Podcast appearances and mentions of ed baker

Step into a treasure trove of rare stories, photos, and audio clips as Bill Scherkenbach shares his decades with Dr. Deming. From boardrooms to sleigh rides, discover the moments, minds, and memories that shaped modern quality thinking, told by someone who lived it. A powerful blend of insight, humor, and history you won't want to miss. (You can see the slides from the podcast here.) TRANSCRIPT 0:00:02.4 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 Scherkenbach, a dedicated protégé of Dr. Deming since 1972. Bill met with Dr. Deming more than a thousand times and later led statistical methods and process improvement at Ford and GM at Deming's recommendation. He authored 'The Deming Route to Quality and Productivity' at Deming's behest and at 79 is still championing his mentor's message. Learn, have fun, and make a difference. Bill, take it away.   0:00:41.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, thank you. Thank you, Andrew. It's an honor to be asked back. Many places don't.   0:00:48.7 Andrew Stotz: I really enjoyed our first discussion, and particularly towards the end of it, it got a little personal and emotional, and I appreciate that you shared your journey. That was amazing.   0:01:00.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Thank you. Thank you. It is personal.   0:01:05.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:01:05.4 Bill Scherkenbach: But today, along that wavelength, I brought some pictures or photos and letters and audios of my association with Dr. Deming. So, if you might bring them up, we can start the commenting.   0:01:27.9 Andrew Stotz: Wonderful. Well, hopefully you see a screen now up.   0:01:34.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. Yep.   0:01:35.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay. And for the audience, just to let you know, for the listeners, we're going to show these and I'll try to explain a little bit about what we're talking about because you're not going to be able to see the pictures. But the first thing is the title is An Insider's View of Deming. Learn, have fun, make a difference. And we see a great picture on the left-hand side, and then I threw in a picture of a Lincoln Continental, which we're going to talk about later, which is kind of fun. But maybe you can take it from there, Bill.   0:02:07.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. Well, we can talk a little bit later on on that, but this is a picture of me and my wife, Mary Ellen, with Dr. Deming having fun. We were at a restaurant in Northville called Elizabeth's, and it's something that he enjoyed to do just about every evening.   0:02:31.3 Andrew Stotz: Great. Well, what a kickoff. So let's go to the next one. And you guys all look great in that photo.   0:02:38.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. This is a letter that I received from Dr. Deming back in May of '85, auspicious because the letter dated 13 May, that's my birthday. But for those who cannot read it, should I read the letter for you?   0:03:05.2 Andrew Stotz: Either you or I can read it for you. You tell me.   0:03:08.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Okay. Well, yeah. Why don't you read it?   0:03:10.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay. So, the letter is addressed to a particular person. It says, this is written by Dr. Deming, this acknowledges your kind letter of the 29th April. He that depends solely on statistical process control will be out of a job in three years. The record is clear, the record is clean, no exceptions. A whole program of improvement of quality and productivity is necessary, and it requires that top management learn what their job is. No part of the program will by itself suffice. Your letter does not describe your program, hence comment is difficult. I am happy to learn that Bill Scherkenbach will work with you. His achievements are renowned. He is excelled by nobody. I am sure that you will follow his guidance, not only while he is there with you, but from that then on out. I send best wishes and remain yours sincerely, W. Edwards Deming.   0:04:19.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. I did spend a week with this organization, and as Deming said, and in many, many cases, the local management or local part of the organization get very enthusiastic, but the top management did not buy in. And so very little happened there, unfortunately.   0:04:53.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I missed that the top right-hand corner in handwritten, it says Portland, 20 May 1985. Dear Bill, I neglected to hand this to you in San Francisco, W. E. D.   0:05:08.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. We went to, we. Dr. Deming and I were in San Francisco to meet with Shoichiro Toyoda and his wife. It was a social call. Shoichiro was in town. I don't know where his brother Tatsuro was. Tatsuro headed up NUMI, but Shoichiro was head of it all and was in the US. And wanted to just have a dinner with Dr. Deming. I'm embarrassingly cloudy. We met in a hotel and I can't tell you which one, but it was a nice, relaxing dinner. The English was a bit stilted, but Soichiro wanted to have a dinner with Dr. Deming and to express his appreciation.    0:06:31.3 Andrew Stotz: And he was a titan of industry at the time and in 1985 was really making a beachhead and a real expansion into the US market. Why did he want to meet with Dr. Deming? What was the connection there? Maybe for those that don't know.   0:06:55.2 Bill Scherkenbach: He was in town and Deming was nearby in town and just wanted to express his appreciation. I guess, Tatsuro, his brother wasn't there, and Tatsuro headed up NUMI, the partnership between GM and Toyota. But Shoichiro was there and just wanted to express appreciation.   0:07:35.1 Andrew Stotz: Great. Okay. So shall we continue on?   0:07:40.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. We have a Where is Quality Made? Famous talking from Dr. Deming, and hopefully the audio translates well.   0:07:55.3 Andrew Stotz: Yes, we'll see. Let's go.   0:07:59.5 Speaker 3: Where is quality made, Andrew, in the top management? The quality of the output of a company cannot be better unless quality is directed at the top. The people in the plant and in the service organization can only produce and test the design a product and service prescribed and designed by the management. Job security and job are dependent on management's foresight to design a product and service to entice customers and build a market.   0:08:31.6 Andrew Stotz: So where did that come from? And tell us more about that.   0:08:36.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, I'm not exactly sure which particular seminar or meeting that was, but over the years I have, have, we've made a number of audio recordings and videos of Dr. Deming in his meetings. And so we're looking to get them to the Deming Institute so they can process them and distribute.    0:09:11.8 Andrew Stotz: And why is this so important? He's talking about quality is made at the top where we can see many people think that quality is made by the worker. Do your best. Quality is your responsibility. Tell us more about why you wanted to talk about this.   0:09:32.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, it's a common, it's a common, very common mistake. He learned back in 1950, and I think I mentioned it in our first talk, that he gave a number of courses at Stanford during the war and people learned SPC. But when the war was over, over here, because management didn't buy in, nothing really happened. And he learned in his visit in 1950 when he was able, as we said, Mr. Koyanagi was able to get a meeting, a number of seminars done with top management in Japan after the war. And he thought that that, he saw that that actually did make a difference, that management was absolutely key. And in every one of his seminars, he would make, he would make  this point, that quality is made at the top.   0:10:54.0 Andrew Stotz: And what was interesting is that, of course, the Japanese senior management, were very receptive. It's many times the case that Deming may have interacted with some senior management at the top of a company, but they weren't receptive or willing to implement what he's talking about.   0:11:12.6 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. I think I mentioned last time that you need maybe a significant physical or logical or emotional event. And Ford lost a few billion dollars and was then looking, is there a better way? Japan lost a war, and the tradition over there is to perhaps listen to the conqueror. But MacArthur was very astute, my understanding, that you're not going to go in and replace the emperor and really mix the place up from what their culture is, which is very, very, very astute, in my opinion.   0:12:11.4 Andrew Stotz: Okay. So let's continue. And we see a document now up on the screen and a diagram. And maybe you can explain this one.   0:12:24.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. This is one of the foils, as he called them, that he wrote on his lantern, which is the overhead projector for all the young people. And making another very, very important point. And that is, he's quoting John Tukey, "the more you know what's wrong with a figure, the more useful it becomes." And he also, at various times, would, would, would talk about George Gallup. And Gallup was his friend. And George Gallup would say that unless you've gone through the slogging of collecting data, you shouldn't be too quickly using data or analyzing data. Because if you go to collect it, you know that some people just aren't there. And this is primarily survey stuff that Gallup was talking about. But Tukey was talking about anything. And Deming, along the way, with his learnings from Shewhart, what I've developed is based on Deming's questions come from theory, created a theory, question, data, action cycle, similar to a PDSA. And so that you need to know what the question was before you can use the data. And Dr. Deming's example was you can't use manganese dioxide for just anything. If it's really, really critical work, then you need to know what's in it that could contaminate it or interact with the other chemicals that you're trying to mix it with. Hugely important in chemistry, hugely important anywhere. And he talked, yes, we do have some audio from Dr. Deming talking about another analogy, on I can't even wash the table unless you tell me what you're going to use it for.   0:15:24.0 Andrew Stotz: I remember watching a video of this with him, with Robert Reich, I think it was, being interviewed. And it was such an impactful thing because I always thought you just tell people what to do and they go do it. And so let's listen to the audio. I'm going to play it now. One second.   0:15:42.6 Speaker 3: I can teach you how to wash a table, teach you how to rub, scrub, use brushes, rags. I'd be pretty good at it. But you know, I could not wash this table suppose you told me my job is to wash this table. I have no idea what you mean. There's no meaning to that. You must tell me what you're going to use the table for. I want to see a flow diagram, work moving. Here I am. My job is to wash this table. I do not understand what you mean. Wash this table. There's no meaning to that. I must know what you're going to use the table for, the next stage. What happened to the table, next stage, in the flow diagram? You want to put books on it? Well, it's clean enough for that now. To wash the table, I just go through it from just here, make a look at it. If I work a little, good enough. If I clean enough to eat off of it, well, it's good enough now. Or use it for an operating table? Oh, totally different now. Totally different. Now I scrub it with scalding water, top, bottom, legs, several times. I scrub the floor underneath for some radius. If I don't know the next stage, I cannot wash the table.   0:17:28.8 Andrew Stotz: Tell us your thoughts on that.   0:17:31.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Yep. Well, again, my theory, question, data, action cycle, if you're asking a question, you, you, if you can, and there are some confidential considerations, but if you can, you need to tell the people who are trying to answer the question what you're going to do with it. And so if you want the table washed, tell them you're going to just eat off of it or assemble microchips on it. If you, so that's the responsibility of the manager or anyone who is asking the question. So if you want to improve your questions, you got to go back up and think of, well, what's my underlying theory for the question? If this, then that, that prompts a question and the circle continues. And if you, the only reason to collect data is to take action. Both Eastern and Western philosophers absolutely have said that for centuries.   0:18:55.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. What's interesting, I didn't hear him say it in any other cases when he was talking about the next stage. I did hear him say before, like, what's it going to be used for? But you could hear when he's talking about the next stage, it's saying to me, that's saying the responsibility of management is looking at the overall system and communicating that and managing that, not trying to, you know, just give some blind instruction to one group, one team, one person without thinking about how it all interacts.   0:19:29.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. Absolutely. But in the local aspect of, well, some question answers are not so local, but it's what the question asker's responsibility to let the people know what they're going to use the data for.   0:19:51.9 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Great lesson. All right. So now I've got a interesting picture up on the screen here. We have Dr. Deming and there's John Turkey, Tukey how do you say his last name?   0:20:05.6 Bill Scherkenbach: John Tukey, T-U-K-E-Y, yep. George Box and Sir David Cox. Anyone in the statistics arena knows them. We also had Stu Hunter and I believe John Hunter was there. They're not in the picture. I took the picture. But we were at Meadowbrook, which is, which is, on the old Dodge estate where Oakland University is near Detroit. And had a, we called the meeting to discuss the importance and the various perspectives of enumerative and analytic. Now, each of these men, Box, Tukey, and Cox, and all of them, all of us in the university, quite honestly, were brought up with enumerative methods. And so your standard distributional stuff and T-tests and whatever. And Deming and Tukey realized the importance of being able to not just take action on the sample, but the cause system, the system that caused the sample, or the process term, in process terms. So yeah, John Tukey was strangely enough, well, not strangely enough, but came up with a graphical method to look at data called the box and whiskers plot, with George Box standing next to him, but it's not that George didn't shave. But Tukey, very, very well known for graphical methods.   