rozwija czasotronikę, czyli pionierskie badania nad praktycznym wykorzystaniem kryształów czasowych, które mogą pomóc m.in. w budowie komputerów kwantowych.

Si hay un animal relacionado con las Navidades ese es el burro. Protagonista del Belén y de villancicos pero también es un animal que desgraciadamente está en peligro. Afortunadamente este équido junto con su pariente la mula, está siendo preservado por los amigos de Burrolandia y otros colectivos que los cuidan. Atentos porque os diremos cómo ayudarles. El burro ha sido un elemento clave en la civilización, en los medios rurales pero también en los conflictos bélicos. También como la mula ha sido estereotipado como un animal tonto, testarudo aunque muy fuerte. En la ficción literaria, desde Juan Ramón Jiménez a Robert Louis Stevenson han admirado a estos animales pero también ha sido compañero de Fray Perico o protagonista de cuentos y fábulas. Los dibujos animados tienen estupendos ejemplos como Tonto de Los Trotamúsicos o el asno de Shrek y en el cine no podemos olvidar a la mula Francis, Al azar Baltasar, Dos mulas y una mujer o Eo. ¿Jugastéis al Tozudo o habéis usado EMule? Todo contenido burrístico cabe en es este podcast. Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

As No. 12 Clemson prepares to face off with No. 5 Texas getting tickets will be different for fans of both schools. 

Ko starši ali drugi bližnji, vzgojiteljica, vzgojitelj, učiteljica opazijo, da otrok diha težko in zelo hitro Za Ultrazvok smo šli po sledi poročil, da slovenski pediatri letos zaznavajo več primerov atipičnih pljučnic pri otrocih in mladostnikih. Podatek smo preverili pri pediatrinji Alenki Stepišnik, ki vodi Oddelek za pediatrijo Splošne bolnišnice v Izoli. Ker so okužbe dihal najpogostejše bolezensko stanje otrok in ker lahko pri otroku povzročijo dihalno stisko, je strokovnjakinja med pogovorom opozorila še na okužbo z respiratornim sincicijskim virusom, na prepoznavanje znakov in simptomov oteženega dihanja ter na problematiko tujkov v dihalnih poteh. Foto: Elektronska mikrografija virionov človeškega respiratornega sincicijskega virusa (RSV; obarvani modro) in označenih s protitelesi anti-RSV F protein/ zlato (obarvani rumeno), ki se izločajo s površine človeških pljučnih epitelijskih celic A549. NIAID/ Wiki, cc Povzročiteljice atipičnih pljučnic - mikoplazma, legionela, šigela TUKAJ, TUKAJ Nujna stanja v pediatriji ZD Ljubljana TUKAJ

¡Vótame en los Premios iVoox 2024! Hace muchos años, dentro del capítulo del FRACASO, Rober nos trajo la historia del rodaje de la película "La Isla de las Cabezas Cortadas", de su protagonista Geena Davis y de un Asno. Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals

Una quijada de asno

Neugodni delovni pogoji, nezmožnost kariernega napredovanja in nekonkurenčno plačilo so glavni razlogi za pomanjkanje strokovnih kadrov v lekarniških enotah po državi. Zaradi kritičnega stanja v javnem zdravstvenem sektorju, so številne lekarne spremenile delovni čas ali celo zaprle svoja vrata. Poleg javnih lekarniških zavodov, med katerimi je v najtežjem položaju Javni zavod Lekarna Ljubljana z največ lekarniškimi enotami, se s kadrovsko stisko spoprijemajo tudi zasebni izvajalci s koncesijo in bolnišnice. O ukrepih za izboljšanje farmacevtskega stanja, ki se z leti le poslabšuje, se je Julija Kandare pogovarjala z magistrico Darjo Potočnik Benčič, predsednico Lekarniške zbornice. Zakaj bodočih magistrov farmacije delo v lekarnah ne privlači, pa ji je povedala 26-letna študentka farmacije iz Litije.

Cuentos de animales de ediciones Saldaña

Že več kot dve tretjini vseh prosilcev za pomoč v humanitarnih programih Zveze Anita Ogulin in ZPM je (redno) zaposlenih, ki s plačami ne obvladujejo niti najnujnejših življenjskih stroškov. In kljub brezplačnemu osnovnemu šolstvu, zagotovljenemu z ustavo, to šolanje starše še vedno veliko stane. Brez pomoči humanitarnih organizacij in programov, kot je Botrstvo, številni tega stroška kljub varčevanju zanj sploh ne bi zmogli.

Patronite Okiem Deva: https://patronite.pl/okiemdeva Discord Okiem Deva: https://discord.gg/4anD7dJJn8 Linki: https://linktr.ee/okiemdeva Rejestracja na panel Game Music Festival: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSef7-7x4Mh4QLTzIWggtwznK3aTpccoGOeel8caAjbjJPSmYw/viewform Bilety Final Symphony: https://www.ticketmaster.pl/event/final-symphony-ii-music-from-final-fantasy-r-v-viii-ix-xiii-bilety/34145 ---------------- Wspierający Intern: KasiaNie Junior Dev: Kruszynka Izka, Daniel Zabłocki, Konrad Wągrowski, nothing, Tomek Mar, Marcin McFly, Anna Weglarz, kondi16, ExitWound, Kojo Bojo, ZajacccXD, Marcin Pietrzyk, Ania Węglarzy, FiSherMan414, MichalDev, Lukas P, Aliwera, Regular Dev: Natsu, Bonga, Sebbx8, Agnieszka Rumińska, vxd555, PabloRal, Remigiusz Maciaszek, Anatae GG, Arrora, Jakub Staniszewski, Ari Gold, bibruRG_78, Leniwa Ola, Sebastian Sadowy, Tek, Mateusz Śródka, Michał Wiśniewski, Bartosz Romanowski, Adam Kabalak, Kaspa Anonim, Martyna Szubka, Bartosz Mateńko, Jon der, sovl, Patryk Szkop, Aquatofana, Bartosz Złotowski Senior Dev: Maja, Dawid Kuc, Arti ,,Niezłomny＂, Miras, jmozgawa, Pawelek1329 STUDIOS, Pielgrzym, Morfiniusz, Jakub Kornatowski (@GramyNaMacu), Mariusz Kowalski ---------------- Źródła: Soulsowy CD-Action https://cdaction.pl/newsy/cd-action-souls-tak-wyglada-nowe-wydanie-specjalne-rozpoczelismy-wysylke Agenda na Copernicon 20-22 września 2024 https://copernicon.pl/ Agenda na GIC https://gic.gd/agenda/#list Raccoon Logic: ludzie powinni mieć gry na własność https://www.gamesindustry.biz/raccoon-logic-let-people-own-the-game-they-bought Developerzy podpisują umowy z SAG-AFTRA https://www.gamesindustry.biz/developers-behind-80-games-sign-deals-with-sag-aftra Gry AA wymrą? https://80.lv/articles/aa-games-will-go-extinct-strange-scaffold-s-lead-says/ Astrobot to nowy kierunek dla gier https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-09-06/playstation-s-astro-bot-is-a-model-for-the-video-game-industry?srnd=undefined .. i Space Marine 2 też https://www.vg247.com/warhammer-40000-space-marine-2-steam-record-players-before-launch Street Figher 6 sprzedał 4 mln kopii https://www.gamesindustry.biz/street-fighter-6-reaches-4-million-units-sold-news-in-brief Zmiany w podziałach zysku Robloxa https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/roblox-rolls-out-higher-rev-share-plan-for-devs-making-premium-games Black Myth Wukong z DLC https://www.destructoid.com/black-myth-wukong-is-getting-at-least-one-dlc-turns-out/ Nowy Spyro na horyzoncie? https://gameranx.com/updates/id/507880/article/spyro-the-dragon-could-have-a-new-game-coming-our-way-soon/ Zmiany w Helldivers 2 https://80.lv/articles/helldivers-2-developers-promise-significant-changes/ Molyneux o AI https://www.vg247.com/peter-molyneux-reckons-ai-will-be-real-game-changer-in-future-of-games Like a Dragon pozostanie na tej samej ścieżce https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/like-a-dragon-developers-say-the-series-will-continue-to-focus-on-middle-aged-guy-things/ Saudyjski rząd wspiera Savvy Games https://www.gamesindustry.biz/saudi-arabias-public-investment-fund-to-transfer-its-gaming-stock-to-savvy-games-group

Čezmejni spopadi med Izraelom in libanonskim gibanjem Hezbolah so se vsaj za zdaj nekoliko umirili, so se pa okrepile izraelske vojaške operacije na zasedenem Zahodnem bregu. Zaradi številnih napadov na Gazo so Združeni narodi prekinili razdeljevanje človekoljubne pomoči v enklavi. Izrael je odredil nove evakuacije. Vojska vztraja v središču Gaze kot tudi na obmejnem območju z Egiptom. V oddaji tudi o tem: - V Franciji se nadaljuje zapleteno iskanje premiera, Macron izključil imenovanje leve vlade - Bolnišnice bodo na sestanku z ministrstvom iskale rešitve glede pomanjkanja radiologov - Pridelovalci zelenjave ambiciozni: v treh letih bi lahko bili v Sloveniji polovično samooskrbni

¿Te quieres anunciar en este y muchos otros podcasts? ¡Escríbenos a ventas@rss.com tenemos algo para tí!---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------El Pulso de La República. El InIn (Informativo Informal) que sale todos los LUNES y JUEVES a las 8 PM EN VIVO. SIEMPRE IMPARCIAL (hasta que decimos algo que no te gusta).SIGUENOS EN TWITTER:http://twitter.com/ChumelTorreshttp://twitter.com/Kaizzerhttp://twitter.com/iraamelnegrohttp://twitter.com/GaboEriveshttp://twitter.com/fayorafaelmxhttp://twitter.com/themebagDESCUBRE MÁS CONTENIDO CON ESTOS SUJETOS https://www.youtube.com/c/Cinerds CONTÁCTANOS: info@maquina501.mxNo olvides suscribirte al canal y darnos tus pulgares arriba. Somos El Pulso de La República y nos despedimos no sin antes decirles que… Los amamos, estupeds.