0:22:24.2 Bill Scherkenbach: George, well known for experimental methods. One of the Box, Hunter and Hunter book on statistical design of experiments is legendary. And Sir David Cox, logistic regression, which is hugely, strangely, well, not strangely enough, but huge nowadays, very important in AI, in how you would be looking to teach or have your model learn what it is that you would like them to learn to look for. So each of these gentlemen, very, very much a pinnacle of the statistical career. We were very, in a large company like Ford, we were very lucky to be able to make big meetings like this, or meetings with very influential people happen.   0:23:38.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. That's got to be amazing because I think when most of us listen to Dr. Deming and all that, we get a lot of what he says. But I would say that the statistical aspect and his depth of statistical knowledge is what many people, you know, it's hard for many Deming followers to deeply connect with that. And I think even myself, having, you know, read everything, listened to him, learned as much as I can, the best that I probably come up with is the idea that once I started understanding variation, one of the things I started realizing is that it's everywhere and it's in everything. And I didn't understand...   0:24:27.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, I still have the cartoon of a popcorn maker that was very surprised when he said, "They all popped at once." And his popcorn stand has blown up. So yeah, variation is everywhere, a lot or a little. And the thing is that you need to be able to take appropriate action. Sometime, I can remember, I can remember Bob Stemple asking me, "What did I think of the Shainin methods, Dorian Shainin, and technical approach?" And I wrote back to him and I said, "It's no better or worse than any of the other methods we don't use here at GM." The point is, all of these methods are better than Bop-A-Mole. And one of the things, well, one of the things that concerns me is that in these tool areas, and Deming's counsel to me long ago was he remembers the fights that the technical people, the statisticians in the quality profession, would have over which one is a tenth of a percent better or more effective doing this and that. And they would publicly argue, and Deming said, "Stop. It confuses management because they don't have a clue and they're staying away from all forms of quality." So, you, and I don't know the solution in this day and age where everyone is connected. But all of these methods have their strengths and weaknesses, but you have to have the savvy to figure out which one to use to help you improve. All of, each of these four were great teachers, and I have a comment from Dr. Deming on that.   0:27:11.7 Andrew Stotz: And just in wrapping this up, it's like, I think one of the things that you realize when you see this one and what you're talking about, what I realize is what a powerhouse Dr. Deming was in the area of statistics. And in some ways, it's kind of like seeing a rock star that you love to listen to and that rock star is great. And then one day on a Sunday, you go to the church and you see he's a reverend and a very solemn man who is a very, very devout devotee of Christianity and something. In some ways, that's the way I feel when I look at this, like, wow, just the roots of the depth of that is so fascinating.   0:28:03.2 Bill Scherkenbach: As you mentioned that, I'm thinking back, we were in Iowa and one of the professors there, and I forget his name, but you're right. Deming was held in awe and he was riding in the backseat. I'm driving and this professor is beside me and Dr. Deming said something and I said, how do you know? And the guy thought the world was going to come to an end that I dared ask the master, how did he know? Well, it, it, it ended up fine.   0:28:52.9 Andrew Stotz: That was the question he was trying to teach you to ask.   0:28:55.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. You don't accept it at face value.   0:29:02.2 Andrew Stotz: So we got this other slide now. It says, what do you mean by a good teacher? Maybe you want to set this up and then I'll play the audio.   0:29:10.7 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. This was one of his favorite stories when he studied under Ronald Fisher, who is the big godfather of statistics, well, relatively modern stuff. So, Fisher was there at University College, as Deming will describe, and Deming wanted to know, and this is where a number of you will have recognized, he wanted to know what great minds were thinking about.   0:29:56.7 Andrew Stotz: All right. I'm going to play the clip right now.   0:30:00.2 Speaker 3: What do you mean by a good teacher? I taught with a man, head of a department. The whole 150 students spellbound him, teaching him what is wrong. And they loved it. What do you mean by a good teacher? Holding students spellbound around him. What do you mean teaching them something? I've had a number of great teachers. One was Professor Ronald Picker, University of London, University College I should say, part of the University of London. In London, 1936, no teaching could be worse. A lovable man, if you tried to work with him, could not read his writing, could stand in the way of it, room was dark and cold, he couldn't help the cold, maybe he could have put some light in the room, make mistakes, Professor Paul Ryder in the front row always helped him out. He'd come in with a piece of paper in his hand the ink not yet dry, talk about it. Wonder why the room was full of people from all over the world. I was one of them. Made a long trip, at my own expense, to learn, and we learned. We learned what that great mind was thinking about, what to him were great or important problems today.   0:31:45.9 Speaker 3: And we saw the methods that he used for solutions. We saw what this great mind was thinking about. His influence will be known the world over for a long, long time. He would rated zero by most people that rate teachers. Another teacher that I had was Ernest Crown at Yale, very poor teacher. We'd get together afterwards, some of us, and try to figure out what he was teaching us. He was not even charismatic the way Ronald Fisher was, but we learned. We learned what that great mind was thinking about, what he thought was the problem. We learned about perturbation. His work on lunar theory will be a classic for generations. We learned. Worst teacher there could be, but we learned.   0:32:49.0 Andrew Stotz: Wow. Tell us more about that.   0:32:53.6 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, he also had a similar story because, from great teachers at NYU, and that's where I first met him and learned from him. He was my teacher, but NYU had a, they had nominations for great teachers. And Deming was able to convince, and I forget who was the, Ernest Kurnow was the dean, and he convinced the dean to wait 10 years before you survey any of the students. And the question was, did any teacher you have really make a difference in your life? And he was able to get that done or get that process agreed to, and it was for the better because in, and I don't want to... I mean, every generation has said this new generation is going to hell in a handbasket, I mean, that for forever. That's nothing new. But what's popular, it's great to be entertained, and as he said, teaching what is wrong. And so did someone make a difference in your life? And not surprisingly, Deming was one of the people selected as a great teacher from NYU Graduate Business School.   0:35:15.4 Andrew Stotz: So that's your review after 50 years after the course, huh?   0:35:21.6 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah.   0:35:24.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And so the point is that, let's separate popularity from original thinking. And also he highlighted the idea that some teachers may not come across very organized, very polished. They may need assistance to help them clarify what they're trying to get across. But just because they're kind of a mess in that way, doesn't mean they're not thinking very deeply. In fact, it may be a sign that they're thinking very deeply about it.   0:36:01.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. Now, again, remember, and I know it's a broad brush, but Deming was eminently logical. Crosby would have loved it. Wine and cheese parties showed Juran more physical. And so I think Deming's preferences there, the key to his statement is teaching what was wrong. Some people get excited in class for a variety of reasons, but the key is what are you teaching? The method depends on the ability of the teacher to connect to the students and actually teach. So it gets you back to physical, logical, and emotional. But for Deming, Fisher struck a chord with him.   0:37:09.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think for the listener, the viewer, think about some teacher that really made an impact on you. And it could be that there was a teacher that was able to connect with you emotionally.   0:37:25.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely.   0:37:26.7 Andrew Stotz: So there's different ways. But I think of Dr. Deming wasn't a teacher of mine in university, but at the age of 24 to learn from him was definitely a teacher that left me with the most to think about. And I would say there was one other teacher, a guy named Greg Florence that was at Long Beach City College who taught me argumentation and debate. And he also really encouraged me to join the debate team, which I really couldn't because I didn't have time because I didn't have money and I had to work. But he really saw something in me, and now I love to teach debate and helping young people construct arguments. And so for all of us, I think this idea of what do you mean by a good teacher is a great discussion. So, love it. Love it. Well, we got another picture now. Speaking of teaching, the City University of New York is in the backdrop. Maybe you can set this one up.   0:38:27.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. This was a one-day, maybe one and a half with some pre-work, but essentially a one-day meeting in New York that was able to gather some of the top educators in the US, the head of the schools in California. There were some folks from Chicago. We had, as I mentioned, Albert Shanker, who was head of the American Federation of Teachers, was sitting right beside me. Other teacher organizations and education organizations. And we got together for a very meaningful thing. We got together to try and determine what is the aim of education in America. And it turned out that everyone was looking for their mic time, and we couldn't even agree on an aim for education in America. And if you can't agree on an aim, your system is everyone doing their best, and it's all, there's not too much progress, except locally or suboptimally.   0:40:02.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. That's a good illustration of the concept of best efforts. Dr. Deming often talked about best efforts. And here you're saying, without an aim, everybody's going to just go in their own direction. And it reminds me of a story I tell people in relation to management, which was that I had a really great boss many years ago in the field of finance research in the stock market. He was very brilliant, and he hired really good analysts. I was surrounded by the best. But he never once really brought us together to say, this is our aim. And so what ended up happening was that each person did their best, which was very good as an individual, but as a group, we never were able to really make an impact. And I explain that to my students nowadays, that I believe it's because he didn't set an aim and bring us together for that.   0:41:09.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Now, one of the, I mean, one of the things Deming very predictably talked about, as I recall, is the grades and gold stars, which were part of his forces of destruction. And the education is the way we approach education here was part of that, even before people get to get beat further down by corporate and other organizational stuff. And the grading and gold stars, I don't know how much that was, that criticism was appreciated. But everyone had a chance to talk. And in my opinion, not too many people listened.   0:42:09.3 Andrew Stotz: Now, the next one is titled Mongolian Rat. What the heck, Bill?   0:42:17.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, this is part of teaching what good teaching would be. You've got to listen. It's one of my favorite stories of his.   0:42:30.3 Andrew Stotz: Well, let's roll the tape.   0:42:33.3 Speaker 3: I met a professor in New York. He was a surgeon, professor of surgery. He did gave out some marble, had plenty. One student in the class, he told them describe the surgical procedure on the jaw in which a certain breed of Mongolian wrap was very helpful. The rat, the flesh right down the bone cleaner than a surgeon could do it. Very important wrap. Describe it in details to the listeners and students. On examination, one, the question was to describe the surgical procedure by use of the Mongolian rat. Plenty of students gave him back the same marbles that he doled out. He described it in exactly the same words that he described it. He flunked them all, all the time. One of them said, my dear professor, I have searched the literature. I've inquired around in hospitals and other teachers, I can find no trace of any such procedure. I think that you were loading us. He laughed. He had to take a new examination. He gave them back the same marbles he doled out to them. He wanted to think.   0:43:55.0 Andrew Stotz: Marbles. I haven't heard that expression. Tell us a little bit more about what you want us to take from this.   0:44:02.6 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, I think it's pretty self-explanatory. His comment on education that teachers are handing out marbles and pieces of information, not necessarily knowledge, and the testing, you're expected to give them back what the teacher said instead of how can you process it and put it in the context of other things, as well as, I mean, maybe not in the early grades, but in the later ones, you need to be able to look at various perspectives to see who has this opinion and that opinion. And unfortunately, today, that discourse is nicely shut down.   0:45:07.3 Andrew Stotz: At first, when I heard him saying marbles, I thought he was kind of using marbles as a way of kind of saying pulling their legs, but now I understand that he was trying to say that he's giving something and then the students give it back.   0:45:24.