Esopo

Continuing their discussion from part 3 of this series, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz talk more about acceptability versus desirability. In this episode, the discussion focuses on how you might choose between the two. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:00.0 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today is Episode 4 of the Misunderstanding Quality Series, and the title is Quality, Mind the Choices. Bill, take it away.   0:00:31.3 Bill Bellows: All right, Andrew, welcome. So podcast three, I think the title was Acceptability and Desirability. And one correction there, when I went back and looked at the transcript the concept of... At least the first person I heard tie together acceptability, desirability, at least in the Deming community, was a professor, Yoshida, Y-O-S-H-I-D-A. He was a PhD student of Dr. Deming, I believe at NYU but I mispronounced or misspelled his first name. I thought I've heard people refer to him as Kauro, perhaps spelled K-A-U-R-O, maybe that's his nickname, and maybe I just didn't remember properly but his proper first name is Kosaku, K-O-S-A-K-U and he at one point in time was in Greater Los Angeles at Cal State Dominguez Hills. And then I think sometime in the mid '90s, early '90s, last I heard he moved to Japan.   0:01:51.1 BB: I've never met him. I've watched videos of him, there's a classic presentation. I don't know if it's got, it might be online someplace of he did a guest lecture. There was a... Dr. Deming was speaking in Southern California and needed an emergency surgery, had a pacemaker put in, so this would've been '92 timeframe. And Professor Yoshida was called in to give a guest lecture. And that ended up being something that I think was sold eventually. The video, the lecture was sold by Claire Crawford Mason and so he is... I don't know how much of that is online, but anyways.   0:02:38.4 AS: Is Kauro, Kauro wasn't that the name of Kauro Ishikawa?   0:02:43.7 BB: That may be where I... Yes that was a Kauro. There's two Ishikawas. There's a father and the son and I... So I'm not sure if Kauro was the father or the son, but anyway correction there. In the first series we did, going back to '23, 2023, I mentioned the name Edgar Schein, but I don't believe I've mentioned his name in this series. So I wanted to throw that, introduce that in this series today and give some background on him for those who have not heard his name or not aware, did not listen to the first series and Edgar Schein, who passed away January of this year. He was an organizational theorist, organizational psychologist, spent the greater part of his career at MIT. And one of the concepts I really like about what he talked about is looking at an organization in terms of its artifacts. So if you walk around an organization, what do you see? What are the artifacts? That could be the colors, it could be the artwork on the wall, but the physical aspect of the organization Schein referred to as the artifacts. And what he also talked about is if you dig beneath the artifacts, they come from a set of beliefs, and then the beliefs come from a set of values.   0:04:23.9 BB: And again, the first series we did, I talked about Red Pen and Blue Pen Companies, and Me and We Organizations, and Last Straw and All Straw organizations. And those titles should make it easy for our listeners who are not aware to go back and find those. And what I talked about is, this imaginary trip report, if you visited a Deming organization, if we could think in terms of two simple organizations, a Deming organization, and a non-Deming organization in this very simple black and white model. And I had people think about the physical aspects of both, if they were to go visit both. What I then followed up on in our conversation is what you see physically comes from a set of beliefs. Now, they may not be articulated beliefs, what Schein would call espoused beliefs. And then you have what they really believe and I forget the term, I use this for that, but it comes from a set... But anyway, the physical comes from the beliefs, the beliefs come from the values.   0:05:39.0 BB: And part of the reason I bring that up for our listeners, and I'm thinking in terms of the people that have a responsibility in their respective organizations. They could be consultants, internal consultants, working in quality likely, given the focus of this series. First of all, you have to start where you are. But even added on, included in start where you are, is you have to start where your management is. So, if your management is tasking you with an improving scrap and rework, then that's what you better be talking about. Now, you don't have to be guiding your actions based on acceptability because the other aspect is scrap and rework are typically associated... Well, not typically, they are associated with acceptability. The lack of acceptability, acceptability is the idea that this is good, it is acceptable, it meets the requirements, defines...the quality requirements that are defined.   0:06:52.0 BB: If it's good, it is acceptable, if it's bad. There's two categories of bad, bad could be I have to throw it away, that's scrap, which means I can't recover it or rework, which means I can do something with it and perhaps salvage it. And so if your management is tasking you with improving scrap and rework, then first of all, where they're coming from, quite naturally, is acceptability. And why do I say that? Because everywhere I've gone, that is the deepest foundation of quality in every organization I've ever met, worked with, I have met people that work from whether it could be... Whether it's clients that I've worked with, whether it's students, my university classes. Acceptability, scrap, and rework, all go together. And, so if that's where your management is, then they're asking you to focus on improving acceptability.   0:08:05.6 BB: But, you may find it invaluable to shift your focus to desirability to improve acceptability. And that will be a focus, well I get into some of that tonight and others or today, and then on a future podcast later. But, I remember once upon a time at Rocketdyne, the executives were, the VP of Quality was task master asking for improvements to scrap and rework and also things called process capability indices, Cp's and Cpk's. And if you've heard of a Cp or a Cpk, great, if you haven't all I could say is I find them dangerous. I find them, well I say they're all about acceptability. And what makes it, reason I would encourage people to stay away from them because they appear to be desirability, but they're really acceptability.   0:09:15.7 BB: We'll save that for later. But anyway you have to start where they are. So if people are asking for improvements in scrap and rework, then, instead of fighting them, you go with it. And then what we'll be talking about tonight is, is it worthwhile to shift? Well, what does it mean to improve acceptability and the difference between acceptability and desirability? And relative to the title tonight, Mind the Choices is being aware that there's a place for acceptability and there's a place for desirability. And going back to Yoshida in episode three, what I was referring to is, in presentations he was doing from the early '90s, maybe even going back to the '80s, he talked about Japanese companies are about desirability. So, he presented this model of acceptability and desirability. And then, his explanation of what makes Japanese companies, again, back in the '80s, Japanese companies were viewed as those setting the quality standards.   0:10:20.5 BB: And, he was trying to say that the way they're doing that is that they don't rely on acceptability as other companies in other countries do. They have a higher standard. And that's what I wanted to introduce in our last episode, Episode 3. And, what I wanted to do tonight in this Episode 4, is to put some, add some more to that. But, also reinforce I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with acceptability, it's a question of what does the organization need at that point of time? And, really it has to do with... Really, it has to do with how big a system you wanna look at. So if you're looking at something in isolation, which is, I mean, when you look at something and saying it's good or bad, that is the epitome of looking at something in isolation.   0:11:17.5 BB: You're looking at a pen and saying it's good. You're looking at the diameter of a hole and saying it's good. That is not looking at what goes in the hole, that is not looking at how the pen is being used. So by definition, that's what Ackoff would call analysis, which is looking inward. It's not what Ackoff would call synthesis, which is looking outward. And how far outward you look is all according... I mean you could look, it comes down to how big is the system. And I wanna introduce the name Shel Rovin, Sheldon was his full name. Shel was his nickname. I met Shel through Russ Ackoff in 2006. Shel was, he was in charge of the Chief Nursing Officer program, which was a two-week immersion program at the University of Pennsylvania.   0:12:14.5 BB: And he was doing that in the, 2003, 4, 5, timeframe when I met him. And Shel was a dentist by background. He was Dean of the School of Dentistry at University of Kentucky and University of Washington. And I met him through Russ and invited him to Rocketdyne on numerous occasions. And Shel spoke about relative to looking at a system, 'cause people talk about, well "Andrew, we've gotta look at the whole system," but how big is the system? And, so people say, well, systems thinkers look at the whole system. Well, how big is that? Is that 1,000 foot view? And people say, oh no, Bill, it's bigger than that. Is it a 10,000 foot view? Is it... How big is the system? Well, Shel's perspective, and the word I wanna introduce from Shel is relative to systems is boundarylessness.   0:13:12.7 BB: Say that a few times fast. 'Cause systems have no boundaries. So I'm sure our listeners... I'm sure you have heard, I don't if our listeners have all heard, Dr. Deming would say to executives, does your system include the future? He used to ask questions such as what business are you in? What business will you be in five years from now, 10 years from now? Well, why not 15 years from now? Why not 25 years from now? Native American Indians, associated with Native American Indians is the idea of looking at the seventh generation after you when you're making choices. And so what I would ask people is, well, why seven? Why not eight? Why not nine? Why not 10? I mean, within an organization, we could be working with our supplier to try to get across these quality ideas to our suppliers.   0:14:05.5 BB: Well, that's looking at the system. Well, wait a minute. Do our suppliers have suppliers? Yes. Do their suppliers have suppliers? And so relative to boundarylessness is this idea is when people start talking about the whole system, I don't know what "whole" means. What I'd rather look at is what size system are we looking at? That's a choice. That's a choice. So we could decide to look at our suppliers. We're gonna go one step, we're gonna look at procurement. Who do we buy from? Now, we may educate them and give them the responsibility of looking at their suppliers on... But that would be a way of managing quality. Likewise, we can look at the impact of our work on our customer and give them heads up as to how to look at the impact of their work on their customers. But that's looking at the system in an X, Y, Z, physical coordinate, add onto that, the time dimension. And so, again, all I wanna throw out there is that when it comes to making choices on acceptability, desirability, a lot of it has to do with how big is the system that we're looking at. Some everyday examples of acceptability.   0:15:23.5 BB: Again and what I wanna get across is, in part the difference to help people make choices. And so when we were on a vacation in Europe recently, I took a number of photos of people making choices. And,` when I travel, anywhere I travel, especially out of the country, I love walking into supermarkets just to see what they sell that perhaps is not sold in the States or in California. I know there are things you can't find in California that you can find on the East Coast. That's one thing. But I like going into supermarkets just to see what products are there. I mean, you can go to England and find in the refrigerator section, hard cider, apple cider, you know, alcoholic cider that I got exposed to going to a Deming conference in 2000. I've become a fan of it ever since. Well, in the States it's pretty hard to find hard cider, period. You go to England and you'll find, a dozen different brands and each brand may have a number of different types.   0:16:44.9 BB: And so that's, but anyway, relative to that when you walk into a supermarket, if you're looking at canned goods, or just look, well, looking at cider, we can look at this cider versus that cider. We treat a can as a can, whether it's buying tomato soup or cider, we treat all those cans as interchangeable, interchangeable parts. But when we go to into the bakery section, that's where I was taking photos in Amsterdam and I was watching people sort through the pastries. And yet what was laid out were a bunch of pastries of the same style. And yet people were, I want this one, I want that one.   0:17:26.0 BB: Well, part of acceptability is treating all those pastries as the same as we would treat all those cans of tomato soup as the same. Now relative to tomato soup I know you live with your mother, and I'm willing to bet your mom, early, early on when she took you to the supermarket, taught you how to buy canned goods, right? And she says "Andrew when you buy a can of something you pick it up, you're looking for dents," right?   0:17:55.1 AS: Mm.   0:17:56.0 BB: Because if it's dented, that's bad. And if it's not dented, that's good. I know my mother taught me that. So I know when it comes to buying canned good we look for dents. If dented, that's bad. If it's not dented, it's acceptable. But I don't see people sorting between cans of tomato soup made by the same manufacturer. They're just, we treat it as they're acceptable. Acceptable implies either one, the differences don't matter or I don't see differences.   0:18:33.0 BB: Desirability is, you wanna see a great example of desirability, go to the produce section and again, either watch people sort through pastries that are all acceptable, and yet they're looking for the biggest one, or... And when it comes to fruit, we're looking for the ripest banana, or maybe we're looking for bananas that are green because we're not gonna use them for a while. So acceptability, again, I'm trying to give everyday examples of acceptability is going in and saying, looking at all the fruit there, and just taking five peppers, whatever it is, and throwing them in the bag and saying, I need five 'cause my spouse said, go get five. And I throw them in the bag. And it could be time-wise, I don't have time to sort through them, or I quite frankly don't care that they're different. That's acceptability. So acceptability is either acknowledging they're different and saying, I don't care. Or...   0:19:29.6 AS: Seeing them as the same.   0:19:32.4 BB: Or pretending they're all the same. And I had a guy in class years ago, and I was asking about buying fruit and I was trying to use the example of we go into the supermarket. We sort through the oranges looking for the ripest one, and this guy says, well, I don't sort through the oranges. I said, well, how do you buy the oranges? I buy them by the bag. I said, do you sort between the bags? He says, no, I don't sort and his arms were crossed. I don't sort, I don't sort. So then I noticed that he had a ring on his left hand, a wedding ring on his left hand. So I said, I see you're wearing a wedding ring. And he said, yep. I said, did you sort?   0:20:15.2 AS: I don't sort.   0:20:15.3 BB: Meaning... I don't sort. And so when you're looking at things that meet all the requirements and saying there is no variation or the variation doesn't matter, that's acceptability, Andrew. When you look at all the things that meet requirements and you see them as being different and saying, I want this one, that's desirability. And so that could be, when it comes to selecting a spouse, when it comes to selecting an orange, when it comes to selecting a parking spot, in a university, you're looking for the, an ideal, the best professor for Thermodynamics II, and there's 10 professors the university says are acceptable. And you talk to classmates and you find out, oh, no, no, no, stay away from that one. What are you doing? You're sorting amongst things that meet requirements, that are acceptable and saying, that's not good enough for me in that situation.   0:21:17.2 BB: Well, what I wanna say then added to that is, this is not to say desirability is better than acceptability. It really comes down to is desirability worth the effort? Because when it comes to desirability, I am looking beyond, I'm looking at a bigger system. So I'm looking at the fruit in terms of how I'm using it. If I'm aware of that, I'm looking at the parking spots in terms of: I'm gonna be in the store for an hour and I want the most shade, or these parking spots have a little bit different distances between cars, and I want a spot with a little bit more width so somebody doesn't ding my car. So what I'm hoping is with these examples, people can appreciate that every day we make choices between acceptability and desirability.   0:22:11.3 BB: Every day we're making a decision based on saying, this is okay, code word for acceptable, or I'll take that one, that's desirability.   0:22:27.6 AS: That's quite a breakdown.   0:22:28.1 BB: Well, and the idea being... The other aspect of it is when you're choosing to say, I want... When you decide that acceptability is not worthwhile, my proposal it's because you're looking at a bigger system. You've got a bigger system in mind. You're not looking at that fruit in isolation. You are somehow saying, there's something about how I plan to use that, which is the reason for this decision. And then it gets into how big is the system that you're looking at? Are you looking at the person downstream of you at work, which that could be an internal customer. People used to use those terms. Are you looking at the person after them, two down from them, three down from them? And that gets into a choice. So what I would tell the folks I was mentoring at Rocketdyne is that they were designing things or going to see how they were used. And I'd say, first of all, nothing requires you to go see how that's used. Your job as a designer, whatever it is in engineering you design it, you give it to manufacturing. But you don't have to go downstairs and see how they're using it.   0:23:47.5 BB: I said, but if you do, you might learn a lot. And then they might say, "well, so I should go talk to the person who's first using it." Well that might be helpful. And then what about the person after that? Well, that might be helpful. And then what about the person after that? Well, that might be helpful. And I was trying to get across to them, we hire really bright people and if we just turn you down to don't look beyond, just deliver the thing, complete those drawings, do whatever it is, pass it to the next person. I said, the system may not require you to go look to see how it's used.   0:24:31.9 BB: But what Dr. Deming is proposing is, the better you understand how it's used, the better you can serve the system. But then you get into the question of how big is the system that you want to be thinking about? And there I would tell them that there's no right answer. I mean, you wanna be and this is what I would tell them is we hire really bright people and then we condition you to believe that it doesn't matter. What I'm proposing guided by Dr. Deming is that there's a possibility that it matters anywhere from a little to a lot, but you won't know unless you go look.   0:25:12.2 AS: Yeah. It's funny.   0:25:12.3 BB: And so what I wanna get... Go ahead Andrew.   0:25:14.4 AS: When I was a supervisor at Pepsi in Los Angeles at our Torrance factory, they asked me to help... Could I figure out how to quicken the pace with which we got 80 trucks or 100 trucks out the gate every morning because it mattered. If you got trucks out an hour late on the LA freeways, now you have overtime and all kinds of trouble. So, what I did is I climbed up... At 4:00 AM I climbed up on top of a building, one of our buildings.   0:25:54.1 BB: Wow.   0:25:54.9 AS: And I had a clipboard, which I always have. I have extra clipboards always with me, here's one right here. And I had paper and then I just observed, and I took a lot of notes. And what I was seeing was all these drivers were, they were checking their trucks and they were spending a lot of time with their trucks. So, after I observed it that morning, the next morning I went down and went around and I asked them, what are you doing? And they said, well I'm checking that the quantity that's on the paper is the quantity that's on the truck. And I said, how could that not be? And they said, the loaders at night don't fill it up right. So, the next night I went and talked to the loaders and I said, drivers are saying that you guys are making errors.   0:26:40.4 AS: No, we're not making any errors. Okay. So, now I gotta dig deeper into the loaders. And then I start to see, okay, the loaders are making errors. So, I went and talked to one loader and said, why are you making this error? He said, well, the production are supposed to put this particular Pepsi item in this spot. But they didn't, they put it in another and I got confused, but it's just 'cause it's normally always there. So, I go to talk to the manufacturer, hey guys come on, why did you put that stuff in the wrong spot? He said, well, sales told us to produce so much that we were overloaded. We didn't have any place to put all of this products. So, we had to basically put it anywhere we could as it's racing off the line and on and on.   0:27:27.9 AS: And then you start to realize like, okay, the system is bigger. Now I went and focused on the loaders and said, how do we make sure that when the loaders load that we can lock the truck and then tell the drivers, you must not open this truck. How do we build the trust between the loaders and the drivers that they're loaded correctly and that they can go, because the drivers don't want to get to San Bernardino or wherever they're going and find out, oh, I don't have what this particular customer wanted and it's supposed to be on here. So that's just a little bit of a picture of kind of a very narrow start that starts to bring in more of the system.   0:28:06.8 BB: Oh, yeah. Oh, that's a brilliant example. And also what you're talking about is a term we used the first series, which is the value of synchronicity. That those handoffs are smooth. And they disrupt...   0:28:26.7 AS: I love that word handoffs, by the way. I was just talking with a client of mine. We were talking about the core processes of the business. And I just now realize that what I was missing and what we were missing in our discussion was how do we make sure that the handoffs work.   0:28:43.6 BB: Well, then the other thing, again a concept you may recall from the first series is, I liken it... I think in terms of two types of handoffs. And, actually, I think in one of the first, maybe in the second episode we talked about this, is associated with acceptability. When I hand off to you something, my report, whatever it is I'm assigned to delivered to Andrew by 5 o'clock tomorrow, you look at it, you inspect it, and you're making sure before you accept it that it is acceptable, that it has all the content. And, if anything's missing a figure, a graph, a label, you send it back to me and then I go through and massage it and then send it off to you. And, part of acceptability is when you say, that's good, then the handoff we're talking about is physical.   0:29:51.6 BB: Right. I mean, there's nothing wrong with a physical handoff. I give it to you physically. And what you may recall me mentioning, I think, again likely episode 2, podcast 2 of this series is I would demonstrate this with people in the class. And I would say, if, if what I give you is not acceptable, what do you do? You give it back to me and you say it's incomplete. And then I go through, massage it. If I now give it to you and all the requirements have been met, it's acceptable. Now what happens? What do you say? And I would kid them and so now you say, thank you. But what I'd also point out is that part of acceptability in a non-Deming organization is the handoff is physical and mental. I mean, physical is: It is yours, not mine.   0:30:38.5 BB: Mental is that if you have trouble with how that fits into what you are doing with it, because that report does not exist in isolation, you're doing something with it. Right. So you're doing your things with it. Now we're looking at the system. And if in the system of you're using it, you have an issue and you come back to me, in non-Deming environment, acceptability is my way of saying "Andrew I'm not sure why we're having this conversation because what I gave you is acceptable." But in a Deming organization, the handoff is physical, but not mental. What does that mean? It means, I'm willing to learn from what you just said and the issues you're having. And now I'm beginning to wonder, there's two possibilities. Either one, what I gave you is not acceptable. There's something wrong with the inspection.   0:31:34.3 BB: Or two, what's missing is desirability, that there's some... What I give you is acceptable, but there's something about how it's, it's um, there's a degree of acceptability, and so instead of viewing it as it's good or it's bad, black and white. Now we're saying there's degrees of good. Desirability is degrees of good. And, so in a Deming environment, when I hand off to you and you have an issue with it, you come back the next day and say, "Bill, somehow this didn't get caught in the control chart." And I said, "well, let me take a look at it," and I may find there was something wrong with the inspection, or I may find that there's a degree of good I'm not giving you that I need to be giving you. So, that can either be an acceptability issue or a desirability issue. I'm willing to have that conversation with you in a Deming environment. So, in a Deming environment, the handoff is physical but not mental. And the learning, as you're demonstrating, the learning that comes from the ability to have those conversations, improves the system. That's a lot more work.   0:32:53.8 AS: So, if you were to sum it up, was that the sum up or would you add anything else to your summation of what you want people to take away from this discussion?   0:33:05.6 BB: Yeah, that's it. I'd like to say one is that there's, acceptability is fine. Choose acceptability, if that's all the situation demands then you've chosen that. But pay attention to how it's used, pay attention to the ramifications of that decision, which may show up an hour from now, may not show up until a year from now. And, the possibility that hiccup a year from now could be either it wasn't acceptable, in which case there's an inspection issue or it was acceptable, which means there's a degree of good, which means it's a desirability issue. And, that gets us into future conversations, talking about degrees of good and the whole idea of variation in things that are good. That's desirability, variation in things that are good.   0:33:57.6 AS: All right. Bill, on behalf of everyone at T      he Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. He responds. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Is reaching A+ quality always the right answer? What happens when you consider factors that are part of the system, and not just the product in isolation? In this episode, Bill Bellows and Andrew Stotz discuss acceptability versus desirability in the quality realm. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.5 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 31 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. Today's episode, episode three, is Acceptability and Desirability. Bill, take it away.   0:00:28.1 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew, and welcome back to our listeners.   0:00:30.7 AS: Oh, yeah.   0:00:31.4 BB: Hey, do you know how long we've been doing these podcasts?   0:00:36.6 AS: No.   0:00:40.8 BB: We started... Our very first podcast was Valentine's Day 2023. I was gonna say 2013. 2023, so roughly 17 months of podcast, Andrew.   0:00:53.4 AS: That was our first date, huh?   0:00:55.0 BB: Our first date was Valentine's Day 2023.   0:00:58.9 AS: All right. Don't tell your wife.   [laughter]   0:01:03.1 BB: All right. And so along the way, I've shared reflections from my first exposures to Dr. Deming, as well as my first exposures to Genichi Taguchi. Talked about Edward de Bono, Tom Johnson, others, mentors, Bill Cooper, Phil Monroe, Gipsie Ranney was a great mentor. Last week, Andrew, while on vacation in New England with my wife, I visited for a day my 85-year-old graduate school advisor who I worked with for ten years, Bob Mayle, who lives in, I would say, the farthest reaches of Maine, a place called Roque Bluffs. Roque Bluffs. How's that for... That could be North Dakota. Roque Bluffs. He's in what they call Down East Maine. He's recently got a flip phone. He's very proud. He's got like a Motorola 1985 vintage flip phone. Anyway, he's cool, he's cool. He's...   0:02:15.9 AS: I'm just looking at that place on the map, and looks incredible.   0:02:19.0 BB: Oh, yeah. He's uh, until he got the phone, he was off the grid. We correspond by letters. He's no internet, no email. And he has electricity, lives in about an 800 square-foot, one-floor bungalow with his wife. This is the third time we've visited him. Every time we go up, we spend one day getting there, one day driving home from where my in-laws live in New York. And then one day with him, and the day ends with going to the nearby fisherman's place. He buys us fresh lobster and we take care of them. [chuckle]   0:03:01.3 AS: Yeah, my sister lives in Kennebunk, so when I go back to the US, I'm...   0:03:08.8 BB: Yeah, Kennebunk is maybe 4 hours away on that same coast.   0:03:15.3 AS: I'm just looking at the guide and map book for Roque Bluffs' State Park, and it says, "a beautiful setting with oceanfront beach, freshwater pond, and hiking trails."   0:03:25.9 BB: Yeah, he's got 10 acres... No, he's got, I think, 20, 25 acres of property. Sadly, he's slowly going blind. He has macular degeneration. But, boy, for a guy who's slowly going blind, he and I went for a walk around his property for a couple hours, and it's around and around... He's holding branches from hitting me, I'm holding branches from hitting him and there's... Let alone the terrain going up and down, you gotta step up and over around the rocks and the pine needles and all. And it was great. It was great. The week before, we were close to Lake George, which is a 32-mile lake in Upstate New York. And what was neat was we went on a three-hour tour, boat ride. And on that lake, there are 30 some islands of various sizes, many of them owned by the state, a number of them owned privately. Within the first hour, we're going by and he points to the island on the left and he says it was purchased in the late '30s by Irving Langmuir. Yeah, so he says, "Irving Langmuir," and I thought, I know that name from Dr. Deming. That name is referenced in The New Economics.   0:04:49.1 BB: In fact, at the opening of Chapter Five of The New Economics, the title is 'Leadership.' Every chapter begins with a quote, right? Chapter Five quote is, "You cannot plan to make a discovery," so says Irving Langmuir. So what is... The guy's describing this island purchased back in the late '30s by Langmuir for like $5,000. I think it's... I don't know if he still owns it, if it's owned by a nonprofit. It's not developed. It's privately held. I'm trying, I wrote to Langmuir's grandson who did a documentary about him. He was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from GE's R&D center in Schenectady, New York, which is a couple hours south of there. But I'm certain, and I was looking for it earlier, I know I heard of him, of Irving Langmuir through Dr. Deming. And I believe in his lectures, Deming talked about Langmuir's emphasis on having fun at work, having fun. And so I gotta go back and check on that, but I did some research after the day, and sure enough came across some old videos, black and white videos that Langmuir produced for a local television station, talking about his... There's like show and tell with him in the laboratory. And in there, he talks about joy and work and all that.   0:06:33.5 BB: So I'm thinking, that's pretty cool. So I'm waiting to hear from his grandson. And ideally, I can have a conversation with his grandson, introduce him to Kevin and talk about Deming's work and the connection. Who knows what comes out of that? Who knows? Maybe an interview opportunity with you and Irving Langmuir's grandson. So, anyway.   0:06:52.7 AS: Fantastic.   0:06:54.7 BB: But going back to what I mentioned earlier in my background in association with Deming and whatnot, and Taguchi, and I offer these comments to reinforce that while my interests in quality were initially all things Taguchi, and then largely Deming, and it wasn't long before I stopped, stepped back and an old friend from Rocketdyne 20 some years ago started focusing on thinking about thinking, which he later called InThinking. And it's what others would call awareness of our... Well, we called it... Rudy called it, better awareness of our thinking patterns, otherwise known as paradigms, mental models.  We just like the way of explaining it in terms of becoming more aware of our thinking patterns. And I say that because... And what I'm presenting relative to quality in this series, a whole lot of what I'm focusing on is thinking about thinking relative to quality.   0:07:58.8 BB: And so last time, we talked about the eight dimensions of quality from David Garvin, and one of them was acceptability. And that is this notion in quality, alive and well today, Phil Crosby has created this focus on achieving zero defects. Everything meets the requirements, that gets us into the realm, everything is good. Dr. Deming and his red bead experiments talked about red beads and white beads. The white beads is what we're striving for. All the beads are good. The red beads represent defects, things we don't want. And that's this... Thinking wise, that's a thinking pattern of "things are good or bad." Well, then we can have high quality, low quality and quality. But at Rocketdyne, when I started referring to that as category thinking, putting things into categories, but in the world of quality, there's only two categories, Andrew: good and bad. This either meets requirements or it doesn't. And if it's good, then we're allowed to pass it on to the next person. If we pass it on and it's not good, then they're going to send it back to us and say, "Uh-uh, you didn't meet all the requirements." And what I used to do in class, I would take something, a pen or something, and I would go to someone in the seminar and I'd say, "If I hand this to you and it doesn't meet requirements, what are you going to say?" You're gonna say, "I'm not going to take it. It hasn't met the requirements."   0:09:36.4 BB: And I would say you're right. All the I's are not dotted, all the T's are not crossed, I'm not taking it. Then I would take it back and I'd say, "Okay, now what if I go off and dot all those I's and cross all those T's?" Then I would hand them the pen or whatever the thing was, and I'd say, "If all those things have been met," now we're talking acceptability. "Now, what do you say?" I said, "Can you reject it?" "No." I say, "So what do you say now that all those things... If you're aware that all those requirements have been met, in the world of quality, it is as good, now what do you say?" And they look at me and they're like, "What do I say?" I say, "Now you say, thank you." But what I also do is one more time... And I would play this out to people, I'd say, "Okay, Andrew, one more time. I hand you the pen, Andrew, all the requirements are met. And what do you say?" And you say, "Thank you." And I say, "What else just happened when you took it?"   0:10:45.4 AS: You accepted it.   0:10:47.3 BB: Yes. And I say, "And what does that mean?" "I don't know. What does that mean?" I said, "It means if you call me the next day and say, I've got a problem with this, you know what I'm going to say, Andrew?"   0:10:58.5 AS: "You accepted it."   0:11:01.5 BB: Right. And so, what acceptability means is don't call me later and complain. [laughter] So, I get a photo of you accepting it, you're smiling. So if you call me back the next day and say, "I've got a problem with this," I'd say, "No, no, no." So acceptability as a mental model is this idea that once you accept it, there's no coming back. If you reveal to me issues with it later, I deny all that. I'd say, I don't know what your problem with Andrew... It must be a problem on your end, because what I delivered to you is good. And if it is good, then there can't be any problems associated with it. So, if there are problems, have to be on your end, because defect-free, everything good, implies, ain't no problems, ain't no issues with it. I'm thinking of that Disney song, trouble-free mentality, Hakuna Matata.   [chuckle]   0:12:04.5 BB: But now I go back to the title, Acceptability and Desirability. One of Dr. Deming's Ph.D. students, Kauro [actually, Kosaku] Yoshida, he used to teach at Cal State Dominguez Hills back in the '80s, and I think sometime in the '90s, he went to Japan. I don't know if he was born and raised in Japan, but he was one of Dr. Deming's Ph.D. students, I believe, at NYU. Anyway, I know he's a Ph.D. student of Dr. Deming, he would do guest lectures in Dr. Deming's four-day seminars in and around Los Angeles. And, Yoshida is known for this saying that Americans are all about acceptability meets requirements, and the Japanese are about desirability. And what is that? Well, it's more than meeting requirements. And, I wanna get into more detail on that in future episodes. But for now, we could say acceptability is meeting requirements. In a binary world, it can be really hard to think of, if everything's met requirements, how do I do better than that? How do I continue to improve if everything meets requirements?  Well, one clue, and I'll give a clue, is what I shared with the senior most ranking NASA executive responsible for quality.   0:13:46.4 BB: And this goes back to 2002 timeframe. And we had done some amazing things with desirability at Rocketdyne, which. is more than meeting requirements. And the Vice President of Quality at Rocketdyne knew this guy at NASA headquarters, and he says, "You should go show him what we're doing." So I called him up a week in advance of going out there. I had made the date, but I figured if I'm going to go all the way out there, a week in advance, I called him up just to make sure he knew I was coming. And he said something like, "What are we going to talk about?" He said something like, "We're going to talk about that Lean or Six Sigma stuff?" And I said, "No, more than that." And I think I described it as, we're going to challenge the model of interchangeable parts. And he's like, "Okay, so what does that mean?" So the explanation I gave him is I said, "What letter grade is required for everything that NASA purchases from any contractor? What letter grade is ostensibly in the contract? What letter grade? A, B, C, D. What letter grade is in the contract?" And he says, "Well, A+."   [laughter]   0:15:01.2 BB: And I said, "A+ is not the requirement." And he's like, "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "It's a pass-fail system." That's what acceptability is, Andrew. Acceptability is something is either good or bad, and if it's bad, you won't accept it. But if it's good, if I dot all the I's and cross all the T's, you will take it. It has met all the requirements. And that gets into what I talked about in the first podcast series of what I used to call the first question of quality management. Does this quality characteristic, does the thrust of this engine, does the roughness of this surface, does the diameter of this hole, does the pH of this bath meet requirements? And there's only two answers to that question, yes or no. And if yes is acceptable, and if no, that's unacceptable. And so I pointed out to him, much to his chagrin, is that the letter grade requirement is not A+, it's D- or better. [chuckle] And so as a preview of we'll get into in a future podcast, acceptability could be, acceptability is passing. And this guy was really shocked. I said, "Procurement at NASA is a pass-fail system."   0:16:21.9 BB: Every element of anything which is in that system purchased by NASA, everything in there today meets a set of requirements, is subject to a set of requirements which are met on a pass-fail basis. They're either, yes, it either meets requirements, acceptable, or not. That's NASA's, the quality system used by every NASA contractor I'm aware of. Boeing's advanced quality system is good parts and bad parts. Balls and strikes. And so again, for our viewers, acceptability is a pass-fail system. And what Yoshida... You can be thinking about what Yoshida's talked about, is Japanese companies. And again, I think it's foolish to think of all Japanese companies, but back in the '80s, that's really the way it came across, is all Japanese companies really have this figured out, and all American companies don't. I think that's naive. But nonetheless, what he's talking about is shifting from a pass-fail system, that's acceptability, to, let's say, letter grades of A's or B's. That would be more like desirability, is that it's not just passing, but an A grade or a B grade or a C grade. So that's, in round terms, a preview of Yoshida... A sense of, for this episode, of what I mean by acceptability and desirability.   0:17:54.7 BB: In the first podcast which was posted the other day, I made reference to, instead of achieving acceptability, now I can use that term, instead of achieving zero defects as the goal, in the world of acceptability, once we continuously improve and achieve acceptability, now everything is passing, not failing. This is in a world of what I refer to as category thinking, putting things in categories. In the world of black and white, black is one category, white is a category. You got two categories, good and bad. If everything meets requirements, how do you continuously improve if everything is good? Well, part of the challenge is realize that everything is good has variation in terms... Now we could talk about the not all letter grade A, and so we could focus on the things that are not A's and ask the question, is an A worthwhile or not? But what I was saying in the first podcast is my admiration for Dr. Deming's work uniquely... And Dr. Deming was inspired towards this end by Dr. Taguchi, and he gave great credit to that in Chapter Ten of The New Economics. And what I don't see in Lean nor Six Sigma, nor Lean/Six Sigma, nor Operational Excellence, what I don't see anywhere outside of Dr. Deming's work or Dr. Taguchi's work is anything in quality which is more than acceptability.   0:19:32.0 BB: It's all black and white. Again, Boeing's Advanced Quality System is good parts and bad parts. Now, again, I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with that. And I would also suggest in a Deming-based organization there may be characteristics for which all we need is that they're good. We don't need to know how good they are, we don't need to know the letter grade. And why is that? Because maybe it's not worth the trouble to discern more than that. And this is where I use the analogy of balls and strikes or kicking the ball into the net.  If you've got an open net... That's Euro Cup soccer. There's no reason to be precisely placing the ball. All you want to do is get it into the net. And that's an area of zero defects, maybe all that is worthwhile, but there could be other situations where I want the ball in a very particular location in the strike zone. That's more of this desirability sense. So I want to clarify for those who listened to the first podcast, is what I'm inferring is I'm not aware of any quality management system, any management system in which, inspired by Dr. Deming and Taguchi, we have the ability to ask the question, is acceptability all that is required?   0:20:55.7 BB: And it could be for a lot of what we do, acceptability is not a bad place to be. But I'm proposing that as a choice, that we've thought about it and said, "You know what? In this situation, it's not worth, economically, the extra effort. And so let's put the extra effort into the things where it really matters." And if it doesn't... So use desirability where it makes sense, use acceptability elsewhere. Right now, what I see going on in organizations unaware of Dr. Deming's work, again, Dr. Taguchi's work, is that they're really blindly focusing on acceptability. And I think what we're going to get into is, I think there's confusion in desirability. But again, I want to keep that for a later episode. Now, people will say, "Well, Bill, the Six Sigma people are about desirability." No, the Six Sigma people have found a new way to define acceptability. And I'll give you one other fun story. When I taught at Northwestern's Kellogg Business School back in the late '90s, and I would start these seminars off by saying, "We're going to look at quality management practices, past, present, future." And so one year, I said, "So what quality management practices are you aware of?" And again, these are students that have worked in industry for five or six years.   0:22:17.6 BB: They've worked at GM, they worked at General Electric, they worked for Coca Cola, banking. These are sharp, sharp people. But you got into the program having worked somewhere in the world, in industry, so they came in with experience. And so they would say, zero defect quality is a quality management practice. And I'd say, "Okay, so where'd that come from?" And again, this is the late '90s. They were aware of the term, zero defects. They didn't know it was Philip Crosby, who I learned yesterday was... His undergraduate degree is from a school of podiatry. I don't know if he was a podiatrist, but he had an undergraduate... A degree in podiatry, somebody pointed out to me. Okay, fine. But Philip Crosby, his big thing was pushing for zero defects. And you can go to the American Society for Quality website to learn more about him. Philip Crosby is the acceptability paradigm. So, students would bring him up and I'd say, "Okay, so what about present? What about present?" And somebody said, "Six Sigma Quality." So I said, "So what do you know about Six Sigma Quality?" And somebody said," Cpk's of 2.00." And I said, "So what's... " again, in a future episode, we could talk about Cpk's."   0:23:48.5 AS: But I said to the guy, "Well, what's the defect rate for Six Sigma... For Cpk's or Six Sigma Quality or Cpk's of 2?" And very matter of factly, he says, "3.4 defects per million." So I said, "How does that compare to Phil Crosby's quality goal from 1962? Here we are, 1997, and he's talking about Motorola and Six Sigma Quality, a defect goal of 3.4 defects per million. And I said, "How does that compare to Phil Crosby's quality goal of zero defects in 1962?" And the guy says... [chuckle] So cool, he says, "Well, maybe zero is not worth achieving." 'Cause again, zero was the goal in 1962. Six Sigma sets the goal for 3.4 per million. Not zero, 3.4, to which this guy says... And I thought it was so cool, he says, "Well, maybe zero is not worth achieving." So, there. Well, my response was, "Well, what makes 3.4 the magic number for every process in every company around the world? So, what about that?" To which the response was crickets. But what I want to point out is we're still talking about zero... I mean 3.4 is like striving towards zero and admitting some. It is another way of looking at acceptability. It is... And again, and people claim it's really about desirability. I think, well, there's some confusion in desirability and my hope in this episode is to clear up some of that misunderstanding in acceptability as well as in desirability. And they... Let me just throw that out.   0:25:58.1 AS: Yeah, there's two things that I want to say, and the first one is what he should have replied is, for those older people listening or viewing that can remember the movie, Mr. Mom with Michael Keaton, I think it was. And he should have replied, "220, 221, whatever it takes." And he should have said, "Well, yeah, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6. It's could be around there."   0:26:27.5 BB: Well, the other thing is, why we're on that is... And I think this is... I'm really glad you brought that up, is, what I would push back on the Lean and the Six Sigma, those striving for zero defects or Cpk's of 2 or whatever they are is, how much money are we going to spend to achieve a Cpk of 2, a zero defects? And again, what I said and... Well, actually, when I posted on LinkedIn yesterday, "I'm okay with a quality goal of 3.4 defects per million." What I'm proposing is, instead of blindly saying zero defects is the goal and stop, or I want Cpk's of 1.33 or whatever they are everywhere in the organization, in terms of the economics of variation or the new economics, is how much money are we going to spend to achieve zero or 3.4 or whatever it is? And, is it worth the return on the investment? And this is where Dr. Taguchi's loss function comes in.   0:27:49.2 BB: And so what I'm proposing, inspired by Genichi Taguchi and W. Edwards Deming is, let's be thinking more about what is... Let's not blindly stop at zero, but if we choose to stop at zero, it's an economic choice that it's not worth the money at this time in comparison to other things we could be working on to improve this quality characteristic and that we've chosen to be here... Because what I don't want people to think is what Dr. Deming and Taguchi are talking about is we can spend any amount of money to achieve any quality goal without thinking of the consequences, nor thinking about, how does this goal on this thing in isolation, not make things bad elsewhere. So we have to be thinking about a quality goal, whether it's worth achieving and will that achievement be in concert with other goals and what we're doing there? That's what I'd like people thinking about as a result of this podcast tonight.   0:28:56.0 AS: And I think I have a good way of wrapping this up, and that is going back to Dr. Deming's first of his 14 Points, which is, create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive, to stay in business, and to provide jobs. And I think that what that... I link that to what you're saying with the idea that we're trying to improve our products and services constantly. We're not trying to improve one process. And also, to become competitive in the market means we're improving the right things because we will become more competitive if we are hitting what the client wants and appreciates. And so... Yeah.   0:29:46.3 BB: But with regard to... Absolutely with regard to our customers, absolutely with regard to how it affects different aspects of our company, that we don't get head over heels in one aspect of our company and lose elsewhere, that we don't deliver A+ products to the customer in a losing way, meaning that the A+ is great for you, but financially, we can't afford currently... Now, again, there may be a moment where it's worthwhile to achieve the A... We know we can achieve the A+, but we may not know how to do it financially. We may have the technology to achieve that number. Now, we have to figure out, is, how can we do it in an economically advantaged way, not just for you, the customer, but for us. Otherwise, we're losing money by delivering desirability. So it's gotta work for us, for you, but it's also understanding how that improvement... That improvement of that product within your overall system might not be worthwhile to your customer, in which case we're providing a... The classic...   0:31:18.8 AS: You're not becoming competitive then.   0:31:21.8 BB: The better buggy whip. But that gets into looking at things as a system. And this is... What's invaluable is, all of this is covered with a grasp of the System of Profound Knowledge. The challenge is not to look at goals in isolation. And even I've seen people at Lean conferences quote Dr. Deming and his constancy of purpose and I thought, well, you can have a... A non-Deming company has a constancy of purpose. [chuckle]  The only question is, what is the purpose? [laughter] And that's when I thought, a constancy of purpose on a focus on acceptability is good provided all of your competitors are likewise focusing on acceptability. So I just be... I just am fascinated to find people taking Deming's 14 Points one at a time, out of context, and just saying, "Well, Dr. Deming said this." Well, there we go again. [laughter]   0:32:29.9 AS: Bill, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. If you want to keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

País Estados Unidos Dirección Chris Miller, Raman Hui Guion Jeffrey Price, Peter S. Seaman, Jon Zack, J. David Stem, Joe Stillman Reparto Antonio Banderas, Cameron Diaz, Julie Andrews, John Cleese Música Harry Gregson-Williams Cuando Shrek se casó con Fiona, no cayó en la cuenta de que tarde o temprano acabaría siendo rey. Así, al caer enfermo su suegro, el Rey Harold, Shrek corre el peligro de tener que abandonar su amado pantano para ocupar el trono; a menos que encuentre un heredero. Decide entonces emprender un viaje con Asno y el Gato con Botas para encontrar a Arturo, el primo de Fiona. Mientras, en Muy Muy Lejano, el Principe Encantador recluta un ejército de villanos para tomar el trono por la fuerza. Pero no cuentan con que Fiona y la Reina Lillian también han reunido su grupo de heroínas para hacerles frente...

Začetek poletja in šolskih počitnic navadno predstavlja zagotovilo za gnečo na cestah. Promet je bil ponekod ohromljen že včeraj - med drugim se je podaljšal potovalni čas proti Primorski, obremenjena ostaja tudi ljubljanska obvoznica. Podobno bo danes, predvsem dopoldne, ko se bo na ceste predvidoma odpravilo največ voznikov. Ostali poudarki oddaje: - Guterres: Libanon ne sme postati druga Gaza. - Izpusti ogljikovega dioksida lani znova rekordni. - V Cerknem popoldne dobrodelni koncert v podporo obnovi partizanske bolnice Franja.