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.   0:45:26.0 Andrew Stotz: Okay. Mongolian rats.   0:45:31.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Yep. So we go from learning to having fun, and here's a picture of our statistical methods office at Ford.   0:45:48.1 Andrew Stotz: And you're sitting in a sleigh? Is that what's happening there?   0:45:50.0 Bill Scherkenbach: We're sitting in a sleigh, yes, at Greenfield Village, which is where the Henry Ford Museum is, and it happened to snow, so we've got the, we've got the horse-drawn sleigh, and I was listening to your first interview of me, and I want to deeply apologize. It's Harry Artinian, and so from the left, you've got Ed Baker and Bill Craft and Pete Jessup, Harry Artinian, Narendra Sheth, Dr. Deming, Debbie Rawlings, Ann Evans, my secretary, uh ooooh, and the gentleman who worked with Jim Bakken, and then me. So, we were working and decided to have a good lunch.   0:46:58.5 Andrew Stotz: And it's a horse-drawn sleigh. And I wasn't sure if you were pulling our leg here because you said, I'm second from the far right. First from the far right, to me, looks like the horse.   0:47:09.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. That's the horse's ass. Yep.   0:47:14.6 Andrew Stotz: That's a big one.   0:47:16.1 Bill Scherkenbach: It is what it is.   0:47:18.7 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Okay. Next one. Who's Sylvester?   0:47:22.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Sylvester is my son's cat. And this is one of the times Dr. Deming was in my home. And he sat down in my office at my home. And Sylvester saw a good lap and he jumped up on it and took it. And as I said, I couldn't tell who was purring louder. They both were content.   0:47:52.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. That looks beautiful.   0:47:55.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. It was very, very peaceful. Another fun thing, after a long day of work at Ford, we would go to Luigi's restaurant in Dearborn. I think there was a Dearborn Marriott, a big hotel. I don't know if it's there now. But that's Larry Moore, director of quality, next to Dr. Deming and me. I had a mustache back then.   0:48:30.4 Andrew Stotz: Yes. And we all loved soft serve ice cream.   0:48:34.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Soft serve ice cream. Yep.   0:48:38.0 Andrew Stotz: Yep. All right. Star-Spangled Banner.   0:48:40.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Now we're at one of my earlier houses in Northville. And Dr. Deming had written a new tune for the Star-Spangled Banner because it was an old English drinking song, Anna, the what? The Anacrocronistic Society. And he thought it was just too bawdy. I mean, you're an unsingable, except if you're drinking. So he rewrote the music for the Star-Spangled Banner. I have a copy of it here. But he, my son Matthew, my oldest son Matthew, we had just gotten one of those first Macs from Apple, Macintosh. And it had a very elementary music thing. So he put the notes that Deming had handwritten. And we put it in there and it played the tune. And so Deming was playing on our piano the Star-Spangled Banner.   0:50:04.7 Andrew Stotz: So he had a musical talent.   0:50:10.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Oh, yeah. He was a very serious study of, a student of music. Very much so. He wrote a complete Mass. He was a high church Episcopalian. And he wrote a complete Mass of the Holy Spirit with all parts. So, very much a student of music.   0:50:41.8 Andrew Stotz: And how did his religious beliefs, like Episcopalian, as you mentioned, how did that come across? Was he a person who talked about that? Was he a person that didn't talk about that? Like, how did that come across?   0:50:59.2 Bill Scherkenbach: It was more of a private thing. But then again, on every one of his books, he would begin a chapter with some quotation from different books. And many of them were from the Bible. I can remember one time in London, I'm Catholic, and so we were celebrating the St. Peter and Paul that Sunday. But he was in London and he was at St. Paul's and they weren't giving Peter any traction. But he looked up and he said, yep, you're right. It was both of those saint days.   0:51:58.3 Andrew Stotz: All right. Next one, Drive Out Fear.   0:52:01.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Oh, yeah. This was Professor Arnold. And we were having lunch in the Ford dining room, one of the Ford dining rooms. And Dr. Deming wasn't too happy of what Professor Arnold was talking about. And Professor Arnold didn't look too happy either. So, I framed the picture and put Drive Out Fear underneath it and hung it in my office. And Deming came and looked at it and smiled.   0:52:46.5 Andrew Stotz: And what was the background on Professor Arnold? And in this case, did they have opposing views or was it a particular thing or what was it that was...   0:52:58.4 Bill Scherkenbach: I don't remember the particular conversation, but Professor Arnold was head of the statistics department at Oakland University. And Ford had an agreement with Oakland University that we established a master's degree in statistics, according to Dr. Deming's viewpoint on enumerative and analytic. And no, he was very, very capable gentleman. I mean, one of the things Dr. Deming mentioned to me is if the two of us agreed all the time, one of us is redundant. So there were always discussions. This is just a snapshot in time.   0:53:52.3 Andrew Stotz: I love that quote, that one of us is redundant. That's powerful, powerful.   0:53:59.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. Yep. This is another having fun after learning in... There were a number of restaurants we went to. He particularly liked Elizabeth's,   0:54:16.1 Andrew Stotz: And how was their relationship? How did he treat your lovely wife?   0:54:22.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Oh, I mean, very lovingly. I mean, I don't know how to describe it, but one of the family.   0:54:36.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. He seemed from my observation, like a true gentleman.   0:54:42.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. Absolutely.   0:54:46.0 Andrew Stotz: Well, here we come to the Lincoln that we started off with. This is a great picture too.   0:54:51.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. That's a picture I had. It wasn't a Hasselblad, but it was a two and a quarter frame. And I had black and white film in it, but this is one of a number of pictures I took of him at the Cosmos Club. I think it was a very good picture. And in any event, it was blending learning and having fun.   0:55:19.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And the Cosmos Club was near his house?   0:55:22.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. Well, it was depending on who drove. I mean, it was just, it was down a few blocks and then a number of blocks on Massachusetts Avenue. I enjoyed the drive from his house because you'd pass the Naval Observatory, which for years was the home of the chief of naval operations here. But a few decades, a few, I don't know how long ago, the vice president pulled rank on him. And so the Naval Observatory, beautiful, beautiful old house. So, the vice president lives there now. And a lot of people think Massachusetts Avenue in that area is Embassy Row. So you're passing a number of embassies on the way. And the Cosmos Club, anyone can look up. I mean, it's by invitation, members only, and Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners and a very distinguished membership, let's say.   0:56:39.3 Andrew Stotz: Here was another one, Making a Difference with Don Peterson.   0:56:43.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Yep. We're, we're, this is one of the meetings we had with Don. And it wasn't this meeting, but we were in one of them. Okay. You have it on the right there. That we periodically would have, Dr. Deming and I would have breakfast with Jim Bakken in what was known as the Penthouse at Ford. There are 12 floors, and then there was the 13th and 14th, which were private quarters, essentially. And so we were having breakfast one morning and finishing breakfast, and I'm walking a little bit ahead, and I run ahead and press the elevator button to go down one floor, and the door opens, and there's Henry Ford II in cowboy belt buckle and boots, no hat. He's going to a board meeting, he says, and Jim shied away, said, "Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Ford." He said, "Shut up, Jim, get in here." And so we got in the elevator, and it was the small elevator. And so we're back to back, belly to belly, and Jim introduces Dr. Deming to Mr. Ford, and Ford said, "I've heard of you, Dr. Deming. God, we really need your help." And Deming had the presence of saying, "I heard of you too, Mr. Ford." It was the longest one-floor elevator ride I've ever had in my life.   0:58:49.1 Andrew Stotz: That's fascinating. All right. Next one, talking with workers.   0:58:54.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Yep. He made it a point. And this is a fine line, because you want to be able to have workers say, how, how, are they able to take pride in their work? And are there any problems and all of that? But you don't want to be in a position of then going to management and telling them because of fear in the organization. So, Dr. Deming was very good at listening and getting people to talk about their jobs and their ability to take joy and, well, pride in their work. So we had many, many meetings, different places. And this next one is with the Ford Batavia plant, I think.   1:00:01.2 Andrew Stotz: Yep.   1:00:02.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. We're riding on the tractors and having a good time.   1:00:11.3 Andrew Stotz: Who's driving?   1:00:14.2 Bill Scherkenbach: The plant manager, Ron Kaseya, was driving.   1:00:16.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay.   1:00:17.9 Bill Scherkenbach: And so I absolutely do not recall what we were laughing at, but we were having a good time. And the Batavia transaxle plant, a number of people will recognize as where Ford, it really made the point that doing better than spec is really what the job is. And it's a very powerful video that's been out there and people would recognize it as well, because we were producing the exact same transaxle in Mazda. And Mazda was influenced a lot of by Genichi Taguchi and looked to reduce variation around the nominal and not just be happy that we made spec. And John Betty, who was head up of powertrain operations and then went to the Department of Defense as assistant secretary of defense for procurement, I think, because of the quality expertise. Betty is in the front of the video saying he's absolutely convinced that this is a superior way to look at manufacturing, to look at the management of any process. You want to get your customers to brag, not just not complain.   1:02:10.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Courage.   1:02:11.8 Bill Scherkenbach: And all of this takes courage. And especially in his seminars in London say, the Brits had the advantage. You guys can take courage every day. We can't get that in the US anymore. Or it's very rare to be able to buy it here.   1:02:36.3 Andrew Stotz: For the listeners, there's a logo of the John Courage beer, premium beer.   1:02:45.7 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. Yes. It's an amber pills.   1:02:49.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay.   1:02:52.4 Bill Scherkenbach: And last but not least, well, not last, but we're looking for, and I ran across this quote from Yogi Berra, and it's very applicable right now. And Yogi Berra said, I never said... Well, what did he say?   1:03:19.2 Andrew Stotz: Never said most of the things I said.   1:03:21.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Most of the things I could have said. I never said most of the things I said. Yeah. And every day online, I see people saying Dr. Deming said this, and he said that. And if he did, I've never heard him say it. And not that I've heard him say everything. But if he did say something like, if it's not measurable, you can't manage it. He would have followed it with, that's not right. The unknown and unknowable. And so you've got a lot of people misunderstanding what Dr. Deming said. And you've got to go with, I never said most of the things that I said.   1:04:24.0 Andrew Stotz: Well, that's the great thing about this discussion is that we're getting it from the horse's mouth, someone that was there listening and being a part of it.   1:04:32.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, I'm glad you saw the other end of the horse.   1:04:37.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. So, I'm going to close out this by just sharing a little personal connection. And that is, I'm showing a picture of me in my 1963 suicide door Lincoln Continental, which I owned for 10 years in beautiful Bangkok, Thailand. And much like being kind of wild taking a ride to the Cosmos Club with Dr. Deming driving his Lincoln Continental, you could imagine how odd it looked seeing this American guy driving this 1963 Lincoln Continental on the streets of Bangkok. But I just thought I would share that just to have some fun. So, yeah.   1:05:14.3 Bill Scherkenbach: That's beautiful. Absolutely. Yeah. I didn't think the streets were that wide.   1:05:22.1 Andrew Stotz: It gets stuck in traffic, that's for sure. But wow, there's so many things that we covered. I mean, I just really, really enjoyed that trip down memory lane. Is there anything you want to share to wrap it up?   1:05:36.1 Bill Scherkenbach: No. As I said, our last conversation, we've just scratched the surface. There's so much, so much more to talk about and preserve, I think.   1:05:48.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, I really enjoyed it.   1:05:52.1 Bill Scherkenbach: I have done my best.   1:05:53.6 Andrew Stotz: Yes, you have. You have. I've enjoyed it, and I'm sure the listeners and the viewers will enjoy it too. So, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I just want to thank you for taking the time to pull that together and to walk us through it. And for listeners out there, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. And of course, go to LinkedIn to find Bill and reach out and share your interpretations of what we went through. And maybe you have a story that you'd like to share also. So, this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. And that is, “people are entitled to joy in work."