In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about where and how to start using your new knowledge when you're learning Deming.  TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today in episode 15 is Start Where You Are. Bill, take it away.   0:00:25.0 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And for our audience, you may notice there's a different background. This is not a green screen. This is actually a bedroom at my in-laws in upstate New York. Hey, Andrew, I've been listening to some of the podcasts, and I've collected some data on each of them. Would you like to see it?   0:00:53.0 AS: Yeah, definitely.   0:00:54.2 BB: I've got a control chart, I've got a control chart for each of the 14 sessions for how many times I say, holy cow.   0:01:02.9 AS: Holy moly.   0:01:04.4 BB: In each episode. Yeah, and the process is stable. [laughter] So I say holy cow, I think the average is 2.2, and the upper control limit is... I'm just kidding.   0:01:25.4 AS: You're a sick man.   0:01:27.7 BB: But I think outside of this podcast, I don't know if I use that expression. And I don't know where it comes from, I just, it must be...   0:01:37.7 AS: Did you grow up around cows? You said you're near where you grew up.   0:01:44.4 BB: Yeah, I am staying at my wife's sister's place. And my wife's father, when I met her, had cows in his backyard. And we used to chase the cows. When they got out, we would chase them. And let me tell you, they move fast. [laughter] And I came down several times, severe cases of poison ivy, trying to herd this one cow that was always escaping. And I thought, oh, I'll tell my father, let me go out and I can scare this cow back. Now, no the cow got the best of me. I got covered with mud and went home with poison ivy. Those things, they move fast. So that's my only personal experience with cows. [laughter]   0:02:33.5 AS: Did the cows ever go to a nearby church?   0:02:38.9 BB: No.   0:02:39.2 AS: To become holy.   0:02:40.1 BB: That's a good point? I don't... Yeah, how do those words tie together? I don't know.   0:02:43.4 AS: I don't know.   0:02:45.4 BB: I have to go find out who I got that from. So what I thought we'd talk about today is this, Start Where You Are, Start Where You Are. And first share where I... One context for that expression was the first time I saw Russ Ackoff speak, well, first where I met Russ. I had seen him speak before at a Deming conference, but I didn't get a chance to talk with him. But I saw him a few years later, and he was doing a one-day program in Los Angeles as part of a management series that he would do around the country. And there are about, I don't know, 150 people in the room, 25-30 from across Boeing sites in Southern California that I had invited. And at the end of the day, with about an hour to go, Russ says, okay, I'm going to give you a break. I'm going to give you time to formulate some questions and we'll spend the last hour discussing wherever you want to go. Well, I took the time to go up to Russ and ask him a couple of questions. I had met him earlier in the day. He knew that most people in the audience were there from across Boeing and that I had arranged them.   0:04:06.3 BB: And so I had a chance to talk with him. So I went up and said, I said I've got two questions for you that are not relevant to the audience, but I'd like to ask you one-on-one. He said, sure, go ahead. Well, no, I said knowing that you've known Dr. Deming for, since the early '50s, I said, over that period of time, what do you think he would say he learned from you that would stand out? And vice versa, what did you learn from him over those years that you would say stands out? And he looks at me and he says, well, I don't, I don't know what he learned from me. Then he says, then he answers the question and he says, he says, I think Ed, and he liked to say Ed, 'cause he liked to brag that, yeah, everybody calls him Dr. Deming. I call him Ed. I've known him since 1950.   0:05:05.2 BB: But Russ, by the comparison, if I ever introduced him to you as Dr. Ackoff, he would say, Andrew, call me Russ. So he says, relative to what he learned, what Dr. Deming learned from him, first he says, "well, I don't know what he learned from me. But I think his understanding of systems is very implicit and I helped him develop a better explicit understanding." And I think that makes a lot of sense. I think Dr. Deming's understanding of systems is a lot of what he talks about in The New Economics is what he learned from Russ. It's a very, I think you know when Dr. Deming shared the Production as a Viewed as a System that flow diagram in 1950, he always talks about systems, what comes around, goes around. But Russ was a master at systems from an academic perspective, and that was not Dr. Deming's forte. Now, when it comes to variation, that was Dr. Deming's academic forte. And that's where I would find Russ's understanding of variation, I would find to be very implicit, whereas Deming's was explicit. But anyway, he said he thought it gave him a better understanding of systems, that it was very implicit, very intuitive, and it helped him develop a better, a more academic sense of it. So I said, okay, so what did he learn... What did you learn from him? And he says, "well, I never gave that much thought to the whole quality movement.”   0:06:38.7 BB: “But he... I got a better, a warmer feeling of it." Russ would talk about quality of work life, and there's parallels with what Russ has talks about quality of work life that resemble Dr. Deming's work very well. And I'll give you one short story which ties in well with the Deming philosophy. Russ says he was at an Alcoa plant once upon a time, and he happened to be there on a day in which two workers were honored on stage in front of a bunch of coworkers with an award. Now, we both know what Dr. Deming thinks about giving people awards. So, but the fun part of the story is, Russ says he went up to these two guys afterwards, after they came down off the stage and he says, hey. And he says, and Russ was so precise with language. I mean, he walks up to these two guys and he says, ready Andrew? He says to them, I caught them at their point of maximum puffery. I mean, have you ever heard anyone use the word puffery...   0:07:56.7 AS: No.   0:07:57.1 BB: In a sentence? So he says, I walk up to these two guys and I said, I caught them at their point of maximum puffy. Right? And then he punctures them with the following question. "For how long have you two known about that idea that you were awarded for?" And they looked down at their feet and he said, "Come on, for, for how long have you had that idea before you shared it with management?" And they said, "20 years." And then Russ says, why did you wait so long to share it? And Russ says, he says to him, "Those sons of bitches never asked."   0:08:51.8 BB: And so, and Russ would talk about that as a quality of work life issue. Now, I've heard him tell that story many times, and I once asked him, I said, so what was the idea they came up with? And he said they would take these four foot wide rolls of aluminum foil off a machine, and these are the types of rolls that get used to make aluminum cans. And the roll may be, you know, so it's four foot tall. It's a, it could be easily a foot in outer diameter. And he said when they, when they're taken off a machine, they stand them on the concrete floor. And then to move them, the workers would tilt them back a little bit and then roll them.   0:09:43.9 AS: Which damages...   0:09:47.0 BB: The edge.   0:09:47.7 AS: Yeah.   0:09:47.8 BB: Exactly. So their idea was to, instead of putting them on a the concrete floor, to put them on a piece of plywood. So, what Russ saw was, which very much resembles a... The prevailing system of management where you're gonna wait 20 years before somebody asks you a question, until there's a program, until there's an award, then I'll come forward. All right, so let's go back to the audience. So I went up and asked Russ those questions, and now he is fielding questions from the audience. And one question really struck me and he says, Dr. Deming, not Dr. Deming, the guy says, "Dr. Ackoff," he said, "what you're talking about all day makes a lot of sense. And most organizations have little understanding of it, where you're just talking about, you know, managing interactions, the system, whatnot." He says, "but don't we have to wait for senior management to get on board before we do something with it?   0:10:54.2 BB: Don't we have to wait?" Right. And I'm listening to this, and I don't know what Russ is gonna say, but I'm hearing where the guy's coming from. And Russ turns right at him and he says, "Andrew, John, Sally, you have to start where you are." And I told him later, I said, I could've run up and given him a big hug, because if you're gonna sit back and wait for your management to get on board, you know how long that's gonna take? And so I just love that perspective of starting where you are. Now, let's flip to Dr. Deming, and a great quote that I like to use with students and clients with his work is "The smaller the system, the easier to manage. The bigger the system, the more complicated, but the more opportunities." Right? Now we'll go back to Russ.   0:11:54.0 BB: Russ would say, if you're a school teacher, like our daughter's an eighth grade teacher, start in your classroom. Why? Because you're not gonna start at the elementary school level or the junior high's, that's bigger than you. You're not gonna smart start smaller than that because then that's minimizing what your impact could be, but start where you are and then expand. Now, what that also means is it may be that when you start where you are, as you expand the size of the system, you might need to go back and change what you did now that you're looking at a bigger system.   0:12:37.8 BB: And so that's a great likelihood that what is optimum for you in the classroom may not be optimum when you're starting to think about the elementary school. But even if you start at the elementary school, what is optimum may not be optimum if you have the school district. So there's, no matter where you start, there needs to be an appreciation that in hindsight, what you did before may not be what's best for the bigger system. And the same thing applies when you're talking about integration. You know, Dr. Taguchi's loss function and the ideal value of a given characteristic, well, what I tell people is the ideal value depends upon the size of the system. And so if I'm designing two things to come together and I'm looking at the clearance between them, well, there's a clearance that makes it easy for these two things to come together if you're Andrew doing assembly. But let's say downstream of you is somebody who's using that product, you know, where that clearance is important, so the clearance that makes it easy to go together may not be the clearance that improves the functionality.   0:14:00.2 BB: And that will always be the case that you, that what is optimum where you are, may not be optimum when you expand the size of the system. So you have a few choices. One is, don't do anything. You know, for fear of making it worse, do nothing. Or, run a small scale experiment, use the PDSA model, try some things. But, that is still not a guarantee. 'Cause that small scale experiment still could be with me in my classroom and I run that experiment for a month, two months, three months.   0:14:44.4 BB: So even if I use that model, I can't know everything. And that's the... I mean, those are the complications of viewing things as a system, is to know that the system is not closed, it's open. I met a professor years ago at a conference and he had a model in his presentation that was very much a closed system. You know, they're working within this model, looking at these factors and these factors and these factors. And he went up after us. And I said, yeah, there's factors outside of that system. And he says, "Well, yeah, but we're just looking at this in scope." I said, "You have to frame it to a given size, but you know there's always the possibility that what's outside [chuckle] that you're not including, could haunt you for some time to come." And I didn't get the impression... I mean, it was almost like in engineering we talk about a free body diagram where you take whatever is your list you're looking at and you draw a line around it and you say, "That's the system I'm analyzing."   0:15:58.1 BB: But there's always a system which is bigger than that. And then again, bigger. So no matter where you start, again, and I look at the options are, if you're fearful of not including everything, well, then you're gonna do nothing. And that's easily what Deming and Ackoff were not saying. What they're saying is start where you are. Run experiments. Now, what I expect to be the beauty of a Deming-based organization, a "we" organization, is flexibility.   0:16:29.9 BB: And the flexibility is when things don't go as planned and we learn something, that we have the ability to reflect, note what we've learned, share it with as many people that we think could... would benefit from that. Get back on the horse and try again. I've worked with groups who were quite willing to do that. I worked with groups that were quite... They wouldn't get back on the horse. We were running some experiments dealing with hole machining of some small drills, you know, like on the order of a 16th of an inch, very small. And the experiment was, let's say eight... Seven different factors at two values each, eight experiments. And I don't know, they might've been machining in each experiment, 10 holes, say. And I wanted them to measure diameter of the top and the bottom of each hole, something like that.   0:17:29.3 BB: And I get the data prior to meeting with them. They sent me the data and I had enough experience running fractional factorial experimentation using Doctor Taguchi's ideas that upon first blush looking at the data, I either get a warm feeling or I get a queasy feeling. So in this case, I get a queasy feeling and there's... I'm looking at the data and immediately I knew this is... But I didn't know why. I just knew that, I'm not... And I'm wondering how am I gonna say this to them in the meeting? 'cause they're all excited. For a couple of them it wasn't their first study; they had done this before with great success. So I'm in the meeting and I'm listening and then one of them says, you know, in the experiment we're looking at starting each experiment with a new drill. And the experiments we're looking at different speeds of the drill, different cutting fluids, different parameters associated with machining these holes. And one of them says, they didn't... In hindsight, they didn't use a brand new drill for each experiment. So now I'm thinking, okay, say some more.   0:18:50.0 BB: Well, the drills we used in the experiment had all been used before and were resharpened to be like new, I mean, not new, but like new. And I said, "So say more." And then he said, "Well, when they looked at them under the microscope, the very tip of the drill was not in the center of the drill." 'Cause if you look at a drill, there's a cutting edge on the very top, you can say that near the left side or the right side. And those two cutting edges weren't the same length. So when the drill is cutting, it's not... The hole is not gonna be round, it's gonna have an oblong... So now I'm thinking, kind of explains the data. So he says, one of them say, "Can we salvage the data?"   0:19:45.3 BB: I said, no. And they said, why not? I said, because the assumption we had was that that the drills were reasonably the same. I mean, of course, even eight brand new drills are not identical, but now what you're telling me is the biggest source of variation is in the drills that we thought were the same. And that is wiping out the variation that we introduced. That's the issue, is that the signal coming from the drills that we didn't ask for is bigger than what we asked for. "So you mean we have to run all the experiments again?"   0:20:26.9 BB: And now they're, and I said, well, let me ask you this. So here's the good news. The good news is we didn't spend more time than we did on this experiment. That's the good news. I said, the good news is, we now know that the sharpening process needs to be relooked at. And as it turned out, probably the biggest thing we learned in the experiment, was that it ain't worth resharpening the drills. At that size, throw them away. But what I was hoping is that they would get back on the horse and go back to what we originally planned to do with eight brand new drills. It never happened. But we learned something, but what we learned is not what we had planned to learn. And that gets me to what I would tell people, is if you don't look, you won't find. But then you have to be willing to take the existing system and what is...   0:21:39.3 BB: Do anything, but that just means it stays the way... So if you don't look, you won't find. And if you do look, there's no guarantee. So that was a situation where I was very bummed. And every time, I mean, what I, one of the things I learned early on was preparing management and the team for such situations.   0:22:02.6 BB: That everybody was expecting, you know, a grand slam every single time. I said, no, that's not the way it works. In the real world, you try, you fail, you try, you fail, you learn, hey, you learn what we did here is that the sharpening process doesn't make sense. Had another experiment where, and I don't know which is, which was the bigger disappointment, but in the other one, there were 18 experiments with a lot of hard work, oh my God, and incredible precision as to how each of 1080 holes would be machines. So there were 1080 holes in a ring that was about eight feet in diameter. So there are holes about three tenths of an inch in this ring. The holes were all numbered one through 1080. Every hole had a different recipe. Somehow, the machinist wasn't informed of that.   0:23:08.5 BB: And the manufacturing engineer went to a meeting and he came back only to find out that the instructions, so machinists didn't know. And I said, "So, so what'd you learn?" He said "I learned not to go away to a meeting." So these things happen. Another thing I say in terms of starting where you are, my boss at one time knew I was involved in half a dozen to a dozen different Taguchi studies. And he calls me in one day and he says, "So how many studies are you working on?" I said, half a dozen to a dozen. He said, "Which of them is gonna have the biggest improvement?"   0:23:55.8 BB: So like the biggest... So I said, "So you mean like the biggest percent gain?" He says, "Yeah, which one's gonna have the biggest percent gain?" I said, "I guarantee you that we'll be smarter about everyone after we're done, I guarantee you that." He says, "But which one's gonna have the biggest percent improvement?"   0:24:17.2 BB: I looked straight at him, I said, if I knew the answer to that question, would I be working here? I'd be doing what you do, Andrew, I mean, financial forecasting. But he's like, "Well, don't give me that." I said, "I don't know which is gonna have the biggest gain, but I know we're going to be smarter. And I know all the things we try that don't have an improvement, we're smarter about it." But I said, "if you don't look, you won't try." So you have to start where you are. Another thing I want to point out is, and I wrote an article about this for the LEAN Management Journal, and if any of our listeners want a copy of the article, they can reach out to me on LinkedIn, and the article is about the, gosh, pragmatism. And viewing things with pragmatism.   0:25:15.3 BB: And I uh, and the possibilities of pragmatism, anyway, there was a lot of alliteration at the time, there was a lot of P's, 'cause what started dawning on me is this need to be practical, pragmatic. And I've got a dictionary definition, "pragmatic, dealing with things of sensibility, and dealing with things that are sensible and realistic in a way which is practical rather than theoretical," right? And where that comes from, in terms of starting where you are, is...   0:26:04.2 BB: Everyone is right. And there's a philosopher years ago that came across this. He says, everyone is right. And so everyone works in an organization where they believe, firmly believe that what they're doing is right, is practical, is pragmatic. And so in a non-Deming organization, would you work on things, Andrew, that are good and going well, that arrive on time, would you spend any time on those things, Andrew?   0:26:33.0 AS: No.   0:26:33.8 BB: And why not, Andrew?   0:26:37.0 AS: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.   0:26:42.1 BB: And that's very practical and pragmatic of you, isn't it?   0:26:46.6 AS: Exactly. I've got limited time. I gotta put out fires.   0:26:51.2 BB: Yeah. And that started to dawn on me, is that in a non-Deming "me" environment, working on things that are good doesn't add value. And so I thought, I mean, how do you argue with that? Now, in a Deming organization, it'd be pragmatic to work on the things that are not broken to either prevent them from breaking or to improve integration. And to not do so would not be practical. So there's two different environments of practicality depending on how you see the world. Um, oh, and last time I named the company, this time I'm not gonna name the company. So I was in an environment with a very well-known consultant.   0:28:00.6 BB: I was invited to travel with this consultant several times over a few years. I could take notes, I was given access to a lot of information on how these ideas were being used in the organization, but I can't talk about where it was, what they were doing, but it was really cool. So in one of the first scenarios, a team came in, led by this guy, and he presented to the consultant over the course of two hours a situation that he was dealing with. And teams would come meet with a consultant for a couple hours. This is one of the very first meetings, so that the engineer came in and said, here's where we are. We've got this issue. And the issue involved a commercial product with a... Let's just say, something about the product, how the customer interacts with it was very laborious. Let's just say like banging it together.   [laughter]   0:29:08.7 BB: It was very laborious. And the resulting warranty claims were on the order of $10-20 million a year in warranty claims. And the solution was kind of like giving the customer a bigger hammer, and actually along those lines. So that scenario was presented and that 10-20 billion at that time was a fraction of the total warranty claims for the company, which was on the order of 2-3 billion. So this was not the biggest issue, but it was a lot of $10-20 million issues. So the engineer proposes a solution, which I would paraphrase as: Spending, hiring someone to manage the variation in the parts that went together to mind the gap. And his theory was that if we minded the gap, we could make these things go together as the customer used it and get rid of all those warranty claims. So I'm thinking, hiring the person to collect the data because it definitely involved hiring someone to give them responsibility. Let's just say putting in place the use of control charts on the respective parts, minding the gap that, you know common cause variation and whatnot. So at that time I'm thinking, salary and benefits, that's maybe a $100,000. Saving the corporation $10 to $20 million. How's that sound, Andrew?   0:30:42.6 AS: Sounds good.   0:30:44.3 BB: Spent a $100,000, save $10 million. So the consultant says to the engineer, so what did the plant manager say? And he said, the plant manager says no. He said, why did the plant manager say no? He said, the plant manager said, why should I spend my budget to save the corporation?   [laughter]   0:31:08.4 BB: Now, if I told you the consultant's response, then you would know the name of the company. So I'm not gonna tell you what the consultant's response was other than the paraphrase would be, I thought you were looking at things as a system. Isn't that the company's slogan? He says, well, not quite. But if you're the plant manager, you're being practical. You're saying, why should I spend my budget to save the corporation? Does that get me promoted? Does that give me visibility or does it make my boss angry? In terms of starting where you are, this is a story you're gonna love. I had an intern one summer, his father was a coworker, he came to a class I was offering twice. 'Cause we allowed employees to bring family members and our vision was to get these ideas out there, fill the empty seats in the classroom. So one is we're filling empty seats, two is, the thought was if we bring in volunteers from the community, and that was a... The training was open to what we called members of the community. Members of the community are people who are working full-time, part-time to serve society. The fact that they work for, you know, General Electric or Lockheed Martin, that was not the issue.   0:32:28.1 BB: So you get to come in because you're a soccer referee, you're a Girl Scout leader, you sing in your church choir, we're gonna fill the empty seats. So this was not taking the space of employees. This is, we have employee space, we have customers, space for customers, place for suppliers, but we still have extra spaces. Let's fill those seats. Boeing's vision was to help the communities in which we live. So I went to my boss with this proposal and he said, go right ahead. And so the operational definition was we invited members of the community. A member of the community is someone who works full-time, part-time to benefit the community.   0:33:05.5 BB: So this, and also we invited family members. And so this guy brings his son in and it was an evening class and which, you know, second shift, which means it ends around midnight. And the one who came in, the son was a, graduated from high school two years early, one of the brightest people I've ever met in my life. And he's an economist by training. So he starts asking economic questions. And he brings up, because hears me talking about how, you know, this movement within Rocketdyne that moved from being a "me" to a "we" organization, the progress we're making, the improvements we're, you know, that we could at least properly talk about. And he says says in economic theory there's this thing called the freeloader principle. Have you heard of it? And I said, no. I said, how does that work?   0:34:00.8 BB: And he says, well, economists will talk about, there'll be people that do the work, and then people who want to ride the train for free. So in your effort for Rocketdyne to move in the direction of being, you know, more of a "we" organization, how will you prevent people from freeloading? And I said, it's easy. I said, everyone will see them and they will know we see them. [laughter] So what you have at Deming organization is, if I leave the bowling ball in a doorway without asking you, you have the visibility to see that. So anyway, he threw that question out. He contacts me a month or so later and he says, Hey, Bill, he says, I'm, I'm gonna be home from college for the summer. I'm looking for a summer job. If you don't, I dunno if you have budget, if you don't have budget, I'll work for free. So I said, I don't have budget. So I made a deal with him. I said, you can come and attend all this training that we're offering over the entire summer. In exchange, here's some things I'd like you to do. So I arranged for him to get a badge. He came in every day.   0:35:10.0 BB: Everywhere I did training across Southern California, he would come with me, be a fly on a wall. And he got to see some really cool stuff. Well, towards the end of the summer, around middle of August, he comes to me and he says he's gonna quit. He's done. Next week is my last week. He says, did I tell you about my other job? I said, no, what other job? He says, oh, I told, I guess I didn't tell you. He said I wanted to see during my last summer in college, 'cause once I graduate, I'm gonna go get a real job. So this is my last summer in college and I figured if the ideas I'm learning from you are worth anything, I wanna go see now. So I says, so what'd you do? He says, I've had a summer job applying these ideas, starting where he is.   0:36:02.6 BB: And I said, okay. And he says, I got a job at a Western Wear store, in Thousand Oaks, that had a sign, walked into the mall, saw a sign at the door looking for a salesperson. So I hired in as a salesperson. I said, so how'd that go? He said, well, the way it works is the salespeople rotate as to who gets the next customer. So there's like three salespeople at any point of time. While I'm working on this one, you sit behind the counter with the others,   just sitting there, you know, twiddling your thumb. So, I said, so, so what'd you do? He said, well, what I started to do was, instead of just sitting behind the counter, if I saw the person waiting on the customer needed a calculator, I'd have it ready for them. If I thought they needed a stapler, I'd have it ready for them.   0:37:00.0 BB: I said, holy cow. I said, what'd that lead to? He said, well, next thing you know, there's, we're doing that for one another. Well, he ended up, after about a month of working there, he was named manager of the store, as a walk-in. I said, how'd that work?   [laughter]   0:37:01.5 BB: How did you after a month become salesperson, you know, moved from being a salesperson to being a manager? He said, well, they keep track of who sells how much each week. You know, it's not a commission system, but they keep track. And because I had the most sales, I got promoted. I said, well, how did you get the most sales? He said, I started asking questions that I learned from you and Tim and the others in the training. I started asking questions about, so somebody comes in, they're looking for a suit, I'm asking them, what's the engagement? And the better I understand where they're coming from, the better I know, you know, you don't need to buy this, you can rent this. And so I started asking questions. The better I understand the questions, the better I'm serving them. So one is, I'm helping my coworkers.   0:38:08.3 BB: Two is, I have been named manager because I'm helping the clients understand...we're better understanding their needs. So he starts off as a salesperson, wins over his colleague and start mimicking his behavior, gets promoted to manager. Now, what he starts to do, in the manager role, is he, there's a, there's... He in the manager's role gets like 10% of all the sales above a certain value. So he starts sharing that profit with all employees on a prorated basis. And there's, the overall sales for the store have improved dramatically.   0:38:56.6 BB: Now he's gonna go off and work on this other big project which was his senior thesis, which also involved taking Deming's ideas and Ackoff's ideas and putting them into a company that he wanted to start. But before he did that, he hired another student, turns out a Stanford graduate, and brought him to class such that this guy could take over for him and keep this thing going. And I said, so are you gonna bring the owner of the store? And he says, no. He says, they have no interest. I say, so what's gonna happen after you leave and after Sam leaves? He says, this is gonna go back to zero. But he walked away having just tried to do what he could with what he learned that summer and made a difference from where he was.   0:39:45.7 AS: Well, that's a great point to end on. And the idea being that when you look around at your company, at your school, at your job, at your life, and you wanna start implementing these ideas, it can get overwhelming as you look at the bigger and bigger systems or other things. So the objective really is just start small and start where you are. Anything you would add in a wrap-up?   0:40:11.6 BB: Yeah. Another thing I'd like to add to that, have you heard the expression, management works on the system, people work in the system?   0:40:24.8 AS: Yeah.   0:40:27.6 BB: Okay. That's attributed to Myron Tribus. And people have said to me, Bill, management works on the system, people work in the system. Well, I've heard people use that expression as a means of saying, if you aren't in management, then you can't... Then just wait. Just wait. Because if you're a willing worker, Andrew, you're just a machinist in the factory, well, Andrew, you're not, that's not management. I mean, you're working in the system. The people in management work on the system. And so a disagreement I've had with some people is that if I was to believe that expression, then I would wait for management to take action. And that may take forever. And so...   [laughter]   0:41:23.7 BB: In fact, I had a guy who was working with Deming, or a guy who was somehow affiliated with some Deming consultants, and he came to a class at Rocketdyne years ago and he says, so Bill, how often do you meet with the president of Rocketdyne? I said, not very often. He said, does he support what you're doing? I said, of course he does. If he wasn't, you wouldn't be here and I wouldn't be here. But how often do you meet with him? I said, not very often. He says, you know what Myron Tribus says, I say, oh, no. What did Myron say? He says, Myron says, management works on the system, people work in the system. He says, you need to be meeting with him all the time. I said, he's in Washington DC trying to get us next generation contracts, and I think that is far more important a point of work for him than anything else. And he says, oh, no. He says, I think you're wrong. And I said, I look at him, I said, so actually, I said, I think there might be a bigger system.   0:42:27.0 BB: You know, it's something more important to do. "More important than working with the president of your company, Bill?" I said, "What if I am meeting with people at NASA headquarters? What if I am meeting with the Army's first [woman] four star general," which I had. I said, what if that? I said, "So you just want me to start, you think the system is constrained to me just getting the president smart?" And so there I would say is, one is, if you follow the belief, and Myron was brilliant, and I don't... But I think if you take that verbatim, management works on the system, people work in the system, now you're back to Russ Ackoff and that student asking the question, where do I... Yeah, don't I have to work for management to get on board? And I said, no. What I try to do in my classes and with clients is help people on any level get smart about these ideas, try to give them everyday examples that they can share with their peers relative to givng an everyday example of Dr. Taguchi 's loss function.   0:43:40.1 BB: Giving an everyday understanding of the difference between managing actions and management systems, so that individuals can become more articulate in explaining to others. And simultaneously, what Ackoff would say, the best way to learn something is teach it to others. And so, my hope is that people listening to our podcast, don't think you have to wait for senior management to get on board, start to make a difference from where you are, practice your understanding of these ideas, explaining them to people outside of work where you might be given more time to explain it than somebody at work.   0:44:18.3 BB: Use that experience to try to do something with it. Maybe the experiments you run are at home, in some manner. And hopefully that then inspires you to go a little bit further. And another thing I'll point out is in a future podcast, I'll talk about what I learned from a good friend on how to create change within an organization starting at the bottom of the organization, which gets into some more detail, but it's still based on the premise of starting from where you are with a theory and understanding that what people call practical, there's Deming practical and there's non-Deming practical. So if they're saying they're being practical, they are truly being practical, don't be dissuaded by that.   [laughter]   0:45:04.4 AS: Boom. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

Co dalej z mediami publicznymi w Polsce? Prof. Antoni Dudek komentuje zamieszanie z przejęciem TVP. Gościem odcinka jest prof. Ryszard Piotrowski. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/dudek-o-polityce/message

Izraelska vlada in Hamas sta ponoči dosegla dogovor, po katerem bo palestinsko gibanje v zameno za prekinitev spopadov izpustilo 50 talcev od več kot 200 zajetih pred poldrugim mesecem, Izrael pa bo iz zaporov izpustil več palestinskih žensk in otrok. Začetek veljavnosti dogovora bodo objavili v 24-ih urah. Hamas in Izrael sta dogovor sklenila v Katarju ob posredovanju te države, Egipta in Združenih držav Amerike. Vse podrobnosti še niso znane. V oddaji tudi: - Državni zbor bo glasoval o proračunskem svežnju za prihodnji dve leti, vlada bo predvidoma potrdila predlog zakona o obnovi po avgustovski ujmi. - Začetek oblikovanja najpomembnejšega dela podzakonskih aktov za dolgotrajno oskrbo: koliko pravic bo pripadalo uporabniku. - Zaprtje šoštanjske termoelektrarne, kot je načrtovano zdaj, bomo prebivalci in gospodarstvo čutili kot podražitev električne energije.

Meditación del día 3 de noviembre de 2023 Palabra de Vida

What's the difference between Compliance Excellence and Contextual Excellence? Is one better than the other? Which one does a Deming organization pursue? In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about the variety of types of excellence, and why they matter. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.7 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is episode 11: In Search of Excellence. Bill, go ahead, take it away.   0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: All right. So, as I've been doing for the last few episodes, I like to go back to the prior episode. Because I listen to these again and again and again. Oh, there's other things I wanna say. [laughter] Remember the title of the last session, Andrew?   0:00:46.1 AS: Well, that depends. [laughter] The title was, It Depends.   0:00:50.7 BB: Alright. Alright. So you know I'm fond of that phrase. So I wanna... I thought of after, you know, in the last couple weeks is, I took a class in program management at a big university in Greater Los Angeles. I mean, it could have been anywhere, but it was in Los Angeles, and there were 25, 30 people in the room, maybe more, from around the world coming into this university. It was a three day program, you know, like, $1,800. $1800. I had just joined a department called The Program Management Office, and I thought, I should go find out what program management is it all about? I had some ideas, but I thought, "I want to go take a real class on this." The class was presented by an aerospace veteran in project management. He had been involved in major programs with Hughes, installing, you know, working on airports around the world and other DOD stuff.   0:01:48.6 BB: And I mean, he was, he was a very interesting guy. I got there early every day looking, I was hoping there'd be an opportunity I could start a conversation with him, have lunch with him, that never happened. But three days long. And so, on the second day, he threw out a question to the audience, and people are sitting in a... It's kind of an amphitheater, with the rows were kind of curved. So he throws out a question to the audience and the guy in the front row answers, "it depends." [laughter] And the instructor very deliberately walked from the front of the room, a good 15 feet without saying anything, just walked right at that person in the front row, you know, all at the same level, gets right in his face and says the following, Andrew, are you ready?   0:02:47.6 AS: I'm ready.   0:02:48.6 BB: He says, "Are you an attorney?" [laughter] And I thought to myself, "All of that for the answer, "it depends," really?" And so, [laughter] later that afternoon, somebody asked the instructor a question, "Hey, what if you're in a situation where you gotta deal with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, this, this, this, this, this, how would you handle that?"   0:03:17.3 AS: And for the listeners out there, you know the punchline here, come on, give it to me. What did he say?   0:03:23.5 BB: No, here's what he said. He said, "Well, if it involves this, I would do this. If it involves that, I would do that." And so, what did I say, Andrew?   0:03:42.6 AS: What did you say? What do you mean?   0:03:44.7 BB: I bit my tongue.   0:03:45.9 AS: Oh, you didn't say anything when he said that?   0:03:48.6 BB: Because what he just said was, "it depends."   0:03:50.4 AS: “It depends” in another way.   0:03:52.8 BB: Yeah. He found another way to say “it depends.” So it was also...   0:03:56.0 AS: He sounded kind of smart, you know, well, let's just narrow it down to two potential options.   0:04:00.8 BB: “Are you an attorney?” Yeah. But he still... What he was still saying was, it depends on the situation.   0:04:09.3 AS: Yep.   0:04:09.8 BB: And I just thought... I mean... And not that I didn't mind that answer, but I was just dumbstruck as to why he was so emphatic in challenging this answer, "it depends"? And I just thought, again, I never went up and asked, but I just thought, I wasn't sure it was gonna go anywhere. So anyway, so I wanted to throw that out. Going back a couple episodes, I wanna talk about metrics and KPIs and point out that there's nothing wrong, I mean, we're not saying KPIs are bad. What we're talking about is, when KPIs are used as goals and in a way that unnecessarily drives the organization in different directions, but if a KPI is just a metric of how we're doing in sales, that's one thing.   0:05:03.7 BB: But if the metric is, I want sales to be this number, and I go to people in procurement and say, "I want you to cut back on procurement," you know, we can end up with a conflict. You know, I had a woman in class once who worked for a gym, health club. And her job was to sell memberships and get on the phone every day, sell memberships, sell memberships, sell memberships. And she told her boss, she says, "Now, if I do a really good job, lines will form if we don't get more equipment. So, while I'm doing this, shouldn't we be working on that?" And her boss' attitude was, "You keep working on that and don't worry about that." So what she realized, it was just a revolving door of replacing old people with new people. They were just managing the parts in isolation. But another thing I think we had agreement on, you know, also had agreement on KPIs is it's... We're not saying there's anything wrong with metrics, but in organizations where we've worked, we've seen people drive change with, "give everybody a KPI."   0:06:17.5 BB: We could have great ignorance of variation. We have... Leading to dissolution of, just increased separation of organization. What I'm also reminded of is a quote that Dr. Deming used to use of his statistician colleague, Lloyd Nelson, who said, "the most important numbers used to manage an organization are unknown and unknowable." And one example from when I worked for Boeing is a good friend of mine was at the Boeing Leadership Center and there was a big emphasis at that time on what's called the Economic Profit Calculator. Making sure that business decisions close. They were not gonna build the next generation airplane unless they've got all the sales lined up and you have to have closure and closure within some timeframe, and that person came out.   0:07:12.4 BB: That was the big driving change in that era. Well, right after that presentation by somebody senior, the Chief Operating Officer, Harry Stonecipher presented. And what was near and dear to Harry at that point was something he started when McDonald Douglas was separate from Boeing, then Boeing bought McDonald Douglas, and he was really big on an education program that allowed anyone to pursue any degree, all reimbursed. So if he wanted an AS degree, a Master's degree, a law degree, not only were they paying for the degrees, but there were people getting a Bachelor's and then getting a Master's in Science and a MBA, so he just go at it, go at it. And he's very proud of that.   0:08:00.5 BB: So, my friend Tim is listening to all this and he says, "This afternoon, we heard from so and so in finance about Boeing business decisions needing to fit into this Economic Profit Calculator, how does your education reimbursement program fit into that model?" And his answer was, I thought really profound, he said, "there are some things you just do." And to me that fits in with Deming saying, you can't measure the price of education. We brought an instructor in, we had you away for so many hours...   0:08:34.6 AS: You can measure the cost.   0:08:36.1 BB: And so, we can put some numbers on it. But what are the benefits? The benefits show up in the future. So I really admire that Stonecipher's answer was, I think very much in keeping with Deming is, we're gonna spend money on education. So, I just wanna throw that out for in terms of metrics and what not.   0:08:52.9 AS: And I would just throw in my thoughts on KPIs, which has gotten stronger and stronger over the years, and that is that, I really think people should stop KPIs. And the reason why is, because I think they've gotten to the point where it's just so misused and so, people are so reliant on it. Now, I know that that's an extreme view and so... But I say it to also challenge people to think about it, but if you can't stop the KPIs, then I would say the most important thing from my perspective, is make sure that compensation is not linked to the KPIs. Which of course, people will come back and say, that's the whole point of KPIs.   [laughter]   0:09:44.4 BB: Exactly.   0:09:44.5 AS: And if you remove compensation connection to KPI, and instead of that, you use coaching and working with your team, and you have metrics of what you want to achieve as a company, as an organization, as a department, and you look at those metrics... Nothing wrong with that, but it's when you bring in the personal, particularly the personal incentive or the division incentive that can then sub-optimize... Can optimize a part of the organization, either an individual or a department, and therefore, sub-optimize the total.   0:10:22.0 BB: Oh, yeah. If you tie those metrics... Yeah and that becomes the... What makes them sinister, when you provide that incentive that... And I'm sure we've both seen people given incentives and they're not gonna leave, what I tell people is, they're not gonna leave a penny on the table, whether it's get rid of that division, lay off so many people, they are going to achieve that metric, because there's money on the table and in the way of that problem.   0:10:55.2 AS: And for those people who are listening or viewing, who feel like, "My God, what would I do if I don't have KPIs, because that's kind of the way we've been managing?" The first thing is, I would say is that, if you know that... So first, talk to your staff, because once you go out and talk to the people in the company, you realize that almost nobody is in favor of KPIs, because they're being manipulated in many ways and they all see it. But if you know in your heart that it's not the right thing to do, my argument is, don't wait to stop doing the wrong thing until you know what the right thing is. You know? Stop... "I don't wanna stop beating my child, because I don't know the other way to do it." [laughter] No. Stop beating your child today, that would be a first step. Don't worry about what it is you're gonna do next. Anyways, that's enough on KPIs.   0:12:00.4 BB: You've reminded me of a story that's coming to me, but it's not coming in loud and clear, so I made a note, I'll share it next time 'cause you're gonna love it. I wanna give an example of what, of what, of what a narrow focus on KPIs can do. Just a couple of little ones, that are, you just can't make these up. In 1999, while at Rocketdyne, there was a focus on reducing costs. And this is, all organizations have these stories. And this is one I use to talk about in class all the time. So I don't think anyone's gonna be offended. Hopefully they'll laugh more than be offended by it.   0:12:37.9 BB: So there's a big focus across the company of reducing cost. Reducing cost. What do people do in a non-Deming organization? They look at cost in isolation. Where I wanna reduce the cost of this, not look at how it affects the others. And so, at that point of time, again, we're talking over 20 years ago, all the documentation to make every space shuttle main engine was on, was on paper. Every page used to fabricate the engines on paper. And there were page by page instructions of manufacturing to do this, do this, line by line by line, and on every line it might say, torque this bolt to 55 inch pounds, and it was stamped by me, the mechanic, and by you the inspector. Boom, boom, boom.   0:13:28.2 BB: So if NASA ever wants to know, was that bolt torqued on that engine on... And we have all the documentation. Guess how many pages of documentation there are? Nowadays it's likely all electronic, but in that day it was all paper. Guess how many pages of documentation for every single space shuttle main engine of which they're on the order of 18 made? Take a wild guess.   0:13:55.9 AS: Gosh. I'm just thinking thousands.   0:14:00.5 BB: 18,000 pages of documentation. So Andrew, that's like, 60 3-Ring Binders and I mean, 300 pages in a 3-Ring Binder, right? So imagine every engine's got 60 3-Ring Binders. So in 1999, all the pages in those books are on card stock heavy... Card stock paper, heavyweight paper, right? And why is that, Andrew? Because these are a storage document, right? So, I kid you not, one week I'm doing a class, you know talking about paradigms of variation and all the things we've been talking about. And somewhere in the conversation, somebody mentions that the card stock paper was replaced by lighter weight photocopy paper. And then, the person mentioned that, shared that, as a result of that, in the use of these 3-Ring Binders, the pages were falling out.   [laughter]   0:15:05.4 BB: And when I... And then the person went on to say...   0:15:07.1 AS: Oh, that's okay.   0:15:09.3 BB: Oh, no. Hold on, Andrew. So, as a focus on reducing costs, the heavy card stock paper is replaced by a lighter weight paper. The pages are falling out. So when I asked the guy, what are we doing with it? And the answer was, we're putting hole reinforcement circles on the pages to put them back in the binder.   0:15:34.2 AS: Absolutely.   0:15:35.1 BB: Right? And so, for those who don't know, hole reinforcement circles are little circles about the size of a, of a cheerio that get put on either side of the sheet of paper...   0:15:46.9 AS: With adhesive on the back of it.   0:15:48.1 BB: And it's a heavy cloth to keep it from pulling up. So, I mentioned that a couple of days later to some colleagues and they looked at me like I was from Mars. They're like, no, I mean, you've got some great stories, Bill, but they weren't buying the story. So the following week in class, [chuckle] I said, Hey, last week somebody mentioned, anybody know anything about that? And the guy in the front row, not only does he nod and say, yeah, he pulls out of his box a roll... Pulls out of his pocket a roll of like, 300 of these. And I said, so, this is really going on. He says, Bill, I go through a box of these a day.   0:16:29.9 AS: Oh, my God.   0:16:34.5 BB: So when you focus on the cost of the paper and forget that the paper is actually a storage document, not just a sheet of paper, you end up with hole reinforcement circles as a solution. Now...   0:16:46.1 AS: And the cost of the circle, the reinforcement, hole reinforcement adhesives that you put on and the cost of the labor that's spending time doing that by these high value added people.   0:17:04.6 BB: Well, and I also realized, if the space shuttle is on the pad and ready to go, fueled, if you're in that window and something comes up and somebody in NASA calls up Rocketdyne and says, we need to know for the second engine in that vehicle, if this work was done? If this work is done? If you delay the launch, if you're in the window, the vehicle was fueled, it's like a million dollars a day. So imagine going to the binder and the phone call back is, we can't find that sheet of paper. So this is...   0:17:46.8 AS: That was on page 47. I've got 46.   0:17:52.7 BB: We've got 40...   0:17:53.3 AS: And I got 48.   0:17:55.5 BB: So, but I use that. Okay, well, pre-pandemic, I was doing some training in New Zealand at a university. I needed to staple... I needed... [chuckle] I needed to staple these documents together. And so, the instructor who was hosting us, said, "What do you need?" I said, I need staples. So he goes to his office, comes back five minutes later, gives me a couple reams of staples and I go to put them in the stapler. And he says, "You're using these?" I said, “yeah, I'm using them.” He said, “wait.” He says, "Let me go get the good staples." I said, [chuckle] “what do you mean?” He says, "The university buys us really cheap staples. So all of us in the faculty keep a private stash of good staples. Let me go get the good staples." Right?   0:18:48.8 BB: You can't make up... Right? This is little stuff. All right. So now I wanna get to what Dr. Deming said last time I used a quote from Dr. Deming about it would be important for people to work together. And what I share in some of my seminars is an Aesop fable, from Aesop the Greek fablist. So we're talking like, 500, 600 BC and the particular fable I referenced is the four oxen and the lion. Are you familiar with that one?   0:19:23.7 AS: No.   0:19:25.1 BB: Okay. Well, I came across this, because I was doing some research on the expression "United we stand divided we fall." And I'm thinking united, divided, I'm thinking Abraham Lincoln, Civil War and to come up with, no, that's the punchline for Aesop's Fable about the four oxen and the lion. And the storyline goes that these four oxen would stand looking outward with their tails connected. That's the united we stand, they looked outward and the lion would circle them, but the lion couldn't do very much, because we're protecting one another. And then when the oxen broke rank, the lion jumped in and ate them. So the united we stand divided we fall. So the reason I use that is, I'm not proclaiming that Dr. Deming is the one who figured out the importance of teamwork. [laughter] I think that was figured out a long time ago. I look at what Dr. Deming's work is about - is helping us understand what are the obstacles to what I think we all really want. But I don't think he... So when he references teamwork, that's an old concept. That's why I like to use the Aesop fable, as it goes back a long way.   0:20:41.3 AS: Yeah.   0:20:42.2 BB: All right. But in terms of division, I'm gonna share from Russ Ackoff one of the many things I learned from him and that is that the adjective in front of the word "problem" is divisive. And so, when I worked in Connecticut for the jet engine company, we're making 120 tank engines a month, 1500 horsepower $300,000 each. And at least once a year there'd be an issue. We gotta stop production. Which would lead to the conclusion that it's a design problem in which case manufacturing did what, Andrew?   0:21:24.5 AS: Not sure.   0:21:25.1 BB: Breathed a huge sigh of relief.   0:21:26.7 AS: Not our problem.   0:21:28.4 BB: Or if it's not a design problem, it could be a manufacturing problem, in which case engineering said... And the engineering people felt slighted, because the president of the company was a manufacturing person. And so, what I saw was, yeah, as soon as you define the problem from that vantage point, then it's stuck on someone. And everybody else just says, whew! Thankful it wasn't us this time. So, I wanna share from Russ, what if we aren't so divisive?   0:22:02.4 BB: So Russ has a really neat story going back to, could be the '60s and you'll know by the punchline the timeframe. So at that point in time he was invited to GE's Appliance Center in Kentucky and he brought a graduate student with him. And he said, in the room, in the center of the room of this conference table, they're discussing this issue they're having. And around the perimeter of the room are all the major appliances that GE is selling at the time from refrigerators, freezers, stoves, washing machines, dryers, they're around the perimeter. And the issue they're facing is, what is labeled a "forecasting problem." And store owners are complaining that when the people are coming in to buy the appliances for the kitchen, they need to remodel the kitchen, they need a new refrigerator, they need a new washing machine, I mean a dishwasher and a stove.   0:22:54.2 BB: They need those three. And the forecasting issue is they come in and we only have two of the three, or we don't have the right... We don't have the matching colors, the matching styles. And so, that's why we're losing sales to the others. And we needed a better forecast. And in addition to having the right colors and the right model, another feature in that timeframe was the refrigerator door had to either open from the left or open from the right to match the configuration of the kitchen. So you may have the right... All three are right, but now you've got a left-handed door and the refrigerator needs a right-handed door. Oh. All right. So the graduate student upon hearing this uses a Swiss Army knife, Russ said, to take a door off of the refrigerator and said, have you ever thought about a reversible door design?   0:23:49.1 BB: And so, the reason I share that story for our audience is, that's what happens when you involve design in a solution to a forecasting problem. You get their inputs. And so, anything short of that, when we, when we focus on a manufacturing problem, only invite manufacturing, not invite others and as is prone in a non-Deming organization you end up with solutions that don't involve the others. And so, I just wanna throw that out that these are... The everyday things we do in organizations to divide. Alright. So now let's talk about the featured movie tonight.   0:24:27.3 AS: Yes.   0:24:27.8 BB: In Search of Excellence inspired by the book by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. Correct?   0:24:35.3 AS: Yes.   0:24:35.9 BB: Roughly '82, '83 timeframe. And so, Dr. Deming's work has been known for a couple years and Tom Peters and Waterman wrote a book talking about... There's US companies doing excellent work, so let's go look at them. So at Dr. Deming's last seminar there were three assistants helping him. He was very frail, he was in a wheelchair, ended up dying 10 days after the seminar ended. And I think I mentioned sitting next to me for all four days was a rabbi praying for him. So, Dr. Deming is very frail in the wheelchair the entire time, when he would get fatigued, he'd be wheeled off the stage. One of these three assistants would come up and pick up the pace. Couple hours later Dr. Deming comes up. And so, during one of the breaks I went up and introduced myself and, to them. And one of them told me that...   0:25:30.0 BB: You know, he traveled with Dr. Deming. He was one of what's called a Deming Scholar. So at that point of time, there was a cadre of people that would travel with Dr. Deming if he was doing a seminar or he's at GE headquarters, wherever he was that week, this cadre came with him. So he said, somebody once in one of these sessions, said to Dr. Deming, “what's the difference between Jerry Falwell and Tom Peters?” And he says, Dr. Deming says, “who's... Well, who's Jerry Falwell?” And he says, “oh, he's a Baptist minister.” He says, oh, he says, so.   0:26:02.8 AS: A very famous one at the time.   0:26:05.0 BB: Very famous Baptist minister. And he says, “so what's the difference?” Dr. Deming says, so what's the difference? He says, "Jerry Falwell has a message." And so in that timeframe, I remember... I used to remember... And you likely watched these as well. So Tom Peters would be working on his next book and whatever the theme of the book was, he's doing research. And I give him credit. I mean, he's a Stanford Business School graduate. He's doing all the research, incredible at marketing. So he picks a topic, does his research, writes the book, goes on PBS to do this presentation with a thousand people in the room. And he's using real life people and companies to tell this story one at a time, one at a time, one at a time. So I thought, well, what if Tom Peters was to write a book about how to live to be a 100? Well, what do you do, Andrew? You've got to go find people who are a 100, right?   0:27:05.3 AS: Yeah.   0:27:06.2 BB: You can go find them, right?   0:27:07.1 AS: Yep.   0:27:07.8 BB: And so, I used to imagine that if Tom Peters is, you know, writing a book about how to live to be a 100, he's gonna go... The recipe is find the people, find the successful companies, go research them, a chapter on each one of them. Each of them comes up and presents. And so, there we are on PBS and the first guests that come out are a 101-year-old gentleman. And he comes out and he's chain smoking and he explains that, how does he live to be a 100? He says, well, "you...smoking is good, cigars sometimes, shots of Old Granddad and that's how you live to be a 100." And then next we have the sisters, live together, twin sisters, never married, lived together their entire lives, don't drink a thing, teetotalers, and that, you know, vegetarians. And so, you say, oh, so that's how you live to be a 100, Andrew, you drink, you drink tea, no, you stay away from alcohol, stay away from red meat.   0:28:14.6 BB: Next one comes out, right? And the point is that all these companies are different and you're left to figure out which one to think. And whereas what Dr. Deming's talking about is a theory by which to understand organizations that you could take to your organization and figure out how to live to be a hundred, not just what we see otherwise. So anyway, I was aware of all that, studied all that. I wasn't aware at the time that's what was going on, but as I started to research this Peter's and... Why Dr. Deming thought of him that way. And so, Rocketdyne was sold by Pratt and Whitney, sold to United Technologies after Boeing, and they had a big Lean Six Sigma program, but they didn't call it Lean Six Sigma.   0:29:02.7 BB: And the Rocketdyne people are asking, why did you call it Lean Six Sigma? He says, well, it is Lean Six Sigma, but GE calls their program Lean Six Sigma, and we're not gonna use the same name as those guys. Those are the light bulb people. So we've got our own name. Well, what's your name? Well, we call it ACE. What is ACE? Achieving Competitive Excellence. But it's really Lean Six Sigma. So I spent a few years trying to wonder, what does it really mean? And I'm and I'm embarrassed that it took me as long as it did, but it dawned on me what it really means is achieving Compliance Excellence.   0:29:42.9 BB: And it was all about, does this meet requirements? And so that's what I referred to early on as question number one. Does this characteristic, have you passed... You know, have you met all of the requirements? And that's all it was, it was meeting requirements, meeting requirements, meeting requirements. And then, and what it reminds me of is, I was doing a seminar in England once for a one-on-one, went over for three days through a translator, and the audience was a physician from Kazakhstan who was anxious to learn as much as he could about Dr. Deming's work and that led him to England. And through some fortunate situation, I had a chance to meet with him one-on-one and went through and explained to him, Me and We organizations, Red Pen and Blue Pen companies, all that, all through a translator. So I had asked a question in English, the translator would translate, boom.   0:30:36.5 BB: So the question I asked him was, that I wanted to share is, I said to Ivan, I said, "what's the fastest way for a Red Pen company to become a Blue Pen company? What's the fastest way?" So that gets translated into Russian. Then it comes back to me and he says, "what?" I said, "spray paint." [laughter] And to me, that's the epitome of Compliance Excellence where we're... You get a really light surface texture, where it's looking good, but it misses the deep sense of the theory of Dr. Deming's work. But I'm not saying Compliance Excellence is bad. And so, when I wrote an article about this, and if any of the listeners want to contact me on LinkedIn, I can send them an article I wrote about it. And so, 'cause when you go to write about something, now you start to think deeply about this, does this make sense as opposed to just having a conversation? And it dawned on me that Compliance Excellence is not a bad thing.   0:31:39.3 BB: And the example I want to use here is, I was listening to two friends, husband and wife who spent a whole year serving society. They were compelled, had incredible military careers, and they decided we wanna pay back society. So the plan was that the husband, Doug would ride his bicycle every day through every state in the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii over the course of one year. So they started upstate New York, crisscrossing around the country. So he was on his bike every day riding, raising awareness for veterans' issues. 'Cause for those who don't know, there's... The the suicide rate of veterans is enormous. And so, they're looking... They're out there trying to help veterans. They were compelled to do that. And Doug's wife Deb, rode the motorhome, either ahead or behind, hooking up with local radio stations, trying to get PR.   0:32:38.8 BB: Then Doug would show up and he says one day they're riding through the Rockies, having dinner... And they're having dinner that night. But all day long, Doug is going up these hills, down these hills, up these hills. And so at dinner, Doug says to Deb, he says, I mean, "how'd you like that hill?" [laughter] Deb says, "what hill?" [laughter] So to Doug, every mile is not the same. [laughter] Right? So it's 18,066 miles. Doug felt the difference in every one of those miles, more so than Deb did. So if somebody says, how far was that route, Doug? For Doug to say 18,066 miles, 67, that's ups and downs, he felt every one of them. For Deb, it was a little bit... They were more of the same. So I'm not saying there's anything wrong with answering the question 18,067, but to me that's a compliant... That's looking at every second being the same, every hour being the same, every widget being the same, not understanding the differences or how they're being used.   0:33:49.1 BB: So now I wanna talk about, instead of Compliance Excellence, again, I'm not saying Compliance Excellence is bad. What I would say is that non-Deming organizations thrive on Compliance Excellence in this sense of interchangeability. Everything is the same, looking at things in isolation. So then I started thinking, well, if that's what they do, what is it that that Deming organizations do? And that's what I would call Contextual Excellence. There's an understanding of context, understanding of the context of the system. Tom Johnson, who has written about, Management by Means, which I wanna look at in a later episode, when Tom was doing research, this is around the time I met him, 1997, '98 timeframe. He was, he was visiting Toyota Plants, definitely in the United States. I'm not sure how many overseas, but he is taking copious notes, going behind the scenes. So this was before the world was all over Toyota.   0:34:47.3 BB: So Tom had free access. He said eventually they start charging for all this stuff. But Tom was there way ahead of the crowd. And he said one day he is with his notebook and he is walking around, he is looking at the stamping presses. But they're notorious for stamping out one part at a time. One single minute exchange of dyes. So they don't make a thousand parts and then figure out how to use them. They figured out how to change the dyes quickly. So Tom said, he asked the guy, "how long does it take to change this dye?" And the guy says something like, 28 minutes. And so Tom writes down 28 minutes and later the guy came back to Tom. He says, "just so you understand" he says "28 minutes is not world class, but this does not require world class."   0:35:32.3 BB: And so this is when I was explaining Contextual Excellence to Tom. And he says, is that what you're talking about? I said, that's exactly what I would expect to see within Toyota, that things are... They fit the situation. So it's not speed for the sake of speed, it's speed that fits the context of the situation, which is also like saying, have card stock paper where it makes sense. Have the appropriate staples where it makes sense. And so, when I talk about "in search of excellence," with my classes or in presentations, what I'm trying to get across is, there's a place for Contextual Excellence and there's a place for Compliance Excellence. But I think that difference is far better understood in a Deming organization that has a great understanding of systems and connectedness and synchronicity and teamwork, and lacking that non-Deming organizations, I think unknowingly default to Compliance Excellence, driving things to zero, thinking you could have zero waste in these things.   0:36:39.9 BB: And then you end up with cheap staples, lightweight paper, and you end up paying for it somewhere else in the system. So I just wanted to point out that there's... I'm not saying one is better than the other. What I'm saying is, I believe a Deming organization would have a profound appreciation of when to use each. And as simple as, if you were to say to me, Bill, how far is it to the nearest airport? I could say, it depends Andrew, what are you... How are you getting to the airport? You say, I'm riding my bike. I said, "okay." Right? And again, not that we're always gonna say it depends, but that's what I think that appreciation has. Let me just stop there and...   0:37:19.6 AS: Yeah.   0:37:20.2 BB: See where you are.   0:37:21.6 AS: So, I have two little stories that I wanna share in relation to this. One of them is about my uncle Ham. Hamilton.   0:37:28.4 BB: Yes.   [laughter]   0:37:29.8 AS: And then the other one is about my own business, Coffee Works. And when we set up our factory 28 years ago, my business partner Dale, was absolutely passionate about coffee. He roasted every bean for our first 10 years. And he sold and he did the accounting and he did everything basically, until eventually he trained staff. And some of those staff still, they've been with us for years, for decades, and they take care of the roasting now. But what Dale really understood was what he called, "in the cup quality." The idea that when... When it's in the cup, that's about to touch the customer's lips, that's the quality that matters. Nothing else matters.   0:38:15.1 AS: If you don't get that right then, you know, it doesn't matter how much you've documented or did whatever you've done in the past, in the temperature of the water, in the grind, you know, in all of these different things. So he was really all about excellence, and we didn't get... We never got complaints. Maybe we got an occasional one, but it wasn't very common. Anyways, we got a big, big multinational company came to us and said, we want you to bid along with some other coffee companies for our business, and we bid for the business. And they said, "We're picking you. And now we're gonna go out to your factory and we're gonna inspect your factory. And if you get a score in our quality audit below 70, you're basically in trouble, [laughter] already, and you're gonna have six weeks to fix it or else you're fired."   0:39:05.9 AS: And this was a huge amount of volume and a prestigious company for us. So we pulled everything together to get ready for their audit. And they came and they gave us their score and we felt like we were pretty damn good. And they said, 65. [laughter] And you know, what we realized to them, quality was about paperwork and quality was about, you know, compliance to that paperwork. And so, we had to do that, because that's what quality was to them. We'd never done anything like that. You know, now, 15, 20 years later, we still supply that same customer and they still do their annual audits and our scores are much... They're in the 90s, which puts us in like, world class. But the point is, we learned a lesson, you know, the difference between contextual quality or let's say, intrinsic quality that Dale was working on versus this kind of, what did you call it? Compliance Quality.   0:40:08.5 BB: Yes.   0:40:09.9 AS: So that's my first story. The second one is about my uncle in Germany where he was in charge of the, of the logistics of a base of a US military base. And the commanding general came to see, and they had cleaned up everything. And they got to the end of the whole thing, and they kind of dumped out to the parking lot where there's, you know, 700 or 500 vehicles lined up in different ways and whatever, all kinds of different sizes of vehicles. And Uncle Ham said, "Sir, so how did you like the tour of the facility and all that?" And he says, “of the base?” And he said, "Ham, everything was great except one thing."   0:40:48.4 AS: And my uncle's like, "Okay, what is that, sir?" And he said... And he looked at the vehicles, a long line of vehicles parked side by side. And he asked him, he said, "Next time I come here... " Now remember, these vehicles are all different lengths. "Next time I come here, I want these vehicles all lined up. It's a mess the way you've got it done." Yeah. And so, my uncle said, "Yes, sir!" And he said, "Before you leave, sir, could you walk to the back of the vehicles for a moment with me?" "Yes, yes, I will." And he said, "Sir, would you like them lined up in the back or in the front?" And they had lined them up in the back, which meant their noses were in different lengths. And the point is, is that you can't have it all, right? Everything's a tradeoff. You want it this way. There's a compromise here, there's a challenge there and all that. And that's a lesson I learned from Uncle Ham.   0:41:46.1 BB: Well, and then he, I'm sure he learned it from that point on is, you know, when, when he is asked to line them up and make them more uniform, the question is, help me understand what that means.   [laughter]   0:42:00.3 AS: And the answer's gonna be, it depends. 'Cause this general likes them lined up in the back and this general likes them lined up in the front. We're gonna need to wrap up. So how would you close out this episode?   0:42:17.0 BB: The main thing I want to get across saying is that, first of all, Contextual Excellence is the bedrock of investment thinking. To look, when you begin to look at things as a system and to understand that every mile is not the same or do I need to... Does that matter to me? But to me, instead of everything could be improved, you know, we focus on where are the most red beads, get all the red beads to zero and then go across the organization. And what is that? That's managing actions. We talked about that months ago. And to me that's Compliance Excellence. It's looking at the parts in isolation. But to me, what Contextual Excellence is about is the better we understand, the greater how things fit together.   0:43:10.5 BB: And there, the challenge is that everything we work on is part of a bigger system, which is part of a, then again, bigger system, which is part of, then again, bigger system. So we're not proposing that you're going to infinity, you know, that there's this big picture of you, whatever that means. It's, it's, and I like it... You know, people talk about, well, you know, Andrew's a systems... You and I, Andrew are systems thinkers, as if the others aren't. What does that mean? That means that we think of the big picture. There's no such thing as a big picture. So there, what we're talking about is Contextual Excellence, is trying to gather as much context for the system as it makes sense with appreciation that you might still be missing something.   0:44:00.3 BB: And that's where learning comes in. But that understanding is part of, is fundamental to investment thinking. You know, is the education system paying off? How would you know? Where are we gonna see that benefit? What is your theory for that? So I just wanna point out is, I'm not trying to condemn Compliance Excellence. I think Deming organizations are gonna have a place for that. Just like there's a place for, you know, does it meet requirements? Yes or no? It's just becoming more mindful of these choices is, is what I'm suggesting or proposing.   0:44:31.1 AS: Yes. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. There's so much there for further learning. And if you wanna keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. He's right there. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm gonna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."  