Questions From the Seats - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

What was it like to learn from Dr. Deming himself -- a decade before his name became legend in U.S. business circles? In this deeply personal episode, William Scherkenbach shares with host Andrew Stotz what it was like to sit in Deming's classroom in 1972, join him for late-night chats at the Cosmos Club, and help ignite transformational change at Ford and GM. Learn how Deming's teachings shaped a lifetime of purpose, and why Scherkenbach, now in his 80th year, is stepping back into the arena with lessons still burning bright. 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 here with featured guest William Scherkenbach, and he is known as one of the men who has spent a huge amount of time with Dr. Deming, as he mentioned to me previously, starting from 1972, over a thousand meetings and many other activities that he's been involved in. So, Bill, welcome to the show. Why don't you give us a little background about you?   0:00:39.5 William Scherkenbach: Oh, okay. Good to be here, Andrew. Well, I'm going to start with, since it's about Deming, in '72, I was newly married in April, but had been accepted to NYU Graduate School of Business, and I don't know, I never found out who wrote the course syllabus, but whoever did wrote something that it sounded like a darn interesting course, sampling, manufacturing. I was a protocol officer at the United Nations at the time and was going to night school at the New York University Graduate School of Business. So, I said, this sounds like a good course, interesting course. Had no idea who Dr. Deming was, and I walked into the first class, and there was an old, I'm 26, so he was 72 in 1972, and he was one of the first, one of the only old person who didn't say, I used to be, and I don't want to stereotype all of my peers now that I'm 79, but hopefully I don't fall into the, well, I used to be and what happened. But he did tell, I mean, statistics can be a very technical subject, and the way he taught it, I had courses in some theory of sampling, which was one of his books.   0:02:52.2 William Scherkenbach: He had three, I said three courses. The other course that I took was based on his lectures in Japan in 1950, and in fact, two of them. The third course was an extension of that. So, he was, he would teach the statistics, but he was able to tell the history of the people behind all of the thoughts and the formulas and approaches, and I found that extremely, extremely interesting. And he handed out tons of papers and material, and it was just a very, very good experience. I know he had, and he had, in my opinion, a great sense of humor, but then statisticians, what's our status? Yeah, we're like accountants, in any event. .   0:04:12.2 Andrew Stotz: Why was he teaching? I mean, at 72, most men, you know, maybe women also, but most of us are like, it's the twilight of our years, and we now know he had 30 more years to go, but why was he teaching? And also, what's interesting is when I think about Deming, I think about his overall system of what he's teaching, whereas it's interesting to think about how he taught one relatively narrow subject.   0:04:43.7 William Scherkenbach: I'll get to that as to why I think he was teaching. But yeah, back then there were no 14 Points, no glimmer of Profound Knowledge. It was, not theoretical statistics, but applied statistics with a theory behind it. And he still was really expanding on Shewhart 's work with the difference between enumerative and analytic. He used his own. Now, why he was teaching, years later, probably 1987, so yeah, a bunch of years later, when I was at Ford and I had attended at the time, I attended a senior executive week-long get-together in order to get constancy of purpose or more continuity in the senior executive group. One of the people we brought in was Dr. Peter Kastenbaum. And I found as I attended his lecture in that week-long meeting, he was a student of CI Lewis. And CI Lewis, Deming learned about from Walter Shewhart and his work in the epistemology theory of knowledge. And in any event, Deming, when he was asked, and at the time it was still in the '30s, I think, when he was at the School of Agriculture, or the agriculture department, and bringing in Shewhart, he had tried to get CI Lewis to come talk. And CI said, I would love to, but I have a commitment to my students. And so I can't adjust my schedule.   0:07:33.9 William Scherkenbach: And the students, the people who wanted to learn were sacred. And I think that had a huge impact on Dr. Deming. I mean, he spoke about it a lot. And the way, you know, in a lot of the videos that Clare Crawford-Mason did, lovingly called the old curmudgeon. But for students, he had the greatest empathy and charity for, he just didn't suffer fools gladly. If you showed him that you weren't willing to learn, he took great joy in letting them know where they, where they stood.   0:08:43.1 Andrew Stotz: And one of the things when I went into my first Deming seminar in 1990, so now we're fast forwarding 30 years from when you first met him. It was almost like there was a safe harbor for workers, for young people, for people with open minds. I mean, I didn't, I watched as he didn't suffer fools, but I'm just curious, when you go back to 1972 in those classes, I'm assuming that he was pretty gentle with the students, encouraging them and all that was...   0:09:19.0 William Scherkenbach: Oh, absolutely. In my experience, I mean, if you were by, you know, in a student in graduate school, even though the graduate school of business in New York, down on 90 Church Street, Wall Street area, there were very few people going directly from your bachelor's to the master's program. And so these were people that had probably 10 years experience in business doing stuff. And yet by going to the class, absolutely were willing to learn, listen to different points of view, which is absolutely crucial. As you progress with theory of knowledge to be able to get different perspectives on whatever it is you're trying to look at.   0:10:23.2 Andrew Stotz: I would like to continue on this period of time just because it's a snapshot we don't get that often or that easily. You mentioned CI Lewis, a man who lived from about 1880 to about the year I was born, around 1964-65, and he was known for his understanding and discussion about logic and things like that. But why was CI Lewis someone that was interesting to Dr. Deming? What was the connection from your perspective?   0:10:59.6 William Scherkenbach: Well, my understanding is Shewhart referred to him, and Lewis was a professor at Harvard, and he was in the Peirce, I believe it's called. It looks like Peirce, but it's Peirce School of, or Chair of Philosophy, and Charles Sanders Peirce was a huge, huge influence in epistemology. And so that whole chain of thought or train of thought interested Deming, but it really was, he was introduced to it by Walter Shewhart.    0:11:48.3 Andrew Stotz: There's a famous quote, I believe, by Deming about CI Lewis and his book Mind and the World Order.   0:11:56.0 William Scherkenbach: Mind and the World Order, yeah.   0:11:59.9 Andrew Stotz: Deming said he had to read it six times before he fully understood and could apply its insights. And sometimes I think maybe Dr. Deming was truly inspired by that because when I think about his work, I'm still reading it and rereading it. And just listening to the video that you did many years ago with Tim talking about reduced variation, reduced variation, what he was talking about. Sometimes when we see the big picture, there's many different components of Deming's teachings. But if you had to bring it down to kind of its core, you know, he mentioned on that video that I just watched this morning, he mentioned reduced variation, and that will get you lower costs, happier customers, more jobs. How would you say, after you've looked at it from so many different angles over so many different years, how would you say you would sum up Dr. Deming's message to the world?   0:13:01.5 William Scherkenbach: Well, that's a difficult thing to sum up. Back then, when we did the video, which was in the early '80s, maybe '84, again, he had his 14 Points by then, but he hadn't, it hadn't really, the Profound Knowledge part of that wasn't there. Now, he had used what Shewhart said, and he had read, tried to read CI Lewis, and when he spoke about the connection between theory and questions, that's what he got from Shewhart and, well, and from Lewis, and a bunch of other pragmatist philosophers. So, he, you know, he was influenced by it, and, well, that's all I can say.   0:14:27.5 Andrew Stotz: So, let's go back in time. So, you're sitting in this classroom, you're intrigued, inspired. How did the relationship go at, towards the end of the class, and then as you finished that class, how did you guys keep in touch, and how did the relationship develop?   0:14:51.0 William Scherkenbach: Well, that is an interesting story. I usually am, well, I am introverted. So I had, after I moved from New York, I got a job at Booz Allen and Hamilton in Washington, DC. So in '74, when I got the degree from NYU, we moved to Silver Spring. And obviously, he's lived on Butterworth Place since there was a Butterworth Place. So we were able to, one of the things, and this is, well, I will say it, one of his advice to me, although he gave everyone an A, I later kidded him, he didn't remember that he gave me a B. No, he gave me an A. In any event, but one of his piece of advice was, you really don't need to join ASQC. You know more about quality than any of those inspectors. And so he had learned from the '50s in the past 20 years from the 50s that inspection wasn't going to do it. Well, I didn't take his advice, and I joined ASQC, and I was reading...   0:16:36.1 Andrew Stotz:Which for those who don't know is the American Society for...   0:16:41.6 William Scherkenbach: Quality Control, back then, now it's just the American Society for Quality. I had recommended when we did a big recommendations and forecasts for the year 2000 that quality, it should be the Society for Quality worldwide, but it's ASQ now. Let's see.   0:17:07.7 Andrew Stotz: So he recommended you don't join and you didn't follow his recommendation.    0:17:12.1 William Scherkenbach: I don't join, and I read an article, and it was by a professor in Virginia Tech, and he was showing a c-chart and the data were in control, and his recommendations were to penalize the people that were high and reward the people that were low, which is even back then, Dr. Deming was absolutely on track with that. If your process is in control, it doesn't make any sense to rank order or think that any of them are sufficiently different to reward or penalize. And I had never done this, but it was, I wrote a letter to quality progress. I sent a copy to Dr. Deming, and he said, "By golly, you're right on, that's great." And so I think it probably was '75, yeah, 1975. So I had been a year or so out, and he started inviting me over to his place at Butterworth, and we would go to the Cosmos Club. And that was a logistical challenge because at the time he had, well, his garage was a separate, not attached, it was in the backyard and emptied onto an alley. And he had a huge Lincoln Continental, the ones with the doors that opened from the center.   0:19:29.0 William Scherkenbach: And he would get in and drive and then park it in back of the club and someone would watch over it. But those were some good memories. So that was my introduction to keep contact with him. As I said, I had never done that. I don't think I've written a letter to an editor ever again.   0:20:04.8 Andrew Stotz: And you're mentioning about Butterworth, which is in DC.   0:20:12.6 William Scherkenbach: Butterworth Place, yeah.   0:20:14.7 Andrew Stotz: And Butterworth Place where he had his consulting business, which he ran, I believe, out of his basement.   