When we answer a question with "it depends" we are asking for more information about the possible variables that will inform the answer. In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz discuss how, in the Deming world, "it depends" can trigger improvements in processes or products and services. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.6 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is, in this episode 10, It Depends, Rethinking Improvements. Bill, take it away.   0:00:34.6 Bill Bellows: Rethinking improvement, yes.   0:00:38.3 AS: You're always teasing us with your titles, Bill.   0:00:43.2 BB: I hate when that happens, I hate when that happens. No, I uh, what I would tell managers when I was doing these one-day seminars all over Boeing for year after year after year after year, and the managers would wanna know, so what should I expect from the people afterwards? And I said, or I would warn them, I said, here's what's gonna happen, just so you're ready. I'd say, you're gonna hear a lot more of people saying, "It depends." 'Cause to me, Andrew, "it depends" is the beginning of an appreciation of a system. So Andrew, you and I are going out to dinner and then you say, would you like to have some wine? And I say, sure. Then you say, red or white? And I say well, it depends Andrew, what are you having? Right, I mean, so to me, it depends is an understanding of what Ackoff would call interactions, that I cannot order the wine without knowing the meal. Planning a wedding, we can't order the food without knowing the guest list, can't order the music without going to the guest list. The colors of the flowers depend upon, the color of the tuxes depend upon it. And what is that? It is looking at things, not in isolation, but as a system. So when I tell my students, graduate and undergraduate is, you already manage systems, you already manage interactions.   0:02:09.0 BB: You don't use that word, but you couldn't plan a vacation without looking at things in context. You couldn't run errands on Saturday morning without knowing what time the store is open, what time... So, so I think we have a natural proclivity of looking at things as a system, quite often, quite often. It could be better. But I... So I just throw out, I just, I mean, if somebody asked me a question on a topic I've never heard about before, what I find is, one is I think, well, how would a red pen company, a me organization, a last straw organization look at that? And they'd look at things in isolation. Which reminds me of an Ackoff quote. He says, "getting less of what you don't want doesn't get you what you want." So we're gonna drive variation to zero, and when I was listening to the last podcast, it was talking about this driving variation to zero. You can't go to zero, 'cause Andrew, cloning does not produce identical, twins are not identical. So for those who think you could drive variation to zero, you can't. Get under a microscope and you're gonna see differences in snowflakes. The question behind reducing variation is, is it a worthwhile investment, which gets us into this continual improvement thing.   0:03:32.6 BB: But, so whether we're reducing variation to zero, reduce... Eliminating waste, eliminating non value-added efforts, what Ackoff asking is, he is challenging us saying, getting rid of what you don't want, what is it that we want? And here I had a great quote from a good friend, Dr. Deming, he says, "it would be better if everyone worked together as a system with the aim for everybody to win."   0:04:00.2 AS: He was saying, win-win before everybody was saying it.   0:04:06.3 BB: Well, what I like about that quote is, did the word quality appear in that quote? Did you hear the word quality anywhere in there, Andrew?   0:04:14.8 AS: No, I didn't hear it.   0:04:17.1 BB: Huh. And Dr. Deming was that quality guy, right?   0:04:20.9 AS: Mm.   0:04:22.4 BB: So he's got quotes that don't have to do with quality? [laughter]   0:04:25.0 AS: Yeah, and so that's one of the things that I think people come, when they first come to Deming, they're looking at, they're thinking of quality in terms of tools, you know...   0:04:35.6 BB: Tools, techniques, yeah...   0:04:36.8 AS: And then they find...   0:04:37.1 BB: And so part of the reason that I wanted to throw that quote out is, to reinforce my point, that I look at what Dr. Deming is doing, is providing guidance for how to manage resources, time, energy, money, space, equipment, tools and techniques, ideas, as a system. And the ideas as a system, is the idea that things are interdependent; I depend on you, you depend on me. And I think the better we understand that, you realize is that improved quality, what he would call quality, would come from that, improved safety would come from that, improved profit would come from that. Again, Ackoff would say, you know, profit is the result of how well we work together, which is how well we manage resources and the idea of being deliberately proactive, deliberately reactive, we talked about last time. And I also made reference last time through the term purposeful resource management, purposeful... And then also reflexive resource management, which is the "me organization," the non-Deming organization being reactive, why?   0:05:58.3 BB: I'm not thinking about it. [laughter] I just, why would I be proactive? I'm gonna be reactive. I'm not gonna work on things that are good. I'm gonna focus on the problems. I'm gonna focus on the defects. Whereas in a Deming organization, a "we organization,: I think there'd be, we're gonna be reactive, where it makes sense, it depends. When does it make sense? We're gonna be proactive when it makes sense, it depends. And another term I'm gonna throw out to build upon this purposeful resource management, which I would... I look at management as an activity, we're managing resources, we're thinking locally...   0:06:33.3 BB: Thinking globally, acting locally. And I think everyone in a Deming organization has that responsibility. You don't ask for twice as much resources as you need. So you don't, so you make sure you get things done as you would at a non-Deming company where you ask for way more than you need on everything, because you don't wanna be the bad guy, so you protect yourself. I would believe in a Deming organization, you would ask for what you need. But again, when I'm working on a project in the backyard, it involves going to the hardware store, you know, I'm gonna go there a few times that day. And, but I anticipate that. And in fact, now I get smart and instead of on one visit, and then going back, I'll say, I'll buy, if it's three different things I might need, I'll buy all three.   0:07:19.8 BB: I say it to myself, what am I doing? Managing resources. But a new term, to build upon purposeful resource management, so purposeful resource management is, "I know when I go to the hardware store, I buy more than I need. I can always return it next week and when the project is done." And that's how I manage projects. But I didn't always do it that way. So what I wanted to say is that purposeful resource management is how I currently manage resources. And then when you and I come up with a whole 'nother way of managing resources, I refer to that as purposeful resource leadership. And leadership is about creating a path for others to follow. And you say, holy cow, I should do the same thing, you know, in my part of the organization, again, where it makes sense.   0:08:05.2 BB: So whether that's focusing on an ideal value when it comes to improving integration or managing and improving how we manage interactions, purposeful resource leadership to me is everyone...I mean, someone coming up with a, then again, better way of doing it, and then we spread it around the organization, then somebody else takes the lead on their thing. The other thing I wanted to share with you is, is a quote from, quotes from two friends who spent a good deal of time with Dr. Deming, conversations. I met him twice, never asked him a question. The first time I didn't have a question to ask. And the second time he was health-wise, not in good shape. I just wanted his autograph. And I just wanted to just be thankful for being in the room. But Gipsie Ranney, who was the first president of the Deming Institute, and before that she was a professor at the University of Tennessee and a senior consultant at GM, she told me, she was a mentor for many years, she said she asked Dr. Deming once, she said, "so, um what are people getting outta your seminars?" And he said, he says, "I know what I told them. I don't know what they heard."   0:09:21.1 BB: And I think... And the more I thought about it, it's just I think that's part of the problem. So a big part, of what I was trying to do at Rocketdyne was to make it easy to read The New Economics. 'Cause I think there's, I think yeah, you can read it on your own, but I think the meaning you'll get being guided by others first, and that could be listening to the pod... You know, listening to these podcasts, watching videos on DemingNEXT. I think It's important to realize that there's words he's using that have perhaps a different meaning than you're using where you are at work. I just throw that out. And the other quote I wanted to share was from Bill Cooper. And Bill Cooper is approaching 90, he lives in San Diego, and he's a great guy.   0:10:07.7 BB: And I, I met him 20 some years ago and remained in touch. And he was a senior civilian officer, senior civilian at the US Navy's Overhaul facility in San Diego at a place called North Island, in the early '80s he came across Deming's work and became riveted, along with Phil Monroe, who was a senior military officer. And they went off to do Deming Consulting around the world. And, and Bill said he asked Deming once, Dr. Deming once, he said, "so what percent of people who attend your four-day seminars really walk out understanding what you said?" And his explanation, his answer to Bill was, "very few." And I think that's consistent with Gipsie, because I think you have to step back and realize that there's, there might be something more going on than what you're thinking. And I'm hoping these conversations help to spur that. Now, relative to teamwork, I had a colleague within Boeing, he was at Boeing Corporate, and somebody went by his office one day knowing that he was very fond of Deming's work and Taguchi's work. And the guy sticks his head out and he says to him, "you know the reason I don't like Deming, there's no equations, you know there's no equations.   0:11:30.0 BB: If you had equations, it means something." And so I told my friend, I said, next time the guy comes by and says that, say to him, "do you believe in teamwork? Is teamwork important?" 'cause at that time, within Boeing, Boeing's corporate slogan was "people working together as, as a one global aerospace companies"... But people working together. And I said, ask him, does he believe in working together? And he'll say yes. And then say, "so what's the equation? What's the equation?" And so I wanna share in advance of a, of another session where we get more into this, an example of teamwork. And I think, I think... I think if executives had an understanding of what teamwork is, that it improves profitability, no one would be against it. Now again, I've also come across people who think teamwork means everyone's involved in every decision, and they get turned off by that.   0:12:30.2 BB: And I'm not saying I agree with: everyone's involved in every decision. But what if, Andrew, in terms of a task, let's say you and I have to dig a trench that's 50 yards long. And I give you a shovel. That's a tool. I take a shovel. That's another tool. We start at opposite ends. And let's say we can each dig the trench at one foot an hour. So that means in one hour we're digging two feet, in two hours we're digging four feet. And so what is that? That's one plus one... One hour plus one hour equals two feet. That's addition, right, Andrew, addition. But if you're at one end of the trench and I'm on the other end of the trench, where's the teamwork? [laughter] There's no teamwork in that model. But Andrew, what if I came along with another tool called a pickaxe, and what if I get in there and start softening up the dirt? And then as it's softer, you can shovel faster. That's teamwork, Andrew. Teamwork is that you and I, again I'm changing tools, but what I'm showing is that you and I working together, my work depends upon yours, yours depends upon me. Two of us can be digging three feet an hour. So what's that Andrew? One plus one is three. My wife and I, a number of years ago, were scraping the spray off the ceiling in our hallway, and the work split was, I climbed the ladder and scraped off the acoustic spray. Right?   0:14:07.2 BB: And her job was to be ahead of me spraying it with water to soften it. And I use that example at class because we were doing far more together than the example I gave you. But if her ambition was to get to the end of the hallway before me, then the acoustic spray would be dry long before I got to it. That ain't helping. And so this is an example of would you like to be in an organization where two people are doing the work of two, or two people are doing the work of three, or two people doing the work of four or five or six. Or, or worse than that Andrew, would you like to have two people doing the work, falling behind [laughter] and get into the... 'Cause I also think people think, well, what's the worst case scenario? Two people equals zero? No, falling behind each day.   0:15:00.9 AS: Two people equal negative one.   0:15:02.7 BB: 'Cause they think well, how bad can it be? It can get better and better or worse and worse. And the other thing I'll add relative to the, "it depends" and the answer to every question. I think if you think of in a Deming organization, you're thinking about, "it depends." And so Andrew, if we're in a red... If we're in a non-Deming organization and I say to you, "Andrew, will that report be done by tomorrow?" How would you answer it in a non Deming organization, Andrew?   0:15:34.7 AS: In a non... Yes, sir.   0:15:36.1 BB: You're gonna salute and you're gonna say, "yes sir." All right. And I do this with my students and they'll be quick enough to figure out the answer is yes. Then I'll say, I'll call on a different person and I'll say, "Okay, let's say we're in a Deming organization, a 'we organization' will the report be done by tomorrow?"   0:15:55.5 AS: It depends.   0:15:57.6 BB: And they're like, it depends. It depends on what Andrew? It depends on what time tomorrow. It depends on those other five things you've asked me to do. And you might say, is this a five minute task or a 20 minute task or a two hour task? And so if you're unwilling to answer "it depends," then what's the chance the effort you're gonna apply? And so that's what I find is, I think the beauty of it is not, "it depends" is a smart-alecky response, it's trying to get a better sense of the system. And they, but I also say that I confess of thinking about "it depends" all the time. If my wife, of 40 years, was to ask me, do I have plans for Saturday morning? You know what my answer is, Andrew?   0:16:50.5 AS: For whatever you want, dear, I am free.   0:16:54.2 BB: I do not say, "it depends." [laughter] So it depends is the answer other than when your significant other says, do you have plans for...? And you say, no, I don't.   0:17:07.5 AS: Yes.   0:17:07.8 BB: All right.   0:17:08.3 AS: All right. So I got so many different things that you triggered.   0:17:12.2 BB: Good.   0:17:13.4 AS: The first one I wanted to mention was I have a friend of mine, Bevin in Bangkok, and he helped me edit my book, Transform Your Business with Dr. Deming's 14 Points. And he didn't know anything about Deming, so it's kind of fun to write it and have him going through it. And he actually worked with me side by side in my office and he was reading it and going through and editing and going back and forth chapter by chapter. And then after he was pretty deep into it, he looked at me and he says, I think I just figured it out. Dr. Deming is like is a humanist that cares about people.   0:17:49.8 BB: Yeah.   0:17:51.2 AS: And that was such a... And I think for the listeners and the viewers out there, you're gonna get to a moment where you move beyond tools and techniques into the way you think about getting the most out of a system, getting the most out of people. And that's really where you really get into the meaning to me, the most powerful part of the meaning of Dr. Deming.   0:18:14.5 BB: Well, when you start to think about the potential for one plus one, and then you realize that in a non-Deming organization, you deliver the report by, you know, without understanding the context, you deliver the part without understanding the context. You have the ability to, as we've talked, spoken before, meet requirements minimally, leave the bowling ball in a doorway and... 'Cause I say, Andrew was the task completed? And you're like, yes sir, it was completed. But to do so with the absolute minimal effort and then to realize that that then is creating a ripple effect for the next person. And what we end up doing is a one plus one is a big negative number, or you go off and get the cleaning solution, which is really, really cheap, but it doesn't cut whatever the grease is on the table. And we're saving a lot of money, but we're putting all this manpower. When you start to realize how easy it is to end up in a situation where one plus one is a big negative number, why would you treat people other than with the greatest of respect? And I've had people say, "Well, oh, so it's a feel good thing." I said, are we... Is the result at the end of the day to make... I'm not saying we're in business to make a profit, but I said if we wanna be sustainable, then the better we work together, the more sustainable we are. So, do we wanna be sustainable? And you get what you get.   0:20:00.0 AS: I had some other things that came up. First one is, for the audience out there, you may not know what Bill's talking about when he kept saying Ackoff, Ackoff. But what he's talking about is Russell Ackoff.   0:20:12.5 BB: Russell Ackoff. Yes.   0:20:15.7 AS: And I just wanna go back to an article that he wrote in 1994, and it's titled Systems Thinking and Thinking Systems. But what's critical for our discussion is his description of a system, which is very brief. So let me go through it.   0:20:32.4 BB: Yeah, please do.   0:20:33.5 AS: "A system is a whole consisting of two or more parts, one, each of which can affect the performance or properties of the whole, none of which can have an independent effect on the whole, and no subgroup of which can have an independent effect on the whole. In brief then, a system is a whole that cannot be divided into independent parts or subgroups of parts." Now, I just wanna talk briefly about my... One of my areas of expertise is in the financial markets. And I say something a lot like what you say, when I go into my class and I said it last night in my valuation masterclass boot camp, when you finish my class, you'll be less confident than when you started. If you are less confident when you finish this class, I have succeeded. Well, this is very painful and difficult for people to think about because we're going to school to become more confident. But the stock market is not like physics where we have immutable laws that we can...   0:21:52.2 BB: That's right.   0:21:52.7 AS: Grasp and understand and then watch the interplay of those laws. The world of finance is a messy ball of activity. And the fact is, is that the minute you touch that ball, you have now affected that ball. If you place a buy order, you have just affected that ball. If you maybe place a very big buy order, you've really affected it. Some people could even say that just by looking at that ball of activity, you could influence it. When you face a complex, constantly changing system, then you start to realize that we have so little...to expect definitiveness, I'm just gonna do this.   0:22:49.0 AS: I'm just gonna take care of my department, if... And you're talking about a company, you are ignoring that the system, in this case I'm talking about the stock market, but now let's take it into a factory or into a business or into an office environment. All of these component parts. And if you write an email, a scathing email and you send it into that group of people that is working in a system, congratulations, you have made an effect or an impact on that system. For better or for worse, that system must react to every interaction. It cannot be divided into independent parts or subgroups. And therefore, the typical manager nowadays, that's all they wanna do. "I got my KPIs, that's my subgroup."   0:23:39.2 BB: Yes.   0:23:39.5 AS: We'll take care of that. And they're missing the word that I love in... When I work with management teams, the word I love is "coordination."   0:23:49.9 BB: Yeah. Synchronicity.   0:23:52.2 AS: Yep. So there's a lot there. But I just wanna highlight one other thing. You made me think of a book and earlier I was looking around for that book. So I'm gonna get out that book 'cause my books are right here and for everybody that's in business that's looking at competitive strategy of your business, Michael Porter is the guy...   0:24:14.3 BB: Yes.   0:24:14.8 AS: That's the best of all. But what I can say is that Michael Porter can be a bit dry. And the lady who worked with Michael Porter is a lady named Joan Magretta and she wrote a book called Understanding Michael Porter, a simple, small book to teach all the main things that Porter teaches. But what he teaches, the most important thing is that to develop a competitive advantage in a company, you wanna build that competitive advantage in the supply chain of that business, the flow of that business. And then he talks about the importance of fit, of how different components of that supply chain fit together.   0:24:57.3 AS: That that's the right person running the right part and that they're coordinating their efforts. And when you build that competitive advantage in your supply chain through the coordination of efforts, it's almost impossible for the competitor to copy. A great example is if General Motors, if the CEO of General Motors came in and he says, what I wanna do is start building cars like Toyota. Good luck. It's never going to happen because they've built their whole competitive advantage in their supply chain and it's not something that you can just go out and replicate.   0:25:36.0 BB: Well, to add to that, and I have a...students in one of my classes watch a one hour lecture by Porter. And then I explained to them Porter's five... I think it's a five forces model.   0:25:49.9 AS: Five forces. Yep.   0:25:52.1 BB: And all of that, I think it's absolutely important to know about. What I learned from Tom Johnson, is a retired professor from Portland State University and we'll talk more about Tom in a later session. What Tom pointed out to me that I would have paid no attention to in Porter's model is, in Porter's model it's about "power over." Power over your customers. Where else are you gonna go, Andrew, for Internet? Right? Power over your suppliers, power over your employees. I think and when we get into this "power over" model, so we're gonna go to our customers, start demanding things, put a gun to their head, drive change and they're gonna respond by leaving bowling balls in the doorway when it... So what's missing in that model is... I mean, if the model's based on all white beads are the same, everything which is good, everything is, there is no variation, then it might work. But if you now go back to the humanist, if you've got people in the loop who have vested interest in their survival as an employee, their survival as a supplier, and you go to them and start wrenching them and squeezing them and driving them to...   0:27:18.4 BB: And they respond with things that are thinner and break more often or still meet requirements, it doesn't work out as well. To your point on Toyota, my sense is Toyota has a sense of relationships with suppliers, which is not mutually self destructive. I think there's a better understanding, I think, again, not that I've spoken and gone to visit Toyota's suppliers. But I'm thinking, in order to deliver what they deliver, there's got to be some sense of, shall I say win-win, because if it's win-lose... Boeing, when Rocketdyne was owned by Boeing, you know, severe downturn in the market, there was a lot of pressure within Boeing to improve things and it was a pretty stressful situation. And Boeing was going to suppliers, not only asking them to take back inventory, all those parts you bought from the last six months and we're having trouble selling airplanes. But the reason we want you to take them back, Andrew, is it's not so much that we need the space. We want you to buy them back from us. [laughter] Yeah. Are you okay with that, Andrew?   0:28:44.9 AS: Absolutely not.   0:28:45.6 BB: And I'm thinking, what's gonna happen when you go to that supply chain and say, we're ramping up, we've got customers, and we... Andrew, we need your help, we need your help. Are you there for us? And you're like, remember five years ago? Remember? You get into this rainy day friends kind of thing. It's one thing if we're mutually suffering or mutually benefiting, but anything short of that is not win... I wouldn't define it as win-win. I also want to point out the production viewed as a system, the loop, the loop model that Deming showed the Japanese in 1950. And what I've done in the past is, is I've taken a class and I said, okay, you over there, you are the beginning, the raw material comes to you and then you do your thing, hand off to the next person, off to the next person, off to the next person. Then you over there, I go around the room, and I just show the flow of work from the first person to the last person, last person is a customer. And I say, so, where's the best place to be in this situation? And everybody wants to be way upstream. And you say, why? I say, well, when people start leaving the bowling balls in doorway...   0:30:07.2 AS: What does that mean, leaving bowling balls in doorways?   0:30:10.7 BB: If they start delivering minimally, minimally meeting requirements as they hand off as they hand off as they hand off as they hand off, and that system, the last... The worst place to be is at the end. And I say, but what if what comes around goes around? What if it's actually a loop? [laughter] Now, where would you rather be? Then you begin to realize that whatever goes into the air, I have to breathe, whatever goes into the water, I have to drink. So I think what, going back to the humanist side, I think the better you understand others, and they understand you, this is not done invisibly. So when I'm in a Deming environment, leaving the bowling ball in the doorway, meeting requirements minimally without asking for your permission, you know that, others know that, and then you might call me on it.   0:31:10.3 AS: Yeah.   0:31:11.9 BB: Because instead of black and white thinking - it met requirements, we've got shades of gray thinking - you call me over and you say, "I don't know, you're kinda new here, right Bill?" And I said, "yeah." And he says, let me take you aside. You might be able to tap into the humanist in me. So one is I'd say, I think the better our understanding of what comes around goes around, the better the understanding of what a good friend, Grace used to call boomerang karma. [laughter] But let me also say that Dr. Deming came up with that model...   0:31:49.2 AS: There's a bit of redundancy in that.   0:31:49.3 BB: Say again.   0:31:49.3 AS: There's a bit of redundancy in that. Those words kind of mean the same thing. But yes.   0:31:54.5 BB: Yes. [laughter] That's right. It's like connected as a system. That's what system means. But when Dr. Deming showed the Japanese in 1950 production to view it as a system, and there's an idea of what comes around goes around. And it took me a while to figure this out. If everyone's meeting requirements minimally in that system and you end up with something where there are problems, then if your model is meeting requirements is okay, then it wouldn't dawn on you that some of the problems could be coming from how we meet requirements. And there's a story we'll look at in a future session of a transmission designed by Ford, built by Ford, also built by Mazda in the early '80s. And Ford somehow found out that the Mazda transmission had an order of magnitude fewer complaints, with the shifting of the transmission than the Ford transmission. It was the same design, but one was built with an understanding of managing the variation between the parts and how they work together.   0:33:09.8 BB: Very much as you would do if you're working in the garage, you're gonna get the pieces to come together, not just meet requirements any way. But I thought if Ford operated with a Deming model in everything, and they end up finding out that these transmissions are performing differently, well, if you go back in and check with quality and all the parts meet requirements, you couldn't explain what's going on. And you're left thinking, well, our transmission must have some bad parts. So part of the reason I throw that out is, in the world of improvement, when you shift from this black and white parts are good, what Ackoff would call managing actions, looking things in isolation, you might find that the requirements are met to one extreme or the other. And maybe if we started to mix and match how they come together, there's an opportunity for incredible improvement when you shift your thinking from the black and white...   0:34:10.1 BB: My parts are good, to how they work together. And also, how can you have continual improvement if your mental model, your mindset is things are good and bad, but if we look at things in a relative sense, then we could say our... If we look at understanding as relative, improvement as relative, then there's room for improvement. But if quality is defined as good and bad, there's no room for improvement. And relative to the title, what I want to bring out is, there's a sense among people in the Deming community, people like a few years into Deming, we can go off and improve everything.   0:34:51.4 BB: Now, what we have to be careful about is what does improvement mean? Does improvement mean having less variation? Does improvement mean having lower cost? The important thing is to look at things, right, Andrew, as a system, and then start to ask where can we spend some, where can... I look at it as a resource management model. Where might we spend an hour to save five hours, spend a dollar to save five? And that's what I refer to not as continual improvement, but rather continual investment. And so I look at in terms of managing resources is within an organization, we've got red beads, we've got things that are defective, things that are behind that are not quite good, and we can use a control chart or run chart to manage those, see those ahead of time. And so we have a fire, Dr. Deming, he said, of course we're gonna have fires.   0:35:41.9 BB: Let's put the fire out. We end up back to where we were before, which means the process is...we wanna get it from out of control to in control. But I think the better we are in responding to that, we don't end up shut down for long periods of time. That then gives us the opportunity as you would be as a homeowner... Again, as a homeowner it's the same thing. You end up with a leak, you gotta go fix it, whether it's the faucet, the toilet, but then every now and then you're thinking about, maybe I can improve how the watering system is done. Maybe I can improve how the air conditioner works. Maybe by cleaning the filter more often. And what is that to me, Andrew, paying more attention to the filter, because if I wait six months to change the filter in the air conditioner, now all of that dust is way up inside the coils and I'm gonna spend forever.   0:36:32.0 BB: But if I'm changing that filter on a more regular basis, what am I doing? I am overall reducing the amount of effort spent on this maintenance. And I just wanted to say, I don't look at that as improvement thinking. I look at that as investment thinking, and I just wanna go from, okay yes, we can go past "all the beads are white" and we know that we don't stop at a hundred percent white beads. So that means improvement is possible, it doesn't mean, I'm not suggesting let's go improve everything. What I'm next looking at in terms of, you know, how I interpret Dr. Deming's The New Economics is asking where's the stitch in time saving nine, where's an ounce of prevention worth a pound of cure? And that I refer to as not improvement thinking, but investment thinking.   0:37:22.3 AS: Yep.   0:37:23.4 BB: And that's what I was trying to say last time. I think reading to your kids is investment thinking, listening to these podcasts is investment thinking, going to a concert, I think everything we do is based somehow on, "I think that's a worthwhile use of my time."   0:37:39.0 AS: Yep. Okay. Let's wrap up. I just want to go back to the title, which was, It Depends, Rethinking Improvements, and what you said is that, if you're working in a Deming organization, it's not gonna be as definitive. When we ask questions, we're gonna get answers like, well, it depends. Everything's a trade off. We need to know...   0:38:03.7 BB: That's right.   0:38:03.8 AS: How many things... We need to know many things, as you said, before deciding what to do because we want to think about the impact of the system... On the system. And also I would argue, and I think you make this point, that this is hard and I think there's a rush to simplification in KPIs and things like that to try to corner people into little areas and little boxes. And that's destroying the system and... Or the potential of the system.   0:38:37.5 AS: And then I mentioned the word coordination, the idea. We talked about Porter and his idea of building competitive advantage happens through the supply chain. His example, one of them that he uses is IKEA that makes flat, it ships everything in flat boxes.   0:38:52.5 BB: Yes.   0:38:53.2 AS: And that has built something in the supply chain that's not easy to replicate. And so, but that also requires fits that you're designing your supply chain around a new way of thinking. And then you've talked about Russell Ackoff and also I discussed his definition of a system that's saying that nothing can be independently... Can act independently. Everything has an impact. I talked about the stock market and how that is an interacting system. And then I just wanna finish up my kind of review of what we've talked about by a discussion, Bill, that I had with my father before he passed away.   0:39:35.4 AS: And my father had a PhD in organic chemistry and he created a career all of his life at DuPont in selling, he was a salesman and a technical salesman. And he raised three kids; my mom was a housewife. And I asked my dad, what was your proudest accomplishment? And he said, I built a trusting family.   0:40:01.4 BB: Cool.   0:40:03.1 AS: And I didn't really... It hit me then, but it just hits me more and more whenever I think about that. My mom and dad never betrayed my trust. I never was in a situation where I could see that they were acting for their benefit and...   0:40:14.3 BB: Yeah.   0:40:16.8 AS: Not considering mine. So now I wanna go back to Toyota. One of the things that makes Toyota successful is that it's the quintessential family business. It is a family business that built certain values in the family business that are ongoing. Because what we're trying to do, and when we talked about Dr. Deming being a humanist, we're trying to build trust.   0:40:42.5 AS: He's telling us to build trust in the system. In other words, don't beat up your suppliers, work with them. Don't beat up your employees and make them fearful. Don't rank and rate your employees. Build a system of trust. And what I realized, I want to just go back to the story of my father, if my father had done something that was selfish only for him and neglected the impact on me and my mom or the family, he would have broken our trust. And it just takes one time to cause a system, like a family system, to be permanently broken, unless there's effort made to try to resolve that. And it's no different in a business. What would you like to add to end up this episode?   0:41:33.3 BB: No. I think that's a good point. A number of things is, and I really like the way you described that, because I thought about that recently as well as, it's one thing to have trust in others, but I think what you're saying is that a Deming organization we have trust in the system. And when you, when you lack that trust, what do you do, Andrew? You look out for yourself.   0:41:57.7 AS: Yep.   0:42:00.4 BB: Because you've learned. You've learned the hard way. You fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. But I think if you have trust in the system, then there may be a new direction. But you say, "I don't know where we're going, I just got the announcement, but I have trust in the system. I'm not gonna get tossed overboard." And I think you're right. When you have trust in the system of the company or of the family, then you know that you're being looked out for. And lacking that, when people say something to you, you're like, "what's their ulterior motive?" And when you start thinking about ulterior motives behind coworkers or friends, then they're really not friends for long when you start wondering about ulterior motives.   0:42:51.6 AS: And that stifles innovation.   0:42:53.3 BB: Oh, yeah. You say to me, Andrew, or you say to me, Bill, hey, what do you say we go do this? The first thing comes to mind is, what's Andrew up to now? But that's the humanist.   0:43:04.4 AS: Yeah.   0:43:04.8 BB: And what I love about what Deming is saying, and when you put psychology in the System of Profound Knowledge, is that it's an understanding that that psychology gets me to think about me and not the system. That psychology, then we're looking at also an understanding that each of us is different, that's the variation piece. Right, the theory of knowledge piece or am I willing to share my theories or hide my theories? But if you're not tapping into the... That people... I mean, the most flexible part of the system, once you pour the concrete, so yeah, the chairs are on rollers and you put casters on some machines.   0:43:40.6 BB: But at the end of the day, the potential most flexible part of the system is the people. And when you turn people into concrete, now you've got trouble. So I just wanna... And I know you've got a favorite Deming quote, so let me share with you my favorite Russell Ackoff quote, and then you could sign us off. And so to borrow from Russell Ackoff, "a system is never the sum of its parts. It's the product of the interactions of its parts. The art of managing interactions is very different indeed than the management of actions. And history requires this transition for effective management, not efficient management, effective management." And that's my closing quote, Andrew.   0:44:25.2 AS: Bill, once again, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for our discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. And if you want to keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. Oh, wow, we have a lot of good discussions there and all of this stuff is posted there. Share your ideas and opinions. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming: "People are entitled to joy in work."