0:20:18.3 William Scherkenbach: Out of the basement, yep, yep, yep.   0:20:21.2 Andrew Stotz: And just out of curiosity, what was it like when you first went to his home? Here, you had met him as your teacher, you respected him, you'd been away for a little bit, he invited you over. What was that like on your first walk into his home?   0:20:38.5 William Scherkenbach: Well, went down the side, the entrance to the basement was on the side of the house, and Seal had her desk set up right by the door. And then, I don't know if you can see, this is neat compared to his desk. It was filled with books and papers, but he knew where everything was. But it was a very cordial atmosphere.   0:21:25.2 Andrew Stotz: So when you mentioned Cecelia Kilian, is that her name, who was his assistant at the time?   0:21:36.3 William Scherkenbach: Yes, yes.   0:21:38.0 Andrew Stotz: Okay, so you...   0:21:38.8 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. For Jeepers. I don't know how long, but it had to be 50 years or so. So I don't, I mean, back in the '70s, I don't know of any other. He might have had, well, okay. He, yeah.   0:22:01.1 Andrew Stotz: I think it's about 40 or 50 years. So that's an incredible relationship he had with her. And I believe she wrote something. I think I have one of her, a book that she wrote that described his life. I can't remember that one right now but...   0:22:14.2 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. A lot of, yeah, it contained a lot of...   0:22:16.6 Andrew Stotz: The World of Dr. W. Edwards Deming, I think was the name of it, yeah.   0:22:20.6 William Scherkenbach: Okay. It contained a lot of his diaries on a number of his visits to Japan and elsewhere.   0:22:32.1 Andrew Stotz: So for some of us, when we go into our professor's offices, we see it stacked full of papers, but they've been sitting there for years. And we know that the professor just doesn't really do much with it. It's just all sitting there. Why did he have so much stuff on it? Was it incoming stuff that was coming to him? Was it something he was writing? Something he was reading? What was it that was coming in and out of his desk?   0:22:55.7 William Scherkenbach: A combination of stuff. I don't know. I mean, he was constantly writing, dictating to seal, but writing and reading. He got a, I mean, as the decades proceeded out of into the '80s, after '82, the NBC white or the '80, the NBC white paper calls were coming in from all over, all over the world. So yeah, a lot of people sending him stuff.   0:23:35.8 Andrew Stotz: I remember seeing him pulling out little scraps of paper at the seminar where he was taking notes and things like that at '90. So I could imagine he was just prolific at jotting things down. And when you read what he wrote, he really is assembling a lot of the notes and things that he's heard from different people. You can really capture that.   0:23:59.0 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. He didn't have an identic memory, but he took notes and quite, you know, and what he would do at the end of the day before retiring, he'd review the notes and commit them to memory as best he could. So he, yeah, very definitely. I mean, we would, you know, and well, okay. We're still in the early days before Ford and GM, but.   0:24:37.6 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I want to, if I shoot forward to '90, '92, when I studied with him, I was impressed with his energy at his age and he was just on a mission. And when I hear about your discussion about the class and at that time, it's like he was forming his, you know, System of Profound Knowledge, his 14 Points. When do you think it really became a mission for him to help, let's say American industry?   0:25:09.0 William Scherkenbach: Oh, well, I think it was a mission when Ford began its relationship with him. The ability of a large corporation, as well, and Ford at the same time Pontiac, the Pontiac division, not the whole GM, but Pontiac, was learning as well. But the attachment to Ford was that you had Don Peterson at the time was president of Ford, and he was intellectually curious, and he and Deming were on the same frequency. Now, I don't want to jump ahead, but if anyone has, well, you've read my second book there, you'll know that I have mentioned that the way to change is physical, logical, and emotional. And when you look at the gurus back then, there was Deming, who was the logical guru. You had Phil Crosby, who was the emotional guru. You go to the flag and the wine and cheese party, and Deming would say, "No," and Joe Juran, who was interested in focusing on the physical organization, you report to me kind of a thing. And so each of these behemoths were passing each other in the night with the greatest respect. But, but, and so they had their constituents. The challenge is to be able to broaden the appeal.    0:27:33.8 Andrew Stotz: So we've gone through '72, and then now '75, you've written your piece, and he's brought you into the fold. You're starting to spend some time with him. I believe it was about 1981 or so when he started working with Ford. And at that time, the quality director, I think, was Larry Moore at the time. And of course, you mentioned Donald Peterson. Maybe you can help us now understand from your own perspective of what you were doing between that time and how you saw that happening.   0:28:13.4 William Scherkenbach: Well, I had, my career was, after Booz Allen, mostly in the quality reliability area. I went from Booz Allen and Hamilton to, I moved to Columbia, Maryland, because I can fondly remember my grandfather in Ironwood, Michigan, worked at the Oliver Mine. There's a lot of iron ore mines up in the UP. ANd he would, and his work, once he got out of the mines later on, was he would cut across the backyard, and his office was right there. And so he would walk home for lunch and take a nap and walk back. And I thought that really was a good style of life. So Columbia, Maryland, was designed by Rouse to be a live-in, work-in community. And so we were gonna, we moved to Columbia, and there was a consulting firm called Hitman Associates, and their specialty was energy and environmental consulting. So did a bunch of that, worked my way up to a vice president. And so, but in '81, Deming said, you know, Ford really is interested. He was convinced, and again, it's déjà vu, he spoke about, when he spoke fondly about his lectures in Japan in 1950 and onward, that he was, he was very concerned that top management needed to be there, because he had seen all the excitement at Stanford during the war, and it died out afterwards, because management wasn't involved.   0:30:42.8 Andrew Stotz: What do you mean by that? What do you mean by the excitement at Stanford? You mean people working together for the efforts of the war, or was there a particular thing that was happening at Stanford?   0:30:51.7 William Scherkenbach: Well, they were, he attributed it to the lack of management support. I mean, they learned SPC. We were able to improve quality of war material or whatever, whoever attended the Stanford courses. But he saw the same thing in Japan and was lucky to, and I'm not sure if it was Ishikawa. I'm just not sure, but he was able to get someone to make the call after a few of the seminars for the engineers to make the call to the top management to attend the next batch. And he was able, he was able to do that. And that he thought was very helpful. I, I, gave them a leg up on whatever steps were next. I'm reminded of a quote from, I think it was Lao Tzu. And he said that someone asked him, "Well, you talk to the king, why or the emperor, why are things so screwed up?" And he said, "Well, I get to talk to him an hour a week and the rest of the time his ears are filled with a bunch of crap." Or whatever the Chinese equivalent of that is. And he said, "Of course the king isn't going to be able to act correctly." Yeah, there are a lot of things that impacted any company that he helped.   0:33:07.6 Andrew Stotz: It's interesting because I believe that, I think it was Kenichi Koyanagi.   0:33:15.8 William Scherkenbach: Koyanagi, yes, it was.   0:33:17.8 Andrew Stotz: And it was in 1950 and he had a series of lectures that he did a series of times. But it's interesting that, you know, that seemed like it should have catapulted him, but then to go to where you met him in 1972 and all that, he still hadn't really made his impact in America. And that's, to me, that's a little bit interesting.   0:33:44.4 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, and quite, my take, I mean, you could tell even in '72 and '3 in classes, he was very frustrated that he wasn't being listened to. I mean, he had, his business was expert testimony in statistical design of surveys. He did road truck, truck transport studies to be able to help the interstate commerce commission. And made periodic trips back to Japan, well known in Japan, but frustrated that no one really knew about him or wasn't listening to him in the US. And that was, I mean, for years, that was my, my aim. And that is to help him be known for turning America around, not just Japan. But it's usually difficult. I mean, we did a great job at Ford and GM and a bunch of companies, but it's all dissipated.   0:35:25.9 Andrew Stotz: It's interesting because it's not like he just went as a guest and gave a couple of guest lectures. He did about 35 lectures in 1950. About 28 or almost 30 of them were to engineers and technical staff. And then about seven of them were to top level executives. And, you know, one of the quotes he said at the time from those lectures was, "the problem is at the top, quality is made in the boardroom." So just going back, that's 1950, then you meet him in 1970, then in '72, then you start to build this relationship. You've talked about Booz Allen Hamilton. Tell us more about how it progressed into working more with him, in particular Ford and that thing that started in, let's say, 1981 with Ford.   0:36:22.0 William Scherkenbach: Well, again, he was very enthusiastic about Ford because Peterson was very receptive to this, his approach. And again, it's, I think the British philosopher Johnson said, "there's nothing like the prospect of being hung in the morning to heighten a man's senses." So he, Ford had lost a couple billion bucks. They hadn't cashed in like Chrysler. GM lost a bunch too, but that, and Japan had lost a war. So does it take a significant emotional, logical, or physical event? For some folks it does. So he was very encouraged about what he was seeing at Ford. And he had recommended that Ford hire someone to be there full time to coordinate, manage, if you will. And I was one of the people he recommended and I was the one that Ford hired. So I came in as Director of Statistical Methods and Process Improvement. And they set it up outside, as Deming said, they set it up outside the quality. Larry Moore was the Director of Quality and I was Director of Statistical Methods. And that's the way it was set up.   0:38:08.0 Andrew Stotz: Were you surprised when you received that call? How did you feel when you got that call to say, "Why don't you go over there and do this job at Ford?"   0:38:18.6 William Scherkenbach: Oh, extremely, extremely happy. Yeah. Yeah.   0:38:23.1 Andrew Stotz: And so did you, did you move to Michigan or what did you do?   0:38:27.7 Andrew Stotz: I'm sorry?   0:38:29.4 Andrew Stotz: Did you move or what happened next as you took that job?   0:38:32.0 William Scherkenbach: Oh yeah, we were living in Columbia. We moved the family to the Detroit area and ended up getting a house in Northville, which is a Northwest suburb of Detroit.   0:38:49.9 Andrew Stotz: And how long were you at Ford?   0:38:53.8 William Scherkenbach: About five and a half years. And I left Ford because Deming thought that GM needed my help. Things were going well. I mean, had a great, great bunch of associates, Pete Chessa, Ed Baker, Narendra Sheth, and a bunch of, a bunch of other folks. Ed Baker took the directorship when I left. That was my, well, I recommended a number of them, but yeah, he followed on. Deming thought that there was a good organization set up. And me being a glutton for punishment went to, well, not really. A bunch of great, great people in GM, but it's, they were, each of the general managers managed a billion dollar business and a lot of, difficult to get the silos to communicate. And it really, there was not much cooperation, a lot of backstabbing.   0:40:25.0 Andrew Stotz: And how did Dr. Deming take this project on? And what was the relationship between him and, you know, let's say Donald Peterson, who was the running the company and all the people that he had involved, like yourself, and you mentioned about Ed Baker and other people, I guess, Sandy Munro and others that were there. And just curious, and Larry Moore, how did he approach that? That's a huge organization and he's coming in right at the top. What was his approach to handling that?   0:41:02.1 S2  Well, my approach was based on his recommendation that the Director of Statistical Methods should report directly to the president or the chairman, the president typically. And so based on that, I figured that what I would, how we would organize the office, my associates would each be assigned to a key vice president to be their alter ego. So we did it in a, on a divisional level. And that worked, I think, very well. The difficulty was trying to match personalities and expertise to the particular vice president. Ed Baker had very good relations with the Latin American organization, and, and he and Harry Hannett, Harold Hannett helped a lot in developing administrative applications as well. And so we sort of came up with a matrix of organization and discipline. We needed someone for finance and engineering and manufacturing, supply chain, and was able to matrix the office associates in to be able to be on site with those people to get stuff, to get stuff done.   0:43:09.5 Andrew Stotz: And what was your message at that time, and what was Dr. Deming's message? Because as we know, his message has come together very strongly after that. But at that point, it's not like he had the 14 Points that he could give them Out of the Crisis or you could give them your books that you had done. So what was like the guiding philosophy or the main things that you guys were trying to get across?   0:43:35.9 William Scherkenbach: Well, I mean, he had given in, I think, Quality, Productivity, Competitive Position back in the late '70s, and he was doing it through George Washington University, even though Myron Tribus at MIT published it. But it was a series of lectures, and he didn't really, even in the later 70s, didn't have the, the, the 14 Points. And so those came a couple years later, his thinking through, and Profound Knowledge didn't come until much later over a number of discussions of folks. But the, I mean, the key, I mean, my opinion of why it all dropped out is we dropped the ball in not working with the board. And at Ford, we didn't, weren't able to influence the Ford family. And so Peterson retires and Red Poling, a finance guy, steps in and, and everything slowly disintegrates. At least not disintegrates, well, yes. I mean, what was important under Peterson was different. But that happens in any company. A new CEO comes on board or is elected, and they've got their priorities based, as Deming would say, on their evaluation system. What's their, how are they compensated?   0:45:46.8 William Scherkenbach: And so we just didn't spend the time there nor at GM with how do you elect or select your next CEO? And so smaller companies have a better, I would think, well, I don't know. I would imagine smaller companies have a better time of that, especially closely held and family held companies. You could, if you can reach the family, you should be able to get some continuity there.   0:46:23.5 Andrew Stotz: So Donald Peterson stepped down early 1995. And when did you guys make or when did you make your transition from Ford to GM?   0:46:38.5 William Scherkenbach: '88.   0:46:39.6 Andrew Stotz: Okay, so you continued at Ford.   0:46:42.1 William Scherkenbach: The end of '88, yeah, and I left GM in '93, the year Dr. Deming died later. But I had left in, in, well, in order to help him better.   0:47:07.8 Andrew Stotz: And let's now talk about the transition over to General Motors that you made. And where did that come from? Was it Dr. Deming that was recommending it or someone from General Motors? Or what...   0:47:21.4 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, Deming spoke with them and spoke with me. And I was a willing worker to be able to go where he thought I could be most helpful.   0:47:41.9 Andrew Stotz: And was he exasperated or frustrated that for the changes that happened in '95 when Peterson stepped down, he started to see the writing on the wall? Or was he still hopeful?   0:47:55.4 William Scherkenbach: No, Deming died in '93, so he didn't see any of that.   0:47:58.9 Andrew Stotz: No, no, what I mean is when Peterson stepped down, it was about '85. And then you remain at Ford until '88.   0:48:08.0 William Scherkenbach: No, Peterson didn't step down in '85. I mean, he was still there when I left.   0:48:14.0 Andrew Stotz: So he was still chairman at the time.   0:48:17.3 William Scherkenbach: Yeah.   0:48:17.6 Andrew Stotz: Maybe I'm meaning he stepped down from president. So my mistake on that.   0:48:20.3 William Scherkenbach: Oh, but he was there.   0:48:24.3 Andrew Stotz: So when did it start...   0:48:25.9 William Scherkenbach: True. I mean, true, he was still there when Deming had died.   0:48:31.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, okay. So did the whole team leave Ford and go to GM or was it just you that went?   0:48:39.1 William Scherkenbach: Oh, just me. Just me.   0:48:42.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay. And then.   0:48:44.0 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, because we had set up something that Deming was very pleased with. And so they were, everyone was working together and helping one another.   0:48:59.5 Andrew Stotz: Okay. So then you went to General Motors. What did you do different? What was different in your role? What did you learn from Ford that you now brought to GM? What went right? What went wrong? What was your experience with GM at that time?   0:49:16.5 William Scherkenbach: Well, I've got a, let's see. Remember Bill Hoagland was the person, Hoagland managed Pontiac when Deming helped Pontiac and Ron Moen was involved in the Pontiac. But Bill Hoagland was in one of the reorganizations at GM was head of, he was group, group vice president for Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac. And so I went over and directly reported to him and each of the, I mean, Wendy Coles was in, Gypsy Rainey, although Gypsy was temporary, worked for powertrain and Pontiac and still, but powertrain was where a lot of the expertise was and emphasis was, and then Buick and Cadillac and so, and Oldsmobile. So we, and in addition to that, General Motors had a corporate-wide effort in cooperation with the UAW called the Quality Network. And I was appointed a member of that, of that and, and helped them a lot and as well as the corporate quality office, but focused on Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac.   0:51:18.6 Andrew Stotz: And then tell us about what was your next step in your own personal journey? And then let's now get into how you got more involved with Deming and his teachings and the like.   0:51:32.8 William Scherkenbach: Well, I mean, he would be at GM two and three days a month, and then every quarter he'd be here for, just like Ford, for a four-day seminar. And while at Ford and at GM, I took uh vacation to help him as he gave seminars and met people throughout the world. Even when he was probably 84, 85, I can remember, well, one of the, he always, not always, but he would schedule seminars in England over the Fourth of July because the English don't celebrate that, although he said perhaps they should, but right after the Ascot races. And so he would do four-day seminars. And on one case, we had one series of weeks, the week before Fourth of July, we did a four-day seminar in the US and then went to London to do another four-day seminar. And he went to South Africa for the next four-day seminar with Heero Hacquebord. I didn't go, but I went down to Brazil and I was dragging with that, with that schedule. So he was able to relish and enjoy the helping others. I mean, enjoy triggers a memory. We were at helping powertrain and Gypsy was there, Dr. Gypsy Rainey.    0:53:59.2 William Scherkenbach: And she, we were talking and goofing around and he started being cross at us. And Gypsy said, "Well, aren't we supposed to be having fun?" And Deming said, "I'm having fun." "You guys straighten out." Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, yeah.   0:54:40.6 Andrew Stotz: And for the typical person to imagine a man at the age of 80, 85, traveling around the world. And it's not like you're traveling on vacation in London, you're walking into a room full of people, your energy is up, you're going and it's not like he's giving a keynote speech for an hour, give us a picture of his energy.   0:55:09.5 William Scherkenbach: And over in London, it was brutal because the hotel, I forget what hotel we're in. When he started there, I think it was Dr. Bernard that he wanted to help. And Bernard wasn't available. So he recommended Henry Neave. And so Henry was a good student, a quick learner. So he helped on a few of them. And I can still remember, I mean, the air, it was 4th of July in London and the humidity was there. There's no air conditioning in the hotel. I could remember Henry, please forgive me, but Henry is sitting in his doorway, sitting on a trash can, doing some notes in his skivvies. And it was hot and humid and awful. But so it reminded Deming a lot of the lectures in Japan in 1950, where he was sweating by 8 AM in the morning. So, yeah.   0:56:30.6 Andrew Stotz: What was it that kept him going? Why was he doing this?   0:56:39.5 William Scherkenbach: I think he, again, I don't know. I never asked him that. He was very, to me, he was on a mission. He wanted to be able to help people live better, okay, and take joy in what they do. And so he was, and I think that was the driving thing. And as long as he had the stamina, he was, he was in, in, in heaven.   0:57:21.1 Andrew Stotz: So let's keep progressing now, and let's move forward towards the latter part of Dr. Deming's life, where we're talking about 1990, 1988, 1990, 1992. What changed in your relationship and your involvement with what he was doing, and what changes did you see in the way he was talking about? You had observed him back in 1972, so here he is in 1990, a very, very different man in some ways, but very similar. How did you observe that?   0:57:56.6 William Scherkenbach: Well, toward the end, it was, I mean, it was, it was not, not pleasant to see him up there with oxygen up his nose, and it just, there had to have been a better way. But Nancy Mann was running those seminars, and they did their best to make life comfortable, but there had to have been a better way to, but I don't know what it was. He obviously wanted to continue to do it, and he had help doing it, but I don't know how effective the last year of seminars were.   0:59:01.1 Andrew Stotz: Well, I mean, I would say in some ways they were very effective, because I attended in 1990 and 1992, and I even took a picture, and I had a picture, and in the background of the picture of him is a nurse, and for me, I just was blown away and knocked out. And I think that one of the things for the listeners and the viewers is to ask yourself, we're all busy doing our work, and we're doing a lot of activities, and we're accomplishing things, but for what purpose, for what mission? And I think that that's what I gained from him is that because he had a mission to help, as you said, make the world a better place, make people have a better life in their job, and help people wake up, that mission really drove him.   0:59:57.8 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, and it, it really did. But for me personally, it was just not pleasant to see him suffering.    1:00:09.6 Andrew Stotz: And was he in pain? Was he just exhausted? What was it like behind the scenes when he'd come off stage and take a break?   