In this episode, Bill Bellows and host Andrew Stotz talk about resource management in a non-traditional sense. Bill explains how managing the variation and integration in your product or service is just as important as increasing consistency and removing waste.  TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is episode nine, Resource Management. Bill, take it away.   0:00:28.9 Bill Bellows: Thank you, Andrew. And thanks for our audience and thanks for joining in again. So we're picking up following episode nine, which was, I called it the Paradigms of Variation. It was, I think the title on the podcast may be a little bit different, but what we've been building up to from the beginning is, parallel tracks. But one aspect that I've been trying to bring forward is this idea of variation in the white beads. We talked about the white bead experiment and the idea that the red beads are not caused by the workers, they're caused by the system.   0:01:13.5 BB: And then what if we got to the point that there were no more red beads? Yes, we can make the red beads faster, we can make the red beads cheaper, but could we make, I'm sorry, we can make the white beads faster. We can make the white beads cheaper with the elimination of the red beads, but if we're dealing with nothing but white beads that are cheaper and made faster, can we improve the quality of the beads? And what I found is, when I press on people, they'll say, "Yes, everything can be improved. Everything can be improved. When I press, press, press, they'll say faster. They'll say cheaper. I said, "Yeah, we said that." I said, "But can they be better?"   0:01:53.4 BB: Is that what Dr. Deming's trying to say with continuous improvement that we stop it a 100% white beads? Or can we go further? And I find people get stuck. And I think it's very easy to get stuck, because that's the world we live in of good parts and bad parts. We focus on the bad to make them good. And what do they do when they're good? Well, they met requirements. But what's missing is this key word called variation. And yes, there's variation in the red beads and Dr. Deming would plot that on a control chart. But Dr. Deming also discovered in, definitely in 1960, from Dr. Taguchi who he met a few years earlier, this notion of variation in the white beads and that the, so I talked earlier also about question number one and quality management.   0:02:44.0 BB: Does this quality characteristic meet requirements? There's only two answers, remember Andrew, yes or no. But then question number two is how many ways are there to meet requirements? And I'd say there's an infinite number if you take into account, how many decimal places you can go. And that, the idea that you can have anywhere from the absolute minimum to the absolute maximum of the requirements is there's all those places be in between. That's called variation. And does it matter where you are within spec? Within spec? And again, by spec I mean specification. You've met the requirements for the activity. And so what we did in episode nine, I'm sorry, episode eight is look at what I call the Two Distribution exercise. And you may have caught me saying there are four suppliers.   0:03:41.7 BB: And at the end I said, forget about the four. There's actually two. I've done it with four, I've done it with two but the important thing is when I show people a number of distributions within requirements, and one of them will be, we'll go from the minimum to the maximum with near zero and frequency at either end to then high in the middle. And I'll say, "The middle is the ideal value." And then I'll say, let's say you also have a really narrow distribution consuming, and I said, last time, 10% of the variation, what I meant to say, and I said at least once, is 10% of the tolerance that, so you're using a very small portion of the tolerance, but you're far away from the ideal value.   0:04:27.0 BB: You're shifted to the right. And so when I give people the choice of buying from one of those two suppliers under the idealized situation, you may recall, Andrew, of same price, same schedule, everything's guaranteed to meet requirements. We've got histograms, we've got control charts. The processes are in control with all those, what Ackoff would call idealized situations. Make it really, really simple. Do I go with the wide one centered on the ideal value or the narrow one over to the right? And time again, people take the really narrow one, which we said was about, why do you like the really narrow one? Because they're more consistent. Then I explained that that's precision. And that's the most popular answer. And I'm reminded of that every time I use the exercise. Within the last few days, I've used it again.   0:05:19.6 BB: And that narrow one gets people's attention. What I find really fascinating is if the goal is to meet requirements, then why is the answer not, I'll take either one of them, which was one of the choices. You could take the wide one in the middle that covers the entire, or the narrow one. Why does it matter? Why not say in the world of meeting requirements, what's the driver behind the narrow one? Why don't people say it doesn't matter anymore? And I think because there's something about variation and consistency. I was talking with somebody the other day and they said, "Being consistent is, that's everything in terms of quality." And I said, "Not quite. Not quite." What... And this will become the focus of a later episode, that you could, ideally you could put the variation where you want it to be along the ideal and end up with improved what?   0:06:18.4 BB: The answer is improved integration. Because the very simple model we use in organizations is that if the parts are good, whether it's two parts, three parts, four parts, number of parts going together, you have to have at least two. And I say if the parts are good, then they fit. That's the model. If the parts are good, then they fit, then is there anything wrong with that model? And people are like, "No, that's the model we use." If the parts are good, then they fit. Now, if you're developing an airplane or a rocket engine, you've got a wing and a fuselage, then you've got all the parts to make the wing, all the parts to make the fuselage, all the parts that do these separate components, you could say the same thing for a play. You have all the elements of the first act, all the elements of the second act, and then you put them together for the entire play. So the point is that what I'm talking about is that integration is not black and white.   [overlapping conversation]   0:07:23.2 AS: What... Just... Can you define integration just so we can make sure we understand it?   0:07:27.5 BB: Yeah. Integration is when I'm going to put the cap onto the bottle of water. That's integration. The cap is good, the bottle is good. Now I'm trying to put the cap, which is good, and the bottle, which is good, and I'm trying to put the cap onto the bottle.   0:07:46.0 AS: Okay.   0:07:46.5 BB: Yeah. That's integration. Or I'm trying to put the, I'm trying to put two parts of something together. I'm trying to put the cap on top of the pen. What I love about water bottles as a prop is wherever I'm presenting, someone in your room will have a water bottle. And I'll say, can I use this as a prop? Sure. And I say, if all the requirements for the cap are met, what do we say about the cap? It's good. And if all the requirements for the bottle are met, what do we say about the bottle? It's good. Then I'll say, see what we're doing? We're managing parts in isolation. We're saying the cap is good, the body is good. Then I say, why don't we focus on how well the cap mates with the bottle? And I had a co-worker once said, well, if the cap is good and the bottle is good, then won't it fit. Fit as in absolute fit, right?   0:08:39.7 BB: Not relative fit ‘cause remember in early episodes we talked about black and white thinking versus shades of gray thinking. Good versus bad is black and white. Fit is black and white. It fits or it doesn't. What I'm talking about Andrew, is the idea that there's variation in good and the variation in good cap, and the variation in the good bottle show up when I go to put the cap onto the bottle. Because if the, if the outer diameter of the bottle is on the high side and the cap, inner diameter is on the low side, then I'm gonna have trouble putting the cap onto the bottle, ‘cause one's too small, one's too large. Boom. And, so what I'm trying to imply, [chuckle] not what I'm trying to imply. What I'm stating is fit is not absolute.  It's relative. Integration, which is about fit, is relative. And I don't, did we talk Andrew about a hundred percent…?   0:09:41.1 AS: Wait a minute. You gotta say that again. I didn't catch that. I know many of our listeners are a little faster than me. But say that again about relative versus...   0:09:56.6 BB: Okay, so what I'm saying is the fundamental model we're using is if the cap is good of the water bottle and the bottle is good, then the cap will fit onto the bottle. It'll fit when you go to...   0:10:05.7 AS: Yep.   0:10:07.8 BB: Put the, put it on it fits just like that. What I'm talking about…   0:10:12.1 AS: And when you say fit, are you using that as a general term in a system or are you just talking specifically about the cap?   0:10:17.8 BB: No, no, I'm really, I'm glad you brought this up. What the suggestion is that fit, there's only one degree of fit. It goes together you know with a, technically what we're talking about is how much torque is required to screw it on, how much force is required. And so fit is about how much force is required to screw it on. And the implication behind them being good and fit is that they always fit the same. So the model is that parts that are good fit together the same way each time. And that's not the case. So there's a... And I, one of my first exposures to this was reading a book by David Kearns and I mentioned this, I don't know which episode. And I said that Frank Pipp, an assembly plant manager at this Ford factory had his assembly team routinely buy competitor's cars and put them together.   0:11:19.4 BB: Because at the Ford plant, most of the time when they're putting parts together, they needed rubber mallets to bang them together because they didn't quite fit. And, so they needed help. And the help was the hammers to bang them together and out. Every now and then two parts went together without a hammer. That means fit is easy as opposed to hammers, which means fit is difficult. So imagine you've got everything between I can put them together, with little effort at all to I need a hammer to bang them together. That's degrees of fit, which I'm saying Andrew is degrees of integration.   0:12:00.4 AS: Okay.   0:12:01.2 BB: And, so the point I was trying to, what got me excited about Taguchi's work and then really excited when I saw Dr. Deming realizing it, is that when I came across this a hundred percent snap fit Toyota pickup truck story account, I thought, well, holy cow. And I found in listening to these podcasts that I use a expression quite a bit.   0:12:24.1 AS: Holy cow cow, holy spicoli.   0:12:26.3 BB: Holy... Holy cow, Andrew [laughter] But what was cool is this Ford plant has discovered that Toyota, where I know Dr. Deming had some influence, but some influence, okay, what influence? that's a whole ‘nother topic, but I know Taguchi had an influence there. So I'm looking at that with my understanding of variation and thinking, that's incredible. And brought that awareness to my coworkers at Rocketdyne. And we developed, with, I provided the education, they provided the hands-on go make it work. They developed hardware that went together beautifully. And why is this important, Andrew? And this is one of the things we got to in the end of the last podcast is if you would like your customers to have products that go together easily if they're assembling it or going together means that it, this product fits well with how they use it.   0:13:22.7 BB: That the car starts each time or the stopwatch, whatever they're using, works really well, which means there's degrees of performance. That's what excites me about the idea that if we can pay attention to the variation, we can either have designs that require hammers to assemble or we can design them to go together well. And, and all of this is to say that's what prompted me to get people excited by the paradigms of variation to get them to better understand that a mindset of meeting requirements is different from a mindset of precision, which is different from a mindset of accuracy. And what I've just repeated is Paradigm A is meet requirements. Get the darts somewhere on the dartboard. Meet requirements be anywhere within the requirements. Paradigm B is this idea that we're striving for consistency, incredible uniformity, otherwise known as, as precision.   0:14:30.7 BB: And, and there may be a place for that. But what Dr. Taguchi's talking about is different than that, that's precision is Paradigm B. Paradigm C is trying to be close to target. So that's taken the distribution, which is precise, and then finding a way to adjust it to be on the bullseye. And what does that gain us, Andrew? That, well, first of all, I would say when we're working at home looking for, working on the recipe, trying to get exactly one cup of flour, exactly 350 degrees, exactly one hour in the oven.  As we pay attention to how close we are to those values, chances are we're gonna end up with an incredible product. And that's, we're trusting that the person who developed the recipe has done that.   0:15:23.2 BB: But so whether it is woodworking or working on any project, it could be making things out of cloth where you're, you're putting together some outfit out of cloth that my father used to do for my sister when he was in the textile business. That is about the idea that things come together well is about accuracy in improving integration. And that's what I find the Deming philosophy offers an understanding of what does it take to inspire an organization where, where it takes the people working on their different elements, not to meet the requirements any way they choose, but to meet requirements in a - ready Andrew - synchronous way. So you and I are on the soccer pitch, and it's not about your position, it's about my position and your position on defense that we're trying to win the World Cup.   0:16:25.2 AS: Yeah.   0:16:26.4 BB: And so all of that is about the Paradigms of Variation. Go ahead, Andrew. You were gonna say.   0:16:29.0 AS: You referenced sports and I was just thinking about how easily we work together in team activities, team sports that are just, clearly great teams are the ones that integrate each individual's doing their own personal work and they're doing training and they're improving themselves, and then they're practicing together. How do we bring this together into an integrated system that then wins?   0:16:54.9 BB: That's right. And so when you say bring together, that's what integration is. It's bring together, right? And we're looking, we we're screened a bunch of candidates on the phone, now we bring them in for face-to-face interviews. What are we looking for? Why isn't it enough that they meet the requirements that are on the website? We wanna know which of these potential employees is the best fit with our team, whether it's to play first base, or play senior researcher. Are they a fit? They may be very consistent in what they do, but is that consistency...I mean, they have to be, their consistency has to mesh what we want. So they may be consistently tardy, they may be consistently dominating the meeting, but what we want them to do is fit into the meeting.   0:17:50.0 AS: And the other thing that I always think about when I hear you talking about this stuff is, I think about when I was younger, when Lexus came out, if you remember Lexus, when they first...   0:18:01.8 BB: Absolutely.   0:18:02.5 AS: Launched...   0:18:02.5 BB: Oh yeah.   0:18:03.7 AS: Their great video or the great advertising was stacked up champagne glasses...   0:18:09.5 BB: Yes, yes.   0:18:11.6 AS: Onto the hood of this car. And then they lifted the wheels off the ground and then, or not off the ground, but like they had a roller that they were rolling it on, and then they revved that car up to as fast as it could possibly go, and those glasses did not fall. And you know the only way you can get that is by improving not only each individual part, but how those parts work together with the end result being less vibration, less friction.   0:18:39.9 BB: Yes.   0:18:41.1 AS: All of those things.   0:18:42.0 BB: Yes. Exactly.   0:18:42.5 AS: And you couldn't do it by just improving one part.   0:18:45.6 BB: That's right. And that's a great example because together you've got minimum vibration. That's not an accident. That's they have figured out how those things come together to have an incredible product, which is consistently, it works consistently. But the consistency, there's nothing wrong with consistency. Consistency is not the issue. But it, the issue is is the consistency we're talking about striving for precision or accuracy. So a car that consistently doesn't start is consistent, but that's not helpful. I want a car that consistently starts, right? I wanna be consistent around... I want you to bring your consistency in concert with others' consistency where those consistencies matter, you know? And if we don't need you to be consistent, then that's okay. Then we save money by having lack of consistency because why have consistency if you don't need it? But all of that's about...   0:19:50.6 AS: It's hard. It's hard. Consistency is hard and fit is hard.   0:19:55.4 BB: Yes. And, and, and, to build upon what you just said, consistency is about managing variation as a system. And so, another thing I wanna point out, and I got some comments from some friends about, you know, the last podcast.  The Paradigms of Variation are about the paradigms of white bead variation. So, so, Paradigm A is we've got variation within the requirements and, and is that okay? Is it enough to have variation in requirement? It doesn't matter where we are? That's Paradigm A. Paradigm B is precision. We're consistent, but we're not around the ideal. That's accuracy. And then paradigm D is....and I was searching for the word, the expression Dr. Taguchi used. He calls that Technology Development, that we're developing an advanced technology for use in... And I, the example I used last time is, let's say we're fac…we're developing a new way of making tubes for plumbers to use.   0:21:07.6 BB: And I said in the beginning let's say we just have one inch outer diameter tubes, and that's Paradigm C because everything we make is one inch outer diameter tubes. And then somebody comes along in our research labs and comes up with a novel way to make tubes of different sizes. That's variety. So they can make them down to quarter of an inch, half an inch outer diameter. And then what we're doing with what Paradigm D is about is developing the technology that allows us to be really accurate around all these different values. That's what Dr. Taguchi calls Technology Development. I called it Paradigm D, he called it Technology Development. And in the world of sports, we talk about sports. That's the ability of the soccer player to kick the ball, or I should say a football player. [laughter] To put the ball anywhere in the net during at any time. Whether it's...   0:22:03.6 AS: That's within spec.   0:22:05.4 BB: Yeah, it's so the goalkeeper goes one way and they can hit any point in there. Because if you come up and the goalkeeper knows, oh, here comes Andrew, Andrew's gonna go to the lower left 'cause that's all he knows how to do. But you don't think I know that as your opposing goalkeeper. I know Andrew, Andrew's gonna fake, but I know what Andrew's gonna do. So the Paradigm D is in sports is the ability to move the ball around. If you're the pitcher, if you're the tennis player, and that's how you become a professional athlete, is that ability to move it around. That's Paradigm D. So, years ago, and this, I was developing this and sharing this, refining it with co-workers.   0:22:44.4 BB: And I was at a Deming Institute conference. True story, in Washington DC with Tim Higgins, a co-worker, and got a call from a really good friend, Jim. So Jim calls up and Jim was in this professional development program within Boeing doing a lot of travel. Every time he called, he was somewhere different in the country doing some really cool stuff in this incredible program to develop next generation leaders. And he definitely fit the mold. So he calls me up and he says, so he says, Dr. Bellows, have you discovered Paradigm E yet?   [laughter]   0:23:17.9 BB: I said, Jim, there is no E. He said, yeah, there's letter A, there's letter B, there's letter C, there's letter D. Oh, so there's also E. I said, Jim, A meets requirements, B is consistency anywhere, C is being on target, D is being on any target. I said, there's nowhere else to go. I said that we've run out. He said, we haven't run out of letters. [laughter] So I said, so he pushed on me and I pushed back. He pushed on me. We literally pushed on each other because I kept saying, Jim, you're you... Let's find another topic. No, no, no, no. I wanna hear about Paradigm E. And then it dawned on me, and I can remember it like it happened yesterday.   0:23:58.8 BB: And every time I have lunch with him, I say, Jim, I give him a big hug because I could not explain with the Paradigms of Variation, why would I pick up a nail in the parking lot, right? Why would I pick up a piece of glass in a parking lot? '‘Cause I viewed that as minimizing loss to society, that if I pick up the nail, prevent the flat tire, pick up the piece of glass, prevent the flat tire. I am, to quote Dr. Taguchi, "minimizing loss to society." But I don't know how to put that into his loss function, which is a subject of an of a future episode. And the idea of the loss function is there's an ideal value somewhere within the requirements. And the closer we are to the ideal value, the better the integration, and therefore the easier the effort.   0:24:55.2 BB: And, so now I'm stuck trying to say, so Jim's poking me, and I'm thinking, I'm stuck trying to explain everything through Dr. Taguchi's loss function, which is looking at the impact of variation relative to meeting requirements. And it dawns on me, and what Jim is saying is, I'm stuck in the world of variation. And, so when he mentioned...as, as he pushed and pushed and pushed, and it dawned on me that there's another whole world called managing, not... There's managing resources. I'm sorry, managing variation is Paradigms A, B, C, and D. What Jim got me to do that he called Paradigm E, and later we called it Resource Management, he realizes variation is a resource. Variation is a result of how we define our processes. There's managing cost.   0:25:52.3 BB: What is the cost of what we're doing? How much time is required? So, I look at resources as all the things we have in our organization from people to equipment to software to hardware and tools and techniques. Those are all resources. And picking up a piece of glass in the parking lot is a way of managing resources to improve the system, just as being on target is a way to improve how resources are managed. I started, I just jumped back and thought, holy cow, it's bigger than variation. And I think Dr. Deming really had this in mind. It's not just about variation, it's about the system includes variation, but it also has resources. Again, people, time, ideas, money. How do we use our money? That's a resource.   0:26:39.4 BB: Are we using, 'cause the other thing that was bugging me was are we using our money to improve things that are good? No, we're using our money and our time and our resources to focus on what is bad to make it good. And so that's what started off as Paradigm E then became Resource Management. So that's the genesis for Paradigm E. Managing resources is, should I get a college education, right? Should I exercise? How often should I go to the doctor, right? How often should I go shopping for groceries? Should I go shopping every day on my way home or should I go once a week? Those are resource management questions. Should I have a garden in my backyard? Should I buy the groceries? What's a better use of my time when I'm running errands?   0:27:33.2 BB: So on Saturday morning, I'm gonna run out and I'm gonna pick up the dry cleaning, go to the drug store, go to the veterinarian, pick up something for the cats. Do I do each of those randomly, come home and I say, what do I do next? Or Andrew, do I line up the errands and figure out what time the store opens? When do the lines occur? What time does traffic start to pick up? Am I making right-hand turns or left-hand turns? And I find what I do is I'm trying to figure out how do I get all these things done as fast as possible? And that directs my route. What I'm I doing, Andrew? I'm managing resources.   0:28:11.7 AS: And you remind me of the book I'm reading right now, Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.   0:28:16.8 BB: Yes, I listened to it, it's fantastic.   0:28:18.9 AS: Yeah, and there's just these times that Steve Jobs would just go into an absolute focus into some minute detail that all the people around were thinking that, and rightly so in some cases, that he was wasting resources, the resource of time. But there was another component that I think they couldn't see maybe was the passion that he was conveying to people around them that this matters.   0:28:48.0 BB: Yes, well, I don't know if this story shows up on that book, but that book was a fantastic read, oh I just loved it. Do you know the subject of Walter Isaacson's next biography? I don't know when it's due, but the very next auto, biography that Walter Isaacson is doing, take a guess who it is?   0:29:07.7 AS: No idea.   0:29:08.4 BB: Elon Musk.   0:29:10.9 AS: Oh, great.   0:29:12.7 BB: Yeah, yeah. So I think Fortune Magazine had an article that Jobs, well, first of all, let's go back, let's say 15, 20 years when I would go into work with others and we'd turn on our computers and then go get a cup of coffee. You know what I'm talking about, Andrew? You know where I'm coming from?   0:29:35.4 AS: I remember that very well.   0:29:37.8 BB: And why are we going to get our coffee, Andrew?   0:29:41.1 AS: Man, it takes minutes to boot up.   0:29:43.1 BB: Yes, so because we're going to go, we gotta turn on the computer and it's going to take minutes, five, 10 minutes. And for those of you that are, I mean, really, now we're so used to turning on the iPhone and it comes right up. Yeah if you shut off the iPhone, it may take 30 seconds to turn on, but you start your computer and it, from scratch and it's within 30 seconds, your computer's up and running. No, what we're talking about, Andrew, is you go into the office, turn on the computer, go get a cup of coffee, talk with some friends, you come back in 10 minutes, your computer's up.   0:30:18.9 BB: So Jobs supposedly went to people that were working on that boot-up system and told them that if we could shave a few seconds off of the boot-up time, multiplied by the million or so users around the world, we can save society big numbers. And the person that went off and did this, or the team that went off and did it, went way beyond what he was talking about, but he's the one, he Andrew, saw that as a loss. All right, so when you're banging things together at the Ford plant and I come in on day one and, Andrew, what are you doing? You're like, and you're banging things together. I said, "Andrew, why are you doing that?" And you say, "Bill, this is how we assemble cars here." I said, "Andrew, look at those calluses on your hand." You're thinking, "Bill, you'll get used to it, but this is how we put things together." In the world of automobiles, this is how you do it, Bill." And I think, "Geez, I don't think it needs to be done that way." And what's fundamental here is, and again, the whole idea of the loss function, the integration loss function, we'll look at in a future episode, but what I want to point out here, Andrew, is if I believe you that banging it together with hammers is as good as it gets, then there is no loss.   0:31:51.6 BB: Meaning that as soon as I say that's as good as it gets and I stop, then I'm saying that this is how we do things here. But if I come in and look at that with an understanding of Taguchi's work and how to manage variation as a system or manage resources as a system, I have the capacity to look at that and say, as Jobs did, and say, "I think it can be better." And the difference between what it is and what it could be is loss. But as long as I look at what we do and say, "That's it, let's stop right here." Then what I'm saying is... What I'm acknowledging is that, that's okay. And so what I was looking for within Rocketdyne and got the president of the company to agree to this is finding some people that I was mentoring for several years and their role was to go around the organization and look for loss.   0:32:54.8 BB: And, loss is the ability…Ready Andrew, to look at what is in terms of integration and wonder what could be. And then look at the components and then ask, "Can we change the variation of the components to improve integration?" And of course, the big question is, is it worth the effort? But it's having the vision that the integration and I think that's a great example. The integration is all that time we're spending waiting is not only is it lost, but that's integration time. [laughter] Bingo. So, the next thing I wanna point out before we close is... So this conversation with my friend Jim got me out of being stuck on the loss function and then stepping back and saying that's... There's... It's a global thing. It's all about managing resources, which also means it's more than quality. It's not managing quality, it's managing resources.   0:33:51.8 BB: And if we improve how we manage resources, quality goes up, integration improves, all these things improve. Well, the next thing I wanna point out is, I started thinking in terms of a model that says, how do we allocate our resources? Again, resources are time, energy, equipment, software, ideas. How are we using them? And the first model I had in mind was, are we applying... Are we allocating the resources proactively or reactively? Are we applying the resources to go to the doctor for annual checkups just to see how we're doing. We're going to the dentist for an annual checkup. Are we having somebody come by and look at our plumbing system and getting a feeling for how is it running? Are we taking the car in for routine things. Or are we reactive? We call the plumber when it breaks, we go to the doctor when we're sick. We bring the car in when it's broken. And, so what I started focusing on is what is our preference? How are the resources being allocated?   0:34:55.6 BB: And, without a doubt, what I found is the majority of the resources, time, energy, equipment are being used reactively. Focusing on things that are broken, not good. And, and I would go into big production meetings and say, "How much time are we... How much time do you ladies and gentlemen spend every day discussing parts which are good that arrive on time?" And, no matter where I went, the answer was “little to none.” And, so what I found is the resources were being used reactively, reactively. Now, let me also throw in that if the company's doing research and developing, developing next generation products, that is proactive use of resources. But what I also found is for the products that are in production, rarely did anybody ever come to me for something in production and say, "This could be better."   0:35:52.0 AS: Mm-hmm.   0:35:53.1 BB: That's rare. So the other dimension of this model. So the first dimension... I was just... In fact... It wasn't till I discovered Taguchi, Deming's work that got me to realize this is focusing on things that are broken is the norm. It wasn't just where I work. I started to see that pattern play out elsewhere. Well, the other axis of this resource management model, so the vertical axis is... Are the resources being applied proactively or reactively? So that's let's say the vertical axis going up. Top versus bottom. The horizontal axis are, is are the resources mine or are they ours? Is it my equipment, my people, my department? Or is it ours, Andrew? And so on the horizontal axis, the left hand side is the resources are mine, my department, my, my, my... And the other side of the horizontal axis is ours.   0:36:53.1 BB: And so in this two dimensional model, the vertical axis is, are the resources applied proactively, that's the top. Reactively, that's the bottom. If you think of a two by two matrix, the top row is proactive, the bottom row is reactive. And then when it comes to columns, so the left hand column is the resources are mine. The right hand column is the resources are ours. So we've got a two by two matrix. And I say to people, so given your understanding of Red Pen and Blue Pen companies, me and we organizations, last straw, all straw. I say, according to that matrix, how do you see resources managed in a Red Pen Company, a non-Deming company? And people will say the lower left quadrant, which is what, which is my resources applied reactively. Right?   0:37:43.4 AS: Yep.   0:37:44.9 BB: And then I'll say, "Okay." [laughter] And the name for that is... And it took a while to come up with a name and you're gonna love this. We started calling that at Rocketdyne, Reflexive Resource Management. Reflexive Resource Management. Because a wise man, born in Iowa in 1900, Andrew [laughter], by the name of W. Edwards Deming, once said, pulling your hand off of a hot stove requires no thought. It's all reflex action. When I saw him and that, I don't know where it was, I said, but I know he said that. And I thought, that's it. It's all reflexes. There's no thought involved. Why are we reactive? Because! I mean, why would I be proactive? I mean, why would I work? So when I started realizing is there's no thought involved in being reactive in a Red Pen Company. It's just that's what we do. So then the question is, well, how are resources managed in a Blue Pen Company? A We Organization, a Deming organization. And, what people will say is the upper right quadrant, which is proactive ours, the resources are ours.   0:38:56.1 BB: We're gonna be proactive. And wherever I go, that's people's answers. And I say, you, are you ready? And okay, what? I say, the entire right hand side is a Deming organization. What does that mean? It means I'm smart enough to know when to be proactive, and I'm smart enough to know when to be reactive. I choose, I choose to replace the light bulb when it goes out, it's a choice. Or I choose to replace the battery in the smoke alarm when it goes out. I, being reactive in a Deming organization is a choice. Being proactive is a choice. And so the right hand side, it's about choice. And it took some time to figure this out. What do we call that? What do we call this? So we call it the left hand side, the left lower left quadrant, Reflexive Resource Management. So it took a while to find out what's the adjective for the right hand side.   0:39:55.6 BB: And I come up with an adjective, find out that it's an acronym used by somebody for something else. No, can't use that. Try it again. Try it again. Try it again. Try it again. Try it again. It took about an hour to, at least an hour and finally came up with a term used by the Bureau of Land Management in the late 1800s. And it, and it's, it was known as Purposeful Resource Management. And I thought, bingo! One is nobody's got a trademark on it, [laughter] And so we started calling the deliberate use of resources to be deliberately proactive, or we choose to be proactive, or we choose to be reactive. We started calling that purposeful, thoughtful resource management.   0:40:45.5 AS: Yeah, that choice. It made me think about there's a lot of things in business that you just, your choice is to be reactive. When that breaks, we're gonna fix that because it's not so critical, whereas we cannot have a situation where we're reacting to this particular process. Like, think about my coffee business as an example. We cannot be reactive to downtime on the roasting machines. Well, we're not just waiting for that. We're doing preventive maintenance. We've got stocks.   0:41:17.7 BB: That's right.   0:41:18.5 AS: Stock of parts. We've got, so we make a deliberate effort and resource allocation to make sure we never in that situation, but there's other parts. Let's say we have a few grinders and something like that, we'll fix those when they break. [laughter]   0:41:35.0 BB: Yeah. Well, I've shared this with a woman who, the hairstylist I go to. My kids used to go there and I've been going there ever since. And she is awesome. Just awesome. So I, these are the things I discussed with her, all kinds of things. And so I have a photograph of her, Andrew, holding a hairdryer in her hair salon. And the hair salon is called Kids Cuts because a good part of her business is kids. And then people like me bring the kids in there and next thing you know, I'm a customer, too. Well, so I'm explaining this to me and she says, "Bill, every 6 months I get rid of all the hair dryers". I said, why? She says, "I cannot afford to burn somebody's hair". And so, so I've got a photo of her holding it, so she doesn't monitor how it's performing.   0:42:24.1 BB: She just knows 6 months, get rid of it now. You know, does she donate it? I don't know where it goes. And I don't wanna get into recycling, but she deliberately, she's not gonna burn somebody's hair.   0:42:35.0 AS: Right.   0:42:38.1 BB: Alright. And, what else? Oh, but you and I talked earlier in one of the episodes, this idea of choice, that instead of following the domain that says you can't have inventory, we gotta have blah, blah, blah, you realize this? No, we can choose to have inventory, or we can choose not to have inventory. And so what we're talking about in resource management is, which gets into all those things we talked about earlier, is it's about choices. And so I would say to people, I've got a slide, then I say, it's like you get to the end of the road and you turn right and turning right is being reactive.   0:43:21.3 BB: And I say, Andrew, I've been patterning you, and you get to the end of the road and you turn right, you're always reactive. Why do you turn right? And you say, "Bill, there's only a right-hand turn". And I said, "No, Andrew, there's a left-hand turn, but you can't see it. It's in your blind spot". So the right hand turn is to focus on what's bad, to make it good, what Ackoff would also call managing actions. And that's the road that's well traveled, [laughter], the road less traveled is the left-hand turn, which is to be proactive, again, when it makes sense. I'm not saying being proactive all the time, I'm saying there's a place for it. Consider being proactive, consider being reactive.   0:44:04.0 AS: So, on that note, I think we ought to leave. Why don't you leave the listeners and the viewers with a concise statement of what you want them to take away from this discussion. We went through a lot of different things, but if you wanna bring it down to something clear and concise, how would you describe that?   0:44:24.5 BB: I'd say the, um…I'd like, I'd encourage our listeners, viewers, students of the Deming philosophy, those new to it, to expand their appreciation of quality management and realize that to managing resources period. And the better we manage our resources in our organization, knowing when to collect data, when not to collect data, when to meet requirements, when to be on target with minimum variation, when having lots of variation. Should we be proactive or re…. These are all choices. And they're, and I think the better we understand those choices about how we manage variation as a system in concert, I think the better the performance of the organization and improving productivity, improving quality, improving profit. So I think all those things we're striving for come from a better understanding of how to manage resources. And so instead of just being narrowly focused on the quality dimension, I think if we step back and realize that that's one aspect of how an organization operates.   0:45:42.4 AS: Bill, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you again for this discussion. And for listeners, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. If you want to keep in touch with Bill, just find him on LinkedIn. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'm gonna leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to Joy in work."

Skąd wiadomo, czy mieszkanie które odziedziczyliśmy po kimś bliskim jest spółdzielcze czy własnościowe? Jak sprawdzić, jakim prawem do lokalu dysponujemy? Jakie informacje możemy znaleźć w Rejestrze Ksiąg Wieczystych i jak dotrzeć do numeru księgi wieczystej naszego mieszkania? O tym w najnowszym odcinku Poradnika Prawnego Bartłomiej Pograniczny rozmawia z Dominiką Wilczyńską – Gaj – prawniczką w Kancelarii Sobota Jachira. Z podcastu dowiemy się także, czym różnią się różne prawa do lokalu. Ekspertka wyjaśnia, czym jest ograniczone prawo rzeczowe, w jakiej sytuacji lokalu nie możemy zbyć, jakiej formy własności nie dotyczy dziedziczenie, jak wygląda struktura spółdzielni mieszkaniowej i jak zostać jej członkiem oraz czym spółdzielnia różni się od wspólnoty mieszkaniowej. Poznamy także zalety przekształcenia prawa spółdzielczego we własność oraz dowiemy się, jak wygląda taki proces. Na podcast zaprasza Kancelaria Sobota Jachira „Głosem eksperta" to podcast, w którym rozmawiamy na ważne tematy, opowiadamy o istotnych zjawiskach, wyjaśniamy trendy i zastanawiamy się nad tym, co warto wiedzieć tu i teraz, a także już za chwilę, w przyszłości. To rozmowy przygotowywane przez uznanych i doświadczonych dziennikarzy, które zawierają lokowanie marki.