1:00:18.7 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, yeah.   1:00:20.8 Andrew Stotz: And would he take naps or?   1:00:23.2 William Scherkenbach: In the early days, we'd go to, well, at Ford and GM, we would go out to dinner just about every night and talk and enjoy the conversation. We'd, my wife Mary Ellen, went many, many times. He enjoyed Northville, some of the restaurants there, and enjoyed the Deming martinis after the meetings at the Cosmos Club. So very, very much he enjoyed that, that time off the podium. So, but he couldn't do that in the, in the later years.   1:01:28.7 Andrew Stotz: And let's now try to understand the progression as you progress away from General Motors and did other things. How did your career progress in those years until when you retired or to where you are now? Maybe give us a picture of that.   1:01:51.4 William Scherkenbach: I tried to help. I've developed my view on how to operationalize change, worked for, was vice president of a company in Taiwan, spent a couple of, and before that had helped Dell, and would spend probably ending up a couple of years in PRC and Taiwan, and growing and learning to learn, in my opinion, there's too much generalization of, well, Asians or Chinese or whatever. There are many, many subgroups, and so change has to be bespoke. What will work for one person won't work for another. For instance, trying to talk to a number of Chinese executives saying, drive out fear, and they will, oh, there's no fear here. It's respect. And so, yeah. But that was their sincere belief that what they were doing wasn't instilling fear. But it broadened my perspective on what to do. And then probably 10 years ago, my wife started to come down with Alzheimer's, and while we lived in Austin, Texas, and that I've spent, she died three years ago, but that was pretty much all-consuming. That's where I focused. And now it's been three years. I'm looking, and I'm a year younger than Deming when he started, although he was 79 when he was interviewed for the 1980 White Paper.   1:04:36.3 William Scherkenbach: So I'm in my 80th year. So, and I'm feeling good, and I also would like to help people.   1:04:46.6 Andrew Stotz: And I've noticed on your LinkedIn, you've started bringing out interesting papers and transcripts and so many different things that you've been coming out. What is your goal? What is your mission?   1:05:02.3 William Scherkenbach: Well, I also would like to take the next step and contribute to help the improvement, not just the US, but any organization that shows they're serious for wanting to, wanting to improve. On the hope, and again, it's hope, as Deming said, that to be able to light a few bonfires that would turn into prairie fires that might consume more and more companies. And so you've got to light the match somewhere. And I just don't know. Again, I've been out of it for a number of years, but I just don't know. I know there is no big company besides, well, but even Toyota. I can remember Deming and I were in California and had dinner. Toyoda-san and his wife invited Deming and me to a dinner. And just, I was blown away with what he understood responsibilities were. I don't know, although I do have a Toyota Prius plug-in, which is perfect because I'm getting 99 miles a gallon because during my, doing shopping and whatever here in Pensacola, I never use gas. It goes 50 miles without needing to plug in.   1:07:00.6 William Scherkenbach: And so I do my stuff. But when I drive to Texas or Michigan, Michigan mostly to see the family, it's there. But all over, it's a wonderful vehicle. So maybe they're the only company in the world that, but I don't know. I haven't sat down with their executive.   1:07:26.4 Andrew Stotz: And behind me, I have two of your books, and I just want to talk briefly about them and give some advice for people. The first one is The Deming Route to Quality and Productivity: Roadmaps and Roadblocks, and the second one is Deming's Road to Continual Improvement. Maybe you could just give some context of someone who's not read these books and they're new to the philosophy and all that. How do these books, how can they help them?   1:07:58.8 William Scherkenbach: Well, the first book, Deming asked me to write in, I think it was '84. And I don't remember the first edition, but it might be '85, we got it out. But he asked me to write it, and because he thought I would, I could reach a different audience, and he liked it so much, they handed it out in a number of his seminars for a number of years. So.   1:08:40.7 Andrew Stotz: And there's my original version of it. I'm holding up my...    1:08:47.0 William Scherkenbach: Yeah, that's a later version.   1:08:49.7 Andrew Stotz: And it says the first printing was '86, I think it said, and then I got a 1991 version, which maybe I got it at one of the, I'm sure I got it at one of the seminars, and I've had it, and I've got marks on it and all that. And Deming on the back of it said, "this book will supplement and enhance my own works in teaching. Mr. Scherkenbach's masterful understanding of a system, of a process, of a stable system, and of an unstable system are obvious and effective in his work as well as in his teaching." And I know that on Deming's Road to Continual Improvement, you do a good amount of discussion at the beginning about the difference between a process and a system to try to help people understand those types of things. How should a reader, where should they start?   1:09:42.8 William Scherkenbach: Well, not with chapter six, as in CI Lewis, but well, I don't know what... I don't remember what chapter six is. As I said, the first book, and a lot of people after that did it, is essentially not regurgitating, but saying in a little bit different words about Deming's 14 Points. What I did on the first book is arrange them in the order that I think, and groupings that I think the 14 Points could be understood better. The second book was, the first half was reviewing the Deming philosophy, and the second half is how you would go about and get it done. And that's where the physiological, emotional, and all of my studies on operationalizing anything.   1:10:55.4 Andrew Stotz: And in chapter three on page 98, you talk about physical barriers, and you talk about physical, logical, emotional. You mentioned a little bit of that when you talked about the different gurus out there in quality, but this was a good quote. It says, Dr. Deming writes about the golfer who cannot improve his game because he's already in the state of statistical control. He points out that you have only one chance to train a person. Someone whose skill level is in statistical control will find great difficulty improving his skills.   1:11:32.1 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, well, you're old enough to know the Fosbury Flop. I mean, for all high jumpers did the straddle in jumping and made some great records, but many of them had difficulty converting their straddle to the Fosbury Flop to go over backwards head first. And that's what got you better performance. So anything, whether it's golf or any skill, if you've got to change somehow, you've got to be able to change the system, which is whether you're in production or whether it's a skill. If you're in control, that's your opportunity to impact the system to get better.   1:12:40.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and this was Dick Fosbury in 1968, Mexico City Olympics, where he basically went in and blew everybody away by going in and flipping over backwards when everybody else was straddling or scissors or something like that. And this is a great story.   1:12:57.0 William Scherkenbach: You can't do that.   [laughter]   1:12:58.8 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, and it's a great story of something on the outside. An outsider came in and changed the system rather than an existing person within it. And that made me think about when you talked about Ford and having an outsider helping in the different departments. You know, what extent does that reflect the way that we learn? You know, can we learn internally, or do we need outside advice and influence to make the big changes?   1:13:29.7 William Scherkenbach: Yeah. I mean, we had a swim coach, Higgins, at the Naval Academy, and he was known for, again, following in Olympic swimming. And I'm probably going to get the strokes wrong, but there was no such thing as a butterfly stroke. And he used it in swimming the breaststroke, and supposedly the only criteria was recovery had to be underwater with two hands. But I'm screwing up the story, I'm sure, but Higgins rewrote, rewrote the book by doing something a little bit different or drastically different.   1:14:25.4 Andrew Stotz: I'd like to wrap up this fascinating discovery, or journey of discovery of you and your relationship also with Dr. Deming. Let's wrap it up by talking about kind of your final memories of the last days of Dr. Deming and how you kind of put that all in context for your own life. And having this man come in your life and bring you into your life, I'm curious, towards the end of his life, how did you process his passing as well as his contribution to your life?   1:15:08.1 William Scherkenbach: That's, that's difficult and personal. I, he was a great mentor, a great friend, a great teacher, a great person, and with, on a mission with a name and impacted me. I was very, very lucky to be able to, when I look back on it, to recognize, to sign up for his courses, and then the next thing was writing that letter to the editor and fostering that relationship. Very, very, very difficult. But, I mean, he outlived a bunch of folks that he was greatly influenced by, and the mission continues.   1:16:34.1 Andrew Stotz: And if Dr. Deming was looking down from heaven and he saw that you're kind of reentering the fray after, you know, your struggles as you've described with your wife and the loss of your wife, what would he say to you now? What would he say as your teacher over all those years?   1:16:56.3 William Scherkenbach: Do your best.   1:16:59.0 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, wonderful.   1:17:01.4 William Scherkenbach: He knows, but he knows I know what to do. So, you need to know what to do and then to do the best. But I was, I mean, he was very, he received, and I forget the year, but he was at Ford and he got a call from Cel that his wife was not doing well. And so we, I immediately canceled everything and got him to the airport and he got to spend that last night with his wife. And he was very, very appreciative. So I'm sure he was helping, helping me deal with my wife.   1:17:56.4 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, Bill, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute and myself personally, I want to thank you for this discussion and opening up you know, your journey with Dr. Deming. I feel like I understand Dr. Deming more, but I also understand you more. And I really appreciate that. And for the listeners out there, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. And also let me give you, the listeners and viewers, the resources. First, we have Bill's book, which you can get online, The Deming Route to Quality and Productivity. We have Deming's Road to Continual Improvement, which Bill wrote. But I think even more importantly is go to his LinkedIn. He's on LinkedIn as William Scherkenbach and his tagline is helping individuals and organizations learn, have fun, and make a difference. So if you want to learn, have fun, and make a difference, send him a message. And I think you'll find that it's incredibly engaging. Are there any final words that you want to share with the listeners and the viewers?   1:19:08.9 William Scherkenbach: I appreciate your questions. In thinking about this interview, we barely scratched the surface. There are a ton of other stories, but we can save that for another time.   1:19:26.1 Andrew Stotz: Something tells me we're going to have some fun and continue to have fun in these discussions. So I really appreciate it and it's great to get to know you. Ladies and gentlemen.   1:19:36.7 William Scherkenbach: Thank you, Andrew.   1:19:37.7 Andrew Stotz: You're welcome. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and that is that "people are entitled to joy in work."    