Learning Deming is like seeing the world through a different lens. In this episode, Bill Bellows uses various examples to show us how powerful that new vision can be.  TRANSCRIPT 0:00:03.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Bellows, who has spent 30 years helping people apply Dr. Deming's ideas to become aware of how their thinking is holding them back from their biggest opportunities. The topic for today is Vision Therapy. Bill, take it away. 0:00:29.9 BB: Welcome back, Andrew. Yes, I wrote an article, gosh, maybe 10 years ago now for the Lean Management Journal under the title Vision Therapy: Shift from Big Problems to Great Opportunities. And in the article, I talk about vision therapy - as getting glasses is one form of vision therapy or perhaps you need surgery on your eyes. I also talked about therapy our son once went through which is hand-eye coordination. And all of that is leading up to a vision exercise I put together 1998 timeframe and was inspired by a number of things. One is I had read a book written by David Kerns, former CEO of Xerox, and it's called 'Prophets in the Dark.' And he shared a story in there of a senior executive who had come from Ford. And he said, this guy named Frank Pip, who went on to become an outstanding leader within Xerox. If there was... I get the feeling if there was a hall of fame within Xerox, David Kearns would be in it. Frank Pip would be in it. 0:02:02.0 BB: And quite likely Barry Bebb, who's a mentor of mine, would be in it. And others, and... Anyway, relative to Frank Pip: Pip started his career at Ford and he got to the point of being a plant manager for the Ford final assembly plant. And there was an account he gave to Kearns of whenever they did final assembly of automobiles, rubber mallets were used to bang the mating parts together. They didn't quite fit. And every now and then, two parts would go together without a mallet. And the Ford, at Pip's plant, they called the parts that assembled without a mallet Snap-fit - everything else required mallets and mostly it was mallets. But every now and then there'd be Snap-fit. And then he explains how they, Pip was inspired to go off and buy competitor's cars for the purpose of buying them, taking them apart, putting 'em back together. And unfortunately, Pip died a few years ago, and I... And it never dawned on me to reach out to him. I thought by the time I heard of him, it was maybe too late then, it turns out I had plenty of time to reach out to him. So I don't know what inspired him, but I get the feeling he was routinely buying competitors' cars, taking 'em apart, putting 'em together, just alike, and they assembled just like theirs, just like theirs, just like theirs. 0:03:26.7 BB: And then there was a pickup truck they took apart, put together, and never used a mallet. It was, in Ford's language, 100% Snap-fit. And Pip was so astounded by the results he had the assembly team take it apart again and put it back together again 'cause he couldn't believe it was a 100% Snap-fit. Well, when he found that it was 100% Snap-fit twice, now he thought, "Holy cow," he calls up corporate, had someone come out from Dearborn, which was Ford's corporate headquarters, and I don't know if it was his boss, whoever the person was, came out very, very senior. And he says, they met with the team. The team's answering his questions. And as I explain it to people, you can imagine what it's like when somebody from corporate comes out. That's typically in my experience, somebody coming from corporate that's either, they're there to celebrate something or it's a bad day or it's a routine, but it... Anyway, it's a big deal for him. And as Pip's account was when the plant manager, when this executive came out from Dearborn and heard this account first hand, blah, blah, blah, his comment to the team was "The customer will never notice the difference." 0:04:38.1 BB: And in the book it said Pip was so frustrated with that attitude that he quit 'cause he thought, "We have uncovered something and this guy is treating it as no big deal.” Well, then I point out to people that was the late '60s and which was at the beginning of Ford, I'm sorry, of Toyota selling cars in the States. It was a Toyota pickup truck. So I just... I shared this story in part for this term, Snap-fit. Well, then in the late '90s I was teaching a graduate class in quality management at the Kellogg School of Management, Kellogg Business School, Northwestern University, which I checked very recently. It's the number two business school in the United States. And I'm teaching a class there. Through some interesting occurrences, I was invited to teach this class there. And I wrote up this contrast between the very simple black and white model. And we've been talking black and white models and I was using a black and white model of organizations which were about continuous improvement versus black and white thinking in that kind of contrast. And I gave them pairs of words and I said... 0:06:16.5 BB: You could have "good versus bad" - is one model. What I was showing 'em is, is black and white words versus continuum words versus relative words. I said, there's, let's see the good versus bad, and then that would be a black and white. And I said, "If you take the good versus bad and put it into a continuum, what would it be? And people would joke, "Gooder." And I said, "Well, faster, it could be tall versus short - taller, cheap versus expensive - cheaper." And I was using those pairs, getting them a sense of relative thinking versus black and white thinking. And I put out the word Lean, L-E-A-N and I said, "Let's say you don't know anything about the word. In which category does this word apply? Does it fit into the black and white mold or the continuum mold?" And a first of them would say it's shades-of-gray thinking. And I said, "Well, why?" And they come up with explanations and finally one guy says, he says, "It's black and white thinking." And I said, "Why?" He says, "There's no 'er' in the end." 0:07:36.4 BB: Lean, Lean. It's right? And then there's a woman who pushed back on that. And she said, "No, I disagree." She said, "You can continuously eliminate waste." And I said, "How far are you gonna go with that?" And she said, "Until there's no waste." And I said, and I was trying to point out is, well then we're done. I said, "Where is the continuous improvement, the continuum thinking behind being done?" And I said, [laughter] what'd I tell her, saying to her, I said, "So if you're done, well then what do you do?" She said, "Well, you continuously eliminate waste until you're done." Well, then I said, "Well, describe to me what an organization looks like that has no waste. Is what does it look like?" She says, "I don't know." Well, I think those two things inspired me in a class later that year, this is 1998, to throw out as an exercise, a vision, and I call it vision therapy exercise. 0:08:38.0 BB: And I said to them, "Yeah, I want you to take a piece of paper, divide it into half, into half, left and right, and then top and bottom. So there's four quadrants." And I said, "Label on the left hand side Blue Pen for Blue Pen Company. The right hand side for Red Pen as in Red Pen Company." And I held up, I would have these transparency markers. I had eight different colors. And I pulled out one, which is blue. And I said, "Imagine each of you have recently visited a company which makes blue pens, only Blue Pens. And every week I'd buy one that costs a dollar." And, I pulled out a Red Pen. Why red? 'cause I wanted something the other end of the spectrum. So I had eight different colors to choose from. So one was blue, one was red. Later somebody said to me, "Why did you pick blue versus red?" 0:09:31.2 BB: And I said, "Well, Rocketdyne was owned by Boeing at the time." And when I looked at the colors, you know a lot of the, advertising the logos of Boeing were blue and white. And I thought, blue is the company I have in mind for one side, and then something not blue, not green, not brown, red is the other side. So I said, "So imagine you've recently visited a Blue Pen Company, that only makes blue pens. You buy one every week, it costs a dollar. When you need a Red Pen, you buy that from the Red Pen Company, and they only make red, you buy it, it cost a dollar." So I had them create this - left and right. Imagine you've recently visited both organizations for two weeks each. All right? And then I said on the, you've got a left side and a right side, one's red, one's blue, top versus bottom. 0:10:24.1 BB: I said, "So imagine for the first week as you're visiting these two companies, nobody's there. So give us some additional information. What I want you to do is describe the physical layout of both organizations." And this ties in really well with... So my idea, as I shared in a recent session from Edgar Schein who had passed away back in January. He was an organizational therapist for most of his career at MIT. And in his book, 'Organizational Culture and Leadership,' he talked about organizational culture can be analyzed at three levels. And I didn't know about these levels back in '98 and found about them later. And I found it fits really well. And he said the first level is artifacts. And he says, I just wanna read, he says, "The constructed environment of an organization, including its architecture, technology, office layout, dress code, visible or audible behavior patterns, public documents like employee orientation, handbooks." 0:11:27.8 BB: And, what Schein says is that those artifacts come from values, the reasons and/or rationalizations of why members behave the way they do. And values come from assumptions. And again, I'm quoting from Schein, "Typically an unconscious pattern that determines how group members perceive, think and feel." And again, I didn't know about those at the time, but going back to the exercise, there's a left side and a right side. One is Blue Pen Company, one is Red Pen Company. The top two cells are, what would you see physically as Schein would say: what are the artifacts of these two organizations? And all you know so far is that one makes blue, one makes red, they both cost a dollar. And I buy one from each. Well then in the bottom two cells, what I want you to imagine is, so for the first two weeks, you visit both organizations, write down what are the physical characteristics of both organizations for the bottom two cells. 0:12:25.5 BB: And I apologize for coming back to this. In the first week you visit, there's no one there but you, no one there but you. So you're walking around both organizations, you're the only person around. You've got a clipboard. All you can talk about are the artifacts. What do you see? And the bottom two cells, imagine the second week in both organizations, there are people there. So for the bottom two cells, describe the people in both organizations. So all of this is artifacts and they come from values, they come from assumptions. But all you're doing is saying...but what I specifically wanted to differentiate is, what does the place look like different from what are the people like? And so everybody's ready to go. I'm gonna give you five minutes to put something in each cell. And here's the additional information. Andrew, you're ready? 0:13:12.7 BB: When I go to use the Blue Pen. So I would take the Blue Pen out and I would say, "When I use the Blue Pen, the cap goes off, the cap goes on, it goes off and it goes on nice and easy." And at the time I'm explaining this, they don't know anything about the prior story of Toyota, the pickup truck, 100% Snap-fit, Frank Pip. I usually... I save that for later. I said, all you know is the cap goes on, goes off nice and easy. Now the Red Pen, when I go to use the Red Pen, I need pliers to get the cap off. And there were times I had a little pair of pliers and I would use the pliers to pull it off and I need a hammer to get it back on. And I would have a little hammer and I boom, boom, boom. Now however, the Blue Pen... The cap is said to be Snap-fit. Then I would say just like snap your fingers, it comes off nice and easy goes on nice and easy, it doesn't fall off. That's all the information I have. Spend the next five minutes putting something in each cell. 0:14:14.3 BB: I've done that exercise around the world over 500 times of all different audiences, as young as college students, people working in the fishing industry, all over. And what's really cool is what shows up in those four cells is nearly identical. There may be some caveats due to language and whatnot. 0:14:40.8 AS: Identical across the 500, or again, identical... 0:14:44.1 BB: Yes. 0:14:44.5 AS: Across the red and blue. 0:14:46.5 BB: Yes, I... Well... What shows up in those four cells is nearly identical. So I would give people five minutes. And the other thing for those who are listening, my advice when you're doing this, that it took me a while to figure out the additional benefit is, what I would do is go around the room in each cell, the Blue Pen physical and ask if anyone has an example. So for the Blue Pen physical, someone will say: an open environment, bright lights, windows. All right. Then I'd go to the Red Pen Company, physical, "Okay, what do you see over here?" People might say, "Closed doors." Then I'd go to the Red Pen people, what about the people? And the... There might be "rigid,” “looking over their shoulder,” “on a time clock." Blue Pen Company, people might be happy and smiling. So I would go around the room before I give 'em five minutes just to make sure most of us are on the same page 'cause now, and then there'd be some people who are lost. And... But in general, people are pretty good. So then I give 'em five minutes and then depending on the size of the room, I might go around the room, table by table, look over your shoulder, see how you're doing, onto the next one, onto the next one and I get a feeling that they're doing pretty good. So then when I have them stop and there's different things I do at this point. I've had people at this point after five minutes stand up. Okay, there's a couple hundred people in the room at a conference. 0:16:31.0 BB: And I'll say: okay what I'd like you to do is find someone you've not met today and go introduce yourself and spend five minutes comparing trip reports. What's in your trip reports? And the room will very quickly erupt in laughter, whether I do it having you stand up, go find somebody or whether you are sitting at a table of four or five and I say across the table share. And then after they're done with that I'll say, "Okay, what did you find when you share your answers with others at the table?" And again and again, they'll say, "Their answers are just like mine." And I'll say, "Did anything come up in any of those quadrants that you were lost? That you said, Andrew, I... What do you mean by this? I don't know where you're coming from." And that's never happened. Every single time, they may have... They're looking at a factory and somebody may be looking in the kitchen, someone's looking in the lobby area. So they may be looking at different places, but it always fits together well. In the very beginning, what I would do, is I would give them five minutes. I wouldn't have 'em share anything yet. And I would go around the room and I'd say, get in the front of the room and the very first person, and I'd say if it was you say, "Andrew, what's the first thing you have for Blue Pen Physical?" And you'd say, "Clean." In fact, what's really cool is "neat, clean and organized" came up in order again and again. 0:18:13.6 BB: So I would ask you, "Andrew, what do you see?" You would say, "Neat," next person "Clean," next person "Organized." And I go all the way around and just fill up one cell with the very first... One thing you have that you haven't heard yet. Then I would jump over to the Red Pen, fill it out, then I'd go to the Red Pen people. So I would fill up a given cell and in the beginning I would write these on flip charts. And again, I don't know exactly what I was... I had in mind, "It's gonna be interesting," but I didn't appreciate how powerful this has become. And in the beginning I would write these on flip charts and then at the end of the class, I would throw them away. Then as I began to see how common the patterns were, then I would write them onto transparency and save them and I would date them. And at one point of time I've a colleague who's working on a PhD thesis, University of Texas and his PhD research, Andrew, [laughter] came from 200 trip reports that I still had in my files that I hadn't thrown out. And he and his brother took the data 'cause we knew exactly who was in each class. And so he had... He and his brother had some methodology in his... So his research data for his PhD thesis, looking at the leadership styles of these two organizations. And so let me... 0:19:52.3 BB: So in the Blue Pen physical, it's: an open layout neat, clean, organized, what else? Harmonious and as needed, if you were to say harmonious, then I might say, "Andrew, what do you mean by that? What do you mean? What do you mean clean? What do you mean this? What do you mean?" And so there's nothing wrong for our listeners who are trying this out with people. It's just keep asking them: "What do you mean by, what do you mean by." What's most critical is write down exactly what people say. Don't interpret. Don't yeah I would just say don't interpret. So I go all the way around and people would be astounded. 0:20:40.9 BB: I mean, I'd say a couple of things. One is quite often what people see in the contrast is where they work [laughter] versus where they would love to work. [chuckle] Now let me also say, in the very beginning when I did it, I did not explain to them what Snap-fit meant. So I did not say Snap-fit is good. I just said Snap-fit. Now, there would be people who would say, "Well, does it mean because it's Snap-fit, that it's good." And I would just say, "I didn't say one is good, one is bad. All I'm saying is one goes together with the hammers, one doesn't," and then I would eventually explain to them the a 100% Snap-fit Toyota pickup truck, and it would come together nice for them. Well, when I found the uses of this are one, people can, but Dr. Deming talked about prevailing style of management, but talking about it and having conversations about it is, what I found is this exercise... 0:22:00.1 BB: I think helps people in their own words, explain to them. It allows them to create a sense of: what is the prevailing system of management? And it's the Red Pen Company's side in many ways, and then: what is a Deming organization? It's the opposite. Now this is a very simple black and white model. And as George Box's quoted saying "All models are right. Some models are useful." I have found it enormously useful to look at the two organizations and ask people, what are the conversations like in both organizations? And I would say, "Okay, you're walking around a Red Pen Company, you come across two people in the hallway, what are they talking about?" 0:22:48.4 BB: And what you'll get is: it's second-shift people complaining about first-shift people, or it's engineering complaining about manufacturing. And then people would say, there's a lot of "us and them" and I said, okay. What I've also heard people say, is they'll say, "Well, on second shift where they work, we're a Blue Pen Company." "Also on second shift we're a Blue Pen, but those first-shift people, those are Red Pen." And you know, I said, what's a conversation like in a Blue Pen Company? "I've got an idea. Hey, let me hear about it, blah, blah, blah. Tell me more. Tell me more." I'll ask them, what are survival skills in both organizations, survival skill in a Red Pen Company? What'd you find there? And people would say you know, being able to finger-point, not being blamed, protecting yourself, you know, the CYA mentality. Mentality. Don't ever... 0:23:52.8 AS: Surviving the occasional backstabbing. 0:23:55.9 BB: Oh yeah. Don't ever try anything new. You know, what will also come out is, you know, "stodgy, stiff, inflexible." Whereas I said, what about people in the Blue Pen Company? And they'll present this. And I'll ask them, "Which organization would you call a learning organization?" And people will always say, the Blue Pen Company. And I say, why? And they say, "Well, you know, they're always trying to figure out, you know, they're doing PDSA cycles, trying to figure out improvement, improvement." And I'll say, you don't think people in a Red Pen Company have learned how to survive [laughter]? You don't think they've learned how to finger-point, you don't think they've learned how to duck and cover? 0:24:39.9 AS: In a Red Pen. You were saying in a Red Pen Company or in a Blue Pen? 0:24:40.7 BB: Oh yeah I meant Blue Pen, I meant red I mean Red Pen. I said, what I was trying to point out is people will say a Blue Pen is a learning environment. What I'm trying to point out is, don't underestimate the ability of people in a Red Pen Company to also learn, but that learning is about self-protection. And, you know, so the survival skills in that environment are protecting oneself, hoarding information, not allowing others to know how to, you know, do things. So they have secret tools, secret analysis methods, and I say, what are survival skills in a Blue Pen Company? And people will say, "Sharing knowledge is power in a Blue Pen Company." And so I constantly wanna make sure that I'm sharing. And, but it's not that I inundate everyone with everything, but a week later after Andrew, you've asked me for something, a week later I come to you and I say, "Hey, I've been thinking about it. 0:25:34.3 BB: And something else occurred to me that I thought you might value." What I would also add to the conversation is, "What percent of organizations are Red Pen companies?" And I just say, just, you know, in your experience. And then I would say in this unscientific survey, people would say the majority, 80% to 90% of companies, they would say, are Red Pen companies. And I would say, "Well, what keeps them in business? I mean, how could, what is, if 80% of them are Red Pen companies? What keeps all of these companies in what Deming would call the prevailing style of management and business?" People are like, "I don't know." 0:26:17.0 BB: In my response, I shared with my boss who was once President of Rocketdyne. I said, "What keeps us in business?" He said, "What?" I said, "Lousy competition." [laughter] 0:26:27.1 AS: Yeah. That's what I was gonna say. What keeps us in business is the other 80, 90 percent that's in the same boat as us. 0:26:32.7 BB: Exactly. Because they blame their people. Their people become dejected, withdrawn, only do as they're told, hide mistakes, which caused others to make the same mistakes. How can you keep in business focusing on the past to get back to the present when you're in this constant firefighting mode? How do you stay in business other than: others run the same way. And Deming somewhere in The New Economics, I believe in The New Economics. He says, "Be thankful for a good competitor." So that's what I mean by the vision therapy. This Blue Pen Company, Red Pen Company. I've done variants of it. The very first one was blue and red Snap-fit versus not snap-fit. I've, in the last few years, we'll get exactly the same results with a different starting point. 0:27:30.2 BB: And the starting point I use is, I tell the story of the executive sitting next to me that I think I've shared about the last straw. The straw that, what if you're in an organization where you believe the last straw broke the camel's back, what would it be like to work there? And people would say, "Oh, I wouldn't wanna work there is a culture of blame." So I would explain, imagine you recently visited an organization where everyone believes that the last straw did it, and that's called the Last Straw organization. And then there's also this All Straw organization where you understand the systemic aspect of all the straws getting together. And so if I was to start this exercise and explain this belief in the last straw that we have in society, that the basketball game has won on that last shot, or lost in that last shot, versus an all straw, I can use that starting point, Andrew, and have people go through and compare the physical aspects of both organizations and people and get exactly the same results and if it's, 'cause what I found with people, they'll say that... 0:28:31.9 AS: When you say exactly the same, you're saying exactly the same as the Red Pen Blue Pen? 0:28:36.1 BB: Yes. If you were to look at the... If you had a group of 30 people and get a composite score in those four quadrants, you wouldn't necessarily know if it was started with Red Pen, Blue Pen, or All Straw, Last Straw. And I've also done it when I worked for the Deming Institute in that timeframe when I left Rocketdyne, I started explaining it as what if there was one organization where there's a sense of "we," look what we did, how did we do on the exam? Andrew, you're the student, I'm the professor. A collective sense of all for one and one for all versus a "me" organization. Where the question I ask you, Andrew, is "How did you do on the exam?" And inferring that your ability to learn from the exam is separate from my ability to teach. 0:29:28.6 BB: Like I could be saying, "How are you doing in sales" versus "How are we doing in sales?" So if I was to describe it as a "me" organization, everything I do, everything is accomplished by me alone breaking things into parts. My task is done. A lot of this question one stuff that we've been talking about in terms of quality versus a "we" organization, if I explain the "me" and the "we," and there's ways to do that and then get into the trip report, me, we, and the four quadrants, very, very similar. And so I found is in terms of a vision exercise, first of all, depending on who the audience is, I'll get a... I'll figure out do I wanna use Red Pen, Blue Pen, All Straw and Last Straw, me versus we. And there's a couple others that I've used, but I know that once I get them thinking about, I just have to come up with what is the differentiator. 0:30:26.7 BB: And then I get them thinking about the artifacts. And then from the artifacts, once that is done, then I can talk about the conversations in both, the survival skills in both, the what if an... What is an ethics issue in both organizations? And I'll just say a little more about that. And I've worked in large corporations and ethics training. Really, what does it come down to the end of the day is that I didn't misuse company resources, that I didn't charge Project A using the Project B charge number [laughter], right? And I didn't fill out my timecard deliberately wrong. I didn't try to cheat the company on a trip report kind of thing. Well, then what I start thinking about is what's an ethics issue in a Blue Pen Company? 0:31:23.5 BB: And I believe, I think this comes from Dr. Deming, he would say, if, I'm pretty sure it was Deming, Deming would talk about a salesperson for a copying machine. And so Andrew, I'm the salesman and I come to your company and wanna sell, you're in need of a copier. And Deming would say, if I tried to sell you a copier that was bigger than you needed, because there's a bonus for me, Andrew, or a copier that was smaller. If I sold you a copier that I knew was much less than what you needed or much more than what you needed, then Deming would say, that would be unethical. He'd say, "My job is to sell you exactly what you need." And I view that, and I thought, "Well, that's a Blue Pen phenomenon where ethics is about how am I treating others with a sense of sharing or hoarding or whatnot?" So what I found is... 0:32:21.3 AS: Well, also ethics is how am I treating the customer? 0:32:24.4 BB: All of that. Well, how am I treating my coworkers? There's a poem I use with a great quote from Robert Frost and he said "What's the secret to selling a horse?" Have I ever shared this with you? 0:32:35.0 AS: No. 0:32:36.1 BB: The secret to selling a horse. Are you ready? 0:32:36.8 AS: Yep. 0:32:39.5 BB: Just sell it before it dies. [laughter] 0:32:41.7 AS: There you go. 0:32:44.3 BB: And so, and what Frost says in the poem is that we go through life handing off our problems to others. And I've written about this and I said, well, you mean like selling a coworker a horse? And then you come back the next day and you say, "Bill, you know this horse is dead." And I say, "Andrew, it was alive when I gave it to you." What? So I look at it as whether you're a coworker or a customer, what's that all about? And so I throw that out because... 0:33:12.2 BB: I find that that simple model is an incredible mechanism. Earlier today I was in a conversation with a coworker and the word that came up in conversation was you're "driving change." Driving change. And I said, "Driving change is what happens in a Red Pen Company." And the explanation I gave, in the Red Pen Company, I come to you Andrew, and I said, "I want this by tomorrow." And driving change is: I've got a gun to your head. And I say, "Do you understand what I'm looking for?" And you're like, "Right, 'cause I can find somebody else to do this, Andrew. I need this by tomorrow." That's driving change. And so what I'll say to people is, if driving change is a Red Pen Company, then what's the word we use in a Blue Pen Company? 0:34:05.2 AS: Coaxing. 0:34:07.4 BB: And people will say, "I don't know, what's that word?" And I'll say, "Lead, lead!" [laughter] That's what leadership's all about. You want to follow. And so, what I find is this model has allowed me to get a great number of people to explain in their own way, envision the two different organizations. And there's no doubt where they wanna work. They'd much rather be in the Blue Pen, "we" organization, an All-Straw organization. And then we can talk about, how does... The next thing I look at is with an understanding of the System of Profound Knowledge. Can you understand how a Red Pen Company might become a Blue Pen Company? Or my other proposal is that all organizations start off as a Blue Pen Company. So I started off an organization in my garage. I'm the only employee, I have customers, I have suppliers, but I know where everything goes and everything is Snap-fit because it's all about me and I wanna make sure these things integrate really well. And so how does that become a Red Pen Company? 0:35:19.7 BB: Well, here's what happens Andrew is, I hire you right outta school. You're all excited and you come in, you wanna join this organization, and I need help. Andrew, I need help. And I like your attitude. But then what happens is, I go to you and I say, "Andrew, here's what I want you to do. Your job is to answer the phone. Your job is when people call in, here's an instruction sheet, here's the order sheet. I want you to take the order. Here's what we do. We offer different sizes, different colors. You're gonna sell them what they need, not more, not less. You're gonna take their credit card information, you're gonna repeat it back to them, blah, blah, blah." 0:35:54.0 BB: And what I point out is that what I'm slowly doing, once I hire you, is putting people in separate roles. And next thing I know, I've got a baseball team where everybody's covering their own base instead of being incredibly flexible. And so I use that to point out that with the best of intentions, you could go in that direction. And, but what I've seen is I can use the four elements of Profound Knowledge to explain how one becomes the other. I can also use the System of Profound Knowledge to explain why the behaviors are the way they are. Which goes back to: what are the value systems in both organizations? What are the fundamental assumptions? Now relative to what is meant by big problems? Well, Red Pen companies, again, going for those listeners who have heard the earlier podcast. Well, Red Pen companies, all straw, I'm sorry, Last Straw organizations. 0:36:57.7 BB: They're focusing on parts in isolation. They don't work on things that are good. They focus on the things that are bad. So it's always big problems. They're focusing on the past to get back to the present, kept in business by competitors who waste their resources exactly the same way. And it's not to say you never have a problem, but it's to say instead of having a full-time fire department where that's all we're doing, all the doing all the time with a significant portion of our resources, we're using control charts in places where it makes sense. Run charts when a control chart doesn't matter as much. Or we are not even collecting data 'cause intuitively we have a sense of how things are going and where we get blinded, we have problems, but we're also in that environment. We know where can we be spending time to save a lot of time. That's the great opportunity. 0:37:49.7 BB: Things are, so I'm saving time by not having things break. I am managing variation in my resources accordingly, just to allocate my resources for the greater good. A stitch in time saves time. And that's the great opportunity focus that Red Pen companies don't know anything about 'cause they're so focused on the firefighting. And to me, what allows the shift from the Blue Pen to the Red Pen. I mean, what, either if you're unaware of these dynamics, then my Blue Pen Company will gradually become this Red Pen Company nightmare. Because I'm not paying attention to what Deming's talking about. I'm unaware of the System of Profound Knowledge. And I just lapse into that unknowingly. It's not intentional. I just don't know that addition doesn't work, you know, only works when the activities are independent. I think things that are good are equally good. 0:38:47.1 BB: And so to me, I can explain with the System of Profound Knowledge how red becomes blue, how blue becomes red. I can explain the conversations. And the last thing I wanna mention is, is when people come to me with, "Hey, how can I handle an X, Y, Z situation, something we've never talked about in the class or in a seminar?" And people will bring this to my attention and say, "Here's the issue I'm dealing with. Here's that problem I'm dealing with. How can I solve that?" And what I find is, is what I tell people is, here's my advice. 0:39:24.0 BB: And you can do it on your own, or ideally if you can explain this to others and have some others understanding this contrast, then you can - with a group - do what I'm about to explain. And that is first ask yourselves, "How would a Red Pen Company address that issue?" "We're gonna do a root cause investigation. We're gonna find the person who screwed up, we're gonna replace him, blah, blah, blah. We're gonna go that way." And then I would say, "Okay, after you've exhausted that, now ask yourself, what would a Blue Pen Company do by comparison?" 0:40:51.0 BB: And I'm not saying one of those is right, one is wrong, but my belief is that as a starting point, no matter where you are in your Deming journey, I believe, again, and the more people are involved in this, the better - I think the better we can get our minds around how a Red Pen Company handles it. And then say, "Okay, what if we become aware that the ability to learn together and work together is based on the our ability to think together?" Now you go the other way and I have individually done that when someone has asked me. And so I just want to throw that out that I find the model, this vision therapy model to be immensely valuable in brand new situations as a starting point. 0:40:51.1 AS: And in wrapping up, how would you describe kind of the number one takeaway without talking about Blue Pen, Red Pen and the exercise, how would you describe the takeaway that you want our listeners and our viewers to get from this? 0:41:07.6 BB: The number one takeaway is: don't underestimate the value proposition of a shared mental model. And this is what I find is, I can within a half hour have people imagining both organizations, imagining the conversations and that for the, and this is what is so cool that I wasn't anticipating in the beginning, is how quickly people can, without reading The New Economics, just by, 'cause essentially what you're getting them to do without talking about assumptions, they are focusing on assumptions and values. So we're not talking about the artifacts, but we're taking the artifacts and without getting... This is what's so cool is without reading Edgar Schein's work, we're really doing what he's talking about is going from the artifacts down to the values, and then we can talk about the values within organizations. And I find, and another thing I would say is, I've never met anyone that thrives to work in a non-Deming organization. 0:42:15.6 BB: They wanna work in a Blue Pen Company. And so I would, that's what I also find is without mentioning Deming's work, which is also pretty cool about this, I don't have to mention Deming, Taguchi or Ackoff. I could very simply get them and they will self-identify, reveal things. And another essential aspect of this is, this is not me telling you where you wanna work. This is me not telling you what you see. This is you sharing with others. And I learned from a colleague years ago that you can't tell anybody anything. So another immense value proposition here is that people are telling you, and then all you have to do is guide them. And that's what I find is immensely valuable. 0:43:02.6 AS: It's like you're teasing out the intrinsic desires, values and all that. 0:43:08.1 BB: All of that is coming out... 0:43:10.5 AS: Without... 0:43:10.5 BB: They're sharing frustrations. They're articulating frustrations in areas that they've not thought about. And then when they share and realize... In fact, I had a guy in a class once going through this exercise and he came up to me actually, we went through...I did this with a bunch of co-workers at an offsite location where all of them knew each other. And we went through the exercise and then took a break. As we're going to a break, one of them come up to me and he saw all the things on the whiteboard and the four quadrants. 0:43:50.3 BB: And he says to me, "These people, my co-workers," this is one-on-one. He's looking, and he says, "My co-workers got all of that over the cap fits or it doesn't." [laughter] 0:44:09.6 BB: And he wasn't denying, but he's like, "I don't get it." He came up to me two hours later when the class is over and he said, "I can't believe what I couldn't see." [laughter] And that's when I realized this is a really exciting exercise that I've written about and helped others present literally around the world. And I find it works amazingly well to create a framework that people aren't realizing is helping them achieve what they really all want. I believe. I believe. 0:44:46.2 AS: Yap. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. And I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. "People are entitled to joy in work."

Premier Robert Golob je državni zbor obvestil, da bo po odstopu Danijela Bešiča Loredana z mesta ministra za zdravje to funkcijo začasno opravljal sam. Ministri so bili ob prihodu na sejo vlade skopi s komentarji o kandidatu za novega ministra, odločitev prepuščajo premierju Robertu Golobu. Tudi koalicijska partnerja SD in Levica za zdaj z morebitnimi kandidati za novega ministra za zdravje nista seznanjena. Druge teme oddaje: - V proračunskem razrezu za prihodnji dve leti poudarek na zdravju, znanju in mladih, vlada potrdila še spremenjen načrt za okrevanje in odpornost - Turški predsednik Erdogan: odprite nam pot v Evropsko unijo, mi pa jo bomo Švedski v Nato - Vodje diplomacij Slovenije, Hrvaške in Italije v Anconi o zaščiti severnega Jadrana in migracijah - Uspešnost na maturi podobna lanski, 18 diamantnih maturantov prihaja iz 12-ih šol

In this episode, John and Andrew discuss what "transformation" means in education. John juxtaposes two reports, conducted a decade apart, that have influenced education for the last 40 years: A Nation at Risk and the Sandia Report. TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with John Dues, who is part of the new generation of educators striving to apply Dr. Deming's principles to unleash student joy in learning. The topic for today is, Do we really need to transform our education system? [chuckle] John, take it away.   0:00:26.7 John Dues: Andrew, it's good to be back with you. Yeah, I thought... Sort of as a jumping off point from our other conversations, I remember, I think in our first conversation, you mentioned you graduated from high school, 1983 in Cleveland area, went to a solid...   0:00:44.9 AS: Hudson High.   0:00:45.2 JD: Hudson High, good traditional public school in Northeast Ohio. And your question was, if I went back to the high school 40 years later, would it look and sound the same, would it have gotten better? Would it have gotten worse? What's going on with our schools in United States, I think was the basic question, I think... When I answered you, I said two parts, there's the question about what most people probably focus on when you think about that question about Did a school get better? Did the test scores improve or decline over time? And then there was a secondary question of, Did the school transform along the lines of the Deming philosophy? And I think that those two questions would have different answers depending on which schools you're looking at, but I thought it would be interesting to sort of think about this question, Do we really need to transform our education system through the lens of a couple reports...   0:01:48.5 JD: Education reports, one that's well known in our world, one that's lesser known, that took a look at the... At least the test results question in the education sector, and then build from there this idea of whether or not we need to transform our schools. One thing, there's no shortage of calls to transform or some people would use the word reform our schools, and those two words probably in and of themselves, probably have different applications, but we'll use them interchangeably as we go through that question and attempt to maybe answer that over this episode and maybe a couple additional episodes.   0:02:36.7 AS: I find that fascinating as I observe education around the world from my own experience outside of the US, and I look at the US, and I think about the importance of education, the role of education. There's a part of education that you could say is kind of indoctrination in the way a country educates its youth to be a certain way or to understand things a certain way, so I didn't see that part of education when I was young, but now I see every country's got their indoctrination that they do within their school system, so I see it kind of broadly, but I'm just curious, really take us through what you'd like to explain about that.   0:03:20.4 JD: Yeah, I think the sort of start... I think there's this quote in The New Economics where Dr. Deming says that people are asking for better schools with no clear idea how to improve education, nor even how to define improvement in education, and I think if that's... And he's saying this roughly the same time that these reports are coming out, and if that's true, I think what happens is when reports come out about the state of our education sector, it's pretty easy to get pulled this way and that. When you don't have a clear picture in your mind for what schools should look like or how to improve schools, these reports have large impacts. And so the first report is well known. It came out about the same time you were graduating from high school, in 1983 in the first Reagan administration, called A Nation at Risk. It's pretty well known in the education sector, and it's had a lot of far-reaching impact in both time and place, where even today, 40 years later, we still... Some of the roots of the various reforms that we've undergone in our sector, it's still playing a role.   0:04:40.6 JD: The second report is, that I'll sort of juxtapose against The Nation at Risk is a report that came out about a decade later called the Sandia Report, and I think it's really interesting just to look at those two reports and the impact or lack of impact they've had over the last 30 or 40 years in the world of education. So I think I would start with, when A Nation at Risk came out, and it was commissioned by the Reagan Administration, the National Commission on Excellence in Education is the group that released the report and one of the leading statistics that's in the report is that the SAT, the college entrance exam that high school students take demonstrates a virtually unbroken decline from 1963 to 1980, where average verbal scores fell over 50 points, and average mathematic scores dropped nearly 40 points in that roughly 20 year time period. And there's these really memorable quotes that are clearly meant to awaken the public to the state of its schools that people still remember to this day, and I'll read one. It says, "We report to the American people that while we can take justifiable pride in what our schools and colleges have historically accomplished and contributed to the United States and the well-being of its people, the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people."   0:06:24.0 JD: You couldn't get much more of wake up type people language, it's really, really interesting. Like I said, this report over the last four decades has been that foundation or bedrock for the various federal reforms that people are probably familiar with, starting with...   0:06:41.0 AS: And to put it into context, that's the kind of talk that was coming out of the Reagan administration, like government's not helping and government can be a problem and we need to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and you need to take personal responsibility, so it's very... It makes sense that that type of language was coming out of the Reagan administration.   0:07:05.4 JD: Yeah, and I think... So this report is floating around, there's a convening of all the governors in the United States in about 1989, and some pretty strong federal education legislation starts getting put together, it starts with the first Bush and then it ends up being passed during Bill Clinton's years called Goals 2000. And has various goals around increasing graduation rates and test scores and things like that, and then that transitions to No Child Left Behind with many people are familiar with that. Came out in the early Bush years and had a lot of impact on schools when my career was first getting started down in Atlanta, but it was federal legislation, so it covered the entire country, and then it even played a role even into the Obama years when he released the Race to the Top legislation, and that was more of a competitive grant program federally that was lots of strings attached a lot of focus on test scores, a lot of focus on teacher evaluations and principal evaluations and using test scores in those evaluations.   0:08:21.3 JD: And so you can see this, I think, direct linkage between A Nation at Risk, to Goals 2000, to No Child Left Behind, to Race to the Top, and even to the stuff that you see at the federal level to this day. So when a report like this comes out, it's called A Nation at Risk, the thesis of the report is right in the title. A nation is at risk because of its education sector, and so it's like... Most people say, Well, we gotta do something about this. We need to take action. There's some serious implications. And so about a decade after this report comes out, the Department of Energy sort of commissions its own report. The point of this report, as you might expect, is the department of energy, they're actually looking to do some economic forecasting, so it's not directly about our schools, but they wanna take the same data set that The Nation at Risk authors looked at and analyze it.   0:09:32.3 JD: And interestingly, they entered this analysis thinking that they are going to verify the results from a Nation at Risk, but what actually happened is that on nearly every measure of achievement, the Sandia analysts found actually steady or slightly improving trends in the test data. So they were...   0:10:02.1 AS: And in the same test data or in new test data that was coming out?   0:10:04.7 JD: Same exact data. They actually didn't look just at test data, they were actually looking at graduation rates, dropout rate, college-going rates so on just about every one of those measures, it was either steadily improving or slightly improving. And so you go back to A Nation at Risk and you have this absolute decline in SAT scores from the early '60s to the early '80s, and the Sandia authors aren't disputing that, but they're looking at their analysis and they're saying, wait a second, this decline in average scores, actually doesn't mean that the high school students of the early '80s or early '90s, weren't as capable as their 1960s peers. And so then you start to think, Well, how could this be? It's really, really interesting. And what the Sandia report authors go on to say is that when they broke out the test scores and these other measures like I said, graduation rates and other things like that, they broke them out by race and socioeconomic status, class rank, gender, they found these steady or improving rates in all of these groups, and they chalked it up to this statistical phenomenon called Simpson's Paradox, and basically what that is, is when trends that appear in this aggregated data set, which is sort of A Nation At Risk analysis, that reverses when the data is separated into sub-groups, like it was in the Sandia report.   0:11:45.6 JD: So basically what they're saying is that there are a more diverse mix of students on any number of measure, socioeconomic status, gender, race, those types of things, class rank, that there's a more diverse mix of students taking this test, and that is what causes this sort of change in average test scores and other similar measures.   0:12:10.6 AS: Which I guess A Nation at Risk should have controlled for?   0:12:17.6 JD: At least... I think breaking the scores out in the way that the desegregating the data like Sandia did would have been an important step given that the population of test takers was very different in 1963 than it was in 1983 or 1993. So the Sandia researchers basically found these improving trends on dropout statistics, standardized tests, post-secondary studies, educational funding even, international assessment comparison, so all these different measures that... This sort of earlier report is raising serious alarm bells about. This new report is saying, Well, wait a second, if we look at this data and we drill down in a little bit different way, we get the opposite results, but hardly anybody knows about the Sandia report, and just about everybody in my sector, my age and older knows about the A Nation at Risk Report, it's cited all the time. Even to this day, I just heard someone on a podcast a week or two ago talking about A Nation at Risk.   0:13:24.7 AS: So I guess one of the lessons is be careful with how you handle data.   0:13:30.6 JD: Be very careful. I think one of the principless we use here is data has no meaning apart from its context, and this is a very good example of data taken out of context. I think one of the lessons for me is that when you look at our schools, and I think this is maybe what happened with A Nation at Risk, is that for most people, what you see in educational data that comes out of our schools depends, in large part, on what you thought about our schools before we looked. I think they kind of drew a conclusion and then they sort of found evidence to support that.   0:14:14.2 AS: Supposed to be the opposite way. Good research.   0:14:16.8 JD: Yeah, I think so. I think so, should have been an open question, and the Sandia Report had... I think maybe their eyes were a little more open or their willingness to consider alternative explanations was a little bit more because they were not inside the Education Sector, they were outsiders, they were physicists and economists in the Department of Energy, and so they didn't really have a dog in the fight. I guess you'd say.   0:14:41.5 AS: Well, I guess you could probably say we actually don't really know, but the assumption is because they're outside in the department of energy, they're completely neutral, but they may have had their own biases that they brought into that too, but still...   0:14:56.3 JD: Yeah, for sure. For sure.   0:14:58.2 AS: It's a great lesson on... What was it you said, data has no meaning without...   0:15:02.3 JD: Apart from its context. Yeah. Apart from its context. Yeah, I think that's a good example. Yeah.   0:15:06.6 AS: Yeah, and what it also makes me think about. One of the things that's so interesting about the stock market is that you can take a lot of data, you can analyze it and come up with your opinion, and let's just say that you're not that good at analyzing and you've missed some very key things in that data, and then you put your money down and the market will take it away from you, boom like that. Like as an immediate punishment for poor logic and reason, and I'd say that it's kind of one of the last places where that's kind of allowed and where it's kind of supposed to happen, but I think that the immediate punishment for bad logic and reason is not that common any place anymore.   0:15:53.6 JD: Yeah, I would agree. And the troubling thing is the, like I said, the wide-ranging implications that reports like A Nation at Risk can have even 40 years later.   0:16:11.9 AS: Yeah, and I guess that's another lesson from this, so first lesson is about understanding the data and being very careful of how you're interpreting that, the second one is that I like to say first to the mind wins. It's just... I have a funny story where I moved to Thailand and I didn't have a girlfriend and I lived with my best friend, and basically there was people at that time that took that circumstantial evidence and they said, Andrew is gay. Okay, that circumstantial evidence could point to that, and I didn't make any attempt to answer that question, so 20 years, 25 years later, a friend of mine was at a bar, and he said that he overheard two people talking about me, and they were talking about how I'm gay. And my friend went up and said, Well, actually do you guys know Andrew? And they're like, No, we've never met him. And he said, Well, I'm friends with him, and I can put this to rest that Andrew is in fact not gay. They refused to accept that. And I just thought, first of all, first opinions are very difficult to reverse. It takes a lot of emotional and intellectual energy for somebody to do that, and therefore that partially explains...   0:17:46.9 AS: Now, the second part that explains it, is that when you attach emotion to something, it also emboldens it or it makes it in your mind much more so if you think... If you ask an older person, Where were you when you heard that John F. Kennedy was shot? They know exactly where they were because that scary negative painful motion was attached to that particular event. So that's another lesson. But really, John, I wanna know. So my iPhones improve. The car I drive has improved. The TV I use is improved. Everything around me, the medical advancements have improved. Has education improved?   0:18:35.0 JD: Yeah, that's a great question because, What is education? I think probably in some places, and in some times it has and in other places, in other times it hasn't. And in the same place, in different times, the answer would probably be different and depend a lot on what it means to improve, going back to that original quote from Deming, What does improvement mean?   0:19:01.0 AS: So I'm asking a very non-specific general question, it sounds like what you're saying.   0:19:07.8 JD: Yeah. Well, and...   0:19:10.2 AS: Can I ask it in a little bit different way?   0:19:12.4 JD: Sure, because I was gonna say, before we move on from your story of the bar story, I think somewhere... There's a researcher named Zeynep Tulfekci, and I was listening to her on a podcast, I think she's some type of researcher. She said, I can't remember what they were talking about, maybe it was something COVID-related or something from a few years ago, and she said, "Whatever thing is that you're researching or just hearing about, go to the primary source and read the entire thing." And I wrote that down on a post it note.   0:19:45.7 AS: Nobody does that.   0:19:46.8 JD: 'Cause nobody does it. Now, in fact, I talk about being first to mind in some training or conversation or a book, I am sure that I heard or read about A Nation at Risk, and then I just repeated a few things over and over as if it was truth in fact, for probably 15 years before I went and read the thing myself, and my first impression reading it was, Whoa, this is all that's in here. I forget if it's 30 or 40 pages. There's not a lot of data in it. There are some compelling statistics like the SAT thing and some quotes that jump off the page, but I was struck when I actually read it for myself. There wasn't a lot there, certainly not enough to base 40 years of education reform work. That's for sure.   0:20:31.2 AS: And I think that's another lesson too, related to Dr. Deming's teaching. And let's say sometimes the Japanese were kind of famous about go to the location where the problem is coming from, get out of your office and go out. I think that Dr. Deming really highlighted the importance of valuing the workers and their inputs 'cause they know what's going on, and so that's something that I think if people aren't reading some of the basic research or originations of ideas, they're also probably not going down and checking out what's actually happening and you could find a very different story.   0:21:10.0 JD: Yeah, go to the Gemba, go to the factory floor, in our case, it's go to the classroom to see what's actually happening. Yeah. And you're gonna ask that question.   0:21:17.7 AS: So I wanna break my question then... I'm gonna break it down and make it a little bit more specific in hopes that you...   0:21:26.7 JD: You pin me down.   0:21:28.3 AS: Could answer it. The first question I have is that, If we go back 40 years, and I can remember, I had to take a French class and I wasn't particularly interested in France and French language, and I had no interest in that really at the time. And now, let's say it's 40 years later and a young kid like me has to take a French class: Have we come up with a better methodology for learning a language like, Okay, we've advanced, we've been teaching French for 40 years from that time to now, and now we know that there is a better way to acquire a language that cuts the language acquisition time from 40 hours to proficiency, or let's say, I don't know, 400 hours to proficiency to 300 hours to proficiency, this has nothing to do with education or the system of education, but: Have we come upon methodologies that can allow us to acquire knowledge any better or faster than what we did 40 years ago?   0:22:36.9 JD: That's a good question. I think... how would I answer that? I would say that in many areas of education there have been significant advances in the understanding of cognitive science or the application of cognitive science to improve teaching methods. In many areas, I think over the last 40 years, there have been advances, but like in other areas, whether or not those advances make it into the hands and the practices of the front line people is a different question.   0:23:23.6 AS: Which is separate. That's a separate point.   0:23:27.5 JD: When there's two things too, and let's take medicine for example. In medicine, there are a series of landmark trials that led to standard practices in medicine, so in education, I think in most areas, there's actually fewer of the landmark trials and key areas that everybody knows about.   0:23:52.4 AS: So I guess part of what I'm thinking about is one of the arguments I read in a great book called Future Hype, where the guy talked about how everybody hypes how things are moving so fast, but in fact, most of the progress that we've made in this world was made a long time ago. And he uses one example is jet airplanes, basically, we're flying at the same speed today as we did in 1950.   0:24:15.7 JD: 1950, yeah.   0:24:17.7 AS: There's been no advancement, and I can say flying back and forth from seeing Thailand and the US, there was a slight advancement where we had a plane that could fly from New York to Bangkok, but eventually they cancelled that because it was just too expensive and stuff, so it's like there really has been no... Maybe we hit the limit. And you could argue that when it comes to education, it should be quickly adopted if there's a new technology or a new way of acquiring knowledge, repetition or whatever that is, it's pretty quickly adopted, so it could be that we're at the... There's just so much that the human mind can take in.   0:24:55.2 JD: Well, yeah, I've heard that argument, and the second part too would be, to finish off that landmark trial thing is, in medicine where there have been landmark trials that it takes on average like 16 or 17 years for that landmark trial to then be sort of standard practice in practice by doctors and actual hospitals and clinics and even in that... In those sort of... Even when it hits that tipping point, that's far from majority...   0:25:23.3 AS: So you can tell the parents just wait 17 years.   0:25:28.6 JD: [laughter] And then we'll have this best practice for...   0:25:31.3 AS: I listened to somebody say that, We want you to make an investment in our education system, and the investment is your child. We'll do the best we can, but it's an investment, we're still learning and all that. So that brings me to the second part of the question is... And let's just say that education is mainly done through government in Thailand, in Asia, in Europe, in the US, I guess it's mainly done by government, but let's just say generally: Have we improved the way that we educate? Is there... I'm trying to ask it in a way that would be maybe a better way like... Okay. I don't know how to ask it, but I'll just say, like I said, my iPhone's improved tremendously. The camera that we're using on this, the microphone, the internet service that we're using to do this, all of these things have incrementally improved and at times made a major jump in improvement. And my question is, Has our ability to educate young people improved at the pace of other things or at a certain good pace?   0:26:50.2 JD: The way I would answer that is two parts, one, Have you ever heard of the Flynn effect?   0:26:56.9 AS: The what?   0:27:00.1 JD: The Flynn effect.   0:27:00.6 AS: No.   0:27:00.9 JD: Its name for the psychologist that discovered it. Flynn, F-L-Y-N-N. The fun fact is basically, this idea that IQs rose about three points per decade over the last century or so, I think I have that roughly right, in every population. So because of the modern world over the last 100 years has gotten more complex and there's sort of more to life that's like taking a standardized test. We've gotten better at that type of thinking over the last 100 years, so IQ has risen. So in that respect, we have gotten better, I guess, at least measures that purport to approximate whatever intelligence is. However, I don't think that we've closed gaps between groups. Those gaps that exist between different groups, performance wise, I think those... And that's sort of a key area of work for education reform movement that came out of A Nation at Risk. One of the things that people are working on is closing the achievement gaps between different groups, especially kids that are living in poverty, and their more affluent peers. I think those gaps, I think over time have been stubborn, because if you consider the Flynn effect, and that's not what's being measured on state exams, but when one group is going up and the other group is going up too, right.   0:28:45.7 JD: So both are relatively higher than, let's say, IQ scores were 50 years ago, but there's still this gap between groups. So again, it depends on exactly what you're talking about and determined what happened.   0:29:02.4 AS: And when I look at Asia, knowing the education system in Asia, first of all, over the last, let's say, 20 to 30 years, you have many, many families that have finally gotten their first kids into college, and you could argue that that's real advancement for that particular family and maybe for that society. The second thing is, you can see the culture in Asia still remains that education is very important, and so there's pressure from family and all of that in society, that it still is there, so whether American education is declining or improving, also you have to think of it in context of what's happening globally. And I think there's two ways to think about it. First is the quality of a country, ultimately the education of the people should have some effect on the quality of the country and the quality of life in that country. And then the second thing is that the position of that country in a global context should have some relationship to the level of education of that country. Those are just my ideas, it's not necessary something proven, but I feel like that could be true. So I wanna wrap this up a little bit, but how would you summarize what you want people to take away from this?   0:30:37.9 JD: Well, a lot of this stuff, there's sort of two counter-intuitive ideas here. When you look at these two reports that we were talking about, so on one hand, I don't think there's clear evidence that schools have been on a steady decline for the last, let's say 50 or 60 years going back to that, the early '60s that a Nation at Risk is talking about. However, on the other hand, I think that to achieve equitable outcomes for all students, that schools must undergo this transformation on an order of magnitude that's never really been seen or seldom seen in the history of organizations. And I think both reports are mostly looking at test scores and that's a pretty narrow definition of success, or there may be some uses there because we don't know how groups are doing and maybe where to allocate resources without some of those results, but they're definitely more of an inspection and in sorting mechanism than they are an improvement tool. So I think the other problem is, is that if there's this narrative that the nation is at risk, and then... Well, then you... You're saying that things are on the decline and then, Who do you blame for that decline?   0:32:12.9 JD: And I think what happened a lot in the last 40 years of the educational reform movement, deliberately non-deliberately, what happened was a lot of a brunt of that blame was placed on teachers and principals, the people that are working in schools. By the time Race to the Top comes out, using student test results in teacher and principal evaluations is sort of like part of getting the money that was there available through Race to the Top. And so I think my whole point with these types of reports is that, something like the Sandia report can have useful insights that maybe can facilitate some sound database decision-making, but so many times these reports come with these preconceived notions, political agendas, those types of things and the only way to make...   0:33:11.8 JD: To have a sound decision-making is if our education system sits on this solid philosophical foundation, and that's where I think Deming comes in, because if you have that foundation, you're not gonna make changes simply because of changes in test scores, you're gonna make changes based on whether or not something is principled and need to change according to the philosophy, and that's where I really see Deming coming in as this solid philosophical foundation, so it doesn't allow you to get swayed by a political agenda, it's a foundation that's grounded in principles, and so that's what I was thinking, we talk about in the next episode is: When you don't have those principles, what are some of the myths that emerge? And then when you identify those myths and can set those to the side, what are the principles that come in that then drive that transformation going forward. And I think Deming's work is at the center of that.   0:34:16.3 AS: And one of the things that makes me think about is: Can the system transform itself? And one of the ways to try to answer this question, it could be right, it could be wrong is, Is there an alternative solution for educating young people? And if there is, has there been an increase or decrease in people turning to that alternative? You could imagine that if there was a competing system and there was a huge outflow of people from one to another, then parents may say, Well, yeah, you guys can't measure what it is that is great output, but I can. That my student has homework that my child is learning, that my child is... Whatever their assessment is, and so there's someone outside, you could say the customer or the outside interested party just says, I vote with my feet. And I'm just curious, as we wrap up, Is there any knowledge that you have on what... Is there an alternative for government education in America? And has that been more or less popular over the last I don't know 10, 20 years?   0:35:31.0 JD: Yeah. Well, I'm gonna say the first part of your answer, I think your hypothesis, your instinct is right, is that you focused on the system. It's that focus on the system versus the focus on the individual, solely on the individuals within the system, like what was happening with the teacher and the principal evaluations and using the test data in those evaluations. So I think Deming said something like: He estimated that 94% of the problems in organization was due to the system, 6% special, and he meant 6% was maybe attributed to issues at the individual level. So the vast majority of the potential for improvement lies with the system. So I think that's what we're talking about here, the redesign of the system.   0:36:17.5 AS: And that also goes back to constancy of purpose, it also goes back to leadership. And is it possible that the system simply can't have constancy of purpose for political reasons or other reasons, and that... It's just a question I've never even thought about, but it is a challenge to think about, Is there constancy of purpose? Is there strong leadership without leadership...   0:36:45.5 JD: Yeah. There has to be fortitude there. Intestinal fortitude for sure. A strong leadership is a prerequisite. One of the things that Deming railed against was the transition, the frequent transitions amongst management leadership in the United States, because you do need that stability of leadership to maintain that focus on the aim that's guiding the system. So I think that is... That's sort of a part of the formula for success, for sure.   0:37:13.0 AS: I kind of interrupted you and you're, I think may be attempting to answer the question, Is there an alternative and has it grown or contracted?   0:37:22.0 JD: Well, so there's government-funded schools, that's traditional public schools, certainly where I am sitting in public charters, that's a government-funded school that has a slightly different governance structure. So that sector didn't exist 35 years ago, and so that now is maybe six or seven percent of the kids in the United States, something like that, attend a public charter school, and then the other component would be kids that attend a private school or are home schooled, now both of those, as I understand it, both of those populations of students rose sort of coming out of the pandemic, for sure. Yeah.   0:38:03.3 AS: Well, an interesting topic, and the original question is, Do we really need to transform our education system and maybe before... As we wrap up here. How would you answer that?   0:38:18.7 JD: So, yes, I think yes, but it's not for the reasons outlined in A Nation at Risk.   0:38:27.7 AS: Got it. John, on behalf of everyone at The Deming Institute, I wanna thank you again for this discussion. For listeners remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host Andrew Stotz, and I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

Glede na vreme, ne le zadnjega tedna, ampak celotnega maja, utegne ta Centrifuga pregoreti. O težavah, ki sta jih povzoročila dva sredozemska coklona predvsem na severovzhodu Slovenije, pa tudi viharnemu dogajanju na političnem prizorišču, kjer se politiki spet ukvarjajo le s preteklostjo in ne prihodnostjo.

Zakon o potrošniških kreditih v 22. členu že vrsto let določa, da morajo banke tistim kreditojemalcem, ki svoja posojila delno ali v celoti predčasno poplačajo, vrniti sorazmerni del stroškov, nastalih ob najemu kredita. Čeprav je dvome o tej pravici nedavno razblinila tudi Banka Slovenije, še vedno ne gre brez težav. Največ naj bi jih imeli potrošniki, ki predčasno poplačajo leasing. A tudi ti niso nikakršna izjema, če po izteku pogodbe predmet leasinga postane njihova last. Gostje: dr. Matevž Zgaga, pomočnik direktorice Sektorja pravnih poslov v Deželni banki Slovenije Luka Omerzel, vodja Sektorja za varstvo potrošnikov in konkurence na gospodarskem ministrstvu Marko Tretnjak, Zveza potrošnikov Slovenije

As No. 7 Baylor basketball finishes up its regular season, we take a look at how well-positioned they are to make a deep run in the NCAA tournament. Baylor knocked off No. 9 Texas on Saturday and beat Oklahoma State on the road on Monday, both largely without superstar freshman Keyonte George. In George's absence, backup point guard Dale Bonner came through big. We also touch on the Baylor women's basketball team. Specifically, how far do the Lady Bears have to go in the NCAA Tournament to make up for a lackluster, up-and-down regular season, a season where they failed to win the Big 12 regular season title for the first time in 14 years? To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Pred nedeljskimi referendumi o spremembah zakonov o vladi, dolgotrajni oskrbi in RTV Slovenija lahko volilci še danes na 95 voliščih po državi, večinsko na sedežih upravnih enot, do 19. ure glasujejo predčasno. Jutri opolnoči pa se bo začel volilni molk pred nedeljskim splošnim glasovanjem. Druge teme oddaje: - Evropski ministri za energetiko o ukrepih proti visokim cenam energije, tudi o skupnem naročanju plina - Srbija in Kosovo vendarle dosegla dogovor o avtomobilskih registrskih oznakah - Podnebna kriza in negotove geopolitične razmere usmerjajo svet v zmanjševanje izgub hrane po vsej verigi

Supervolilno leto novembra dosega vrhunec z drugim krogom predsedniških in prvim krogom lokalnih volitev ter tremi referendumi. Čeprav smo na zadnjih treh izrekanjih zaznali povečanje volilne udeležbe, pa bi tolikšno število volitev po mnenju političnih analitikov lahko do določene mere odvrnilo volilce. Ni pa enotnega mnenja o tem, katerim volitvam bi to najbolj škodovalo. Druge teme oddaje: - Usoda druge polovice mandata ameriškega predsednika Joeja Bidena bo odvisna od izida današnjih vmesnih volitev - Celjska bolnišnica dva meseca po aferi zamenjave bolnikov z novim vodstvom; nova vodilna tudi v HSE-ju in TEŠ-u - Kateri so razlogi za današnjo podražitev bencina in pocenitev dizelskega goriva?

La paradoja del Asno.