In the first episode of Season 5, Arav Bhargava sits down with Ed Baker, Chief Product Officer at Whoop, who shares his entrepreneurial journey from launching a dating site at Harvard to leading growth at major tech companies like Facebook and Uber. He discusses the importance of product market fit, strategies for sustainable growth, and how Whoop differentiates itself in a competitive fitness technology market. Ed emphasizes the significance of customer retention and the innovative features of Whoop that encourage users to keep their devices on, ultimately driving long-term success.

Parables: Two Men in the Temple - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

Choosing Patience While We Wait - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

Revealed: David and Goliath - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

When we go to church or youth groups, we expect in some way or another, to engage with the bible. Often times in life however, we end up also seeing or hearing scripture in all sorts of places we don't expect. From sporting events, to work, at school or at home, bible verses can get thrown around to encourage or even to condemn. For the next few weeks we will be looking at a couple of verses from the bible that get used, and sometimes taken out of context, more often than others. Let's read these verses together and find the context in which they were originally used for, to help us get a better understanding of how scripture can and does impact our lives daily.

In the second hour, Pat McDonald is joined by Ed Baker, ACSW and Host of the Addiction Recovery Channel on CCTV, to talk about an exciting announcement in Vermont's opioid crisis.

SSOF App & Community:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://sweetscienceoffighting.com/ssof-underground/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ SSOF Rash Guard & Shorts Discount - Code "SWEETSCIENCE"⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sweetscienceoffighting.com/sweet-science-rash-guard⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Iron Neck - Code "SSOF10" ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sweetscienceoffighting.com/ironneck⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Edward Baker Performance is an online resource for Strength and Conditioning, Combat Sport Training and Injury Rehabilitation. He is a University Lecturer, Researcher and Strength and Conditioning Coach with over 15 years' experience working in elite sport. Timestamps 0:00 Ed's background 3:54 Ed's punch research 7:30 How does Ed's research influence his S&C programs 10:30 Get brutally strong or produce force quickly? 13:25 Coordinative approach to training 19:10 Does strength training change between MMA, boxing, Muay Thai 24:00 Muscular endurance 30:20 Increasing fight pace 38:30 How does 2nd half of fight camp look 43:48 Fight week training Ed's website: https://www.thefightlab.co.uk/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thefightlabuk/ ★  ★  FREE Stuff! ★  ★ For The Strikers - 5 Powerful Tips For Developing Devastating KO Power! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sweetscienceoffighting.com/devastating-ko-power-yt/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For The Grapplers - 9 Tricks To Build Specific BJJ Strength Without The Rampant Steroid Abuse! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sweetscienceoffighting.com/7-awesome-ways-to-get-stronger-for-grappling-bjj/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For The MMA Athlete - 6 Secrets From The Pros To Never Gas Out ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://sweetscienceoffighting.com/6-secrets-from-the-pros-to-never-gas-out/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Online Training Programs:

November 8, 1985. Harris County, Texas. A burned-out Jaguar belonging to 52-year old Ed Baker, the millionaire chairman of a Houston-based oil investment business, is discovered in a remote field. The charred remains of what is believed to be Baker's body are in the passenger's seat and since he had been suffering from serious financial problems and claimed he was receiving death threats, there is suspicion that Baker was murdered by people he owed money to. However, some people suspect that Baker staged an elaborate suicide in order to ensure his family could collect on his life insurance policies. Did Ed Baker kill himself or was he the victim of foul play? Or could he have actually faked his own death and fled the country? We shall explore all the different theories on this week's episode of “The Path Went Chilly”, which covers a very bizarre unexplained death.Patreon.com/julesandashleyPatreon.com/thetrailwentcoldAdditional Reading:https://unsolved.com/gallery/ed-baker/https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Ed_BakerThis show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4838527/advertisement

November 8, 1985. Harris County, Texas. A burned-out Jaguar belonging to 52-year old Ed Baker, the millionaire chairman of a Houston-based oil investment business, is discovered in a remote field. The charred remains of what is believed to be Baker's body are in the passenger's seat and since he had been suffering from serious financial problems and claimed he was receiving death threats, there is suspicion that Baker was murdered by people he owed money to. However, some people suspect that Baker staged an elaborate suicide in order to ensure his family could collect on his life insurance policies. Did Ed Baker kill himself or was he the victim of foul play? Or could he have actually faked his own death and fled the country? We shall explore all the different theories on this week's episode of “The Path Went Chilly”, which covers a very bizarre unexplained death.Patreon.com/julesandashleyPatreon.com/thetrailwentcoldAdditional Reading:https://unsolved.com/gallery/ed-baker/https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Ed_Bakerhttps://www.inc.com/magazine/19861001/1703.htmlHouston Chronicle (November 10, 1985)This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/4838527/advertisement

The book of James. A blueprint for making faith work. With the turn each page, words spill out; Teaching, Instructing, and Challenging us. The words slowly become etched into our reality and our faith turns into action, until it becomes not only a part of our lives, but a new way to live. Join us for the next few weeks as we walk through the book of James together.

The Book of John: John 3 - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

Allowed to Journey: Grounded and Growing - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

This week we discuss the final regular season games of several future Hall of Famers; the Hall's diss of Lemar Parrish; the woeful play of Ed Baker; Larry Wilson's legacy; stats symmetry as usual; two running backs missing 1,000 yard seasons by less than 10 yards; and the great passing combination of Widby to Nitschke. Quote of the week: "I don't wanna know how to find out about enjoying gum chewing without any teeth." Intro-outro music: "High Stakes," by William Loose.

Pat McDonald goes solo for the first hour and talks all things flooding, safety and preparedness, as well as the Barre Area Development Corporation. Then, Pat is joined by Ed Baker (MSW) Host/Producer of the Addiction Recovery Channel on CCTV VT.

Questions Jesus Asked: Are you not much more valuable than they? - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

Adam Grenier is an OG of the growth world. His first role in growth, was none other than Uber where he was Head of Growth Marketing and Innovation building the global marketing growth infrastructure and team from the ground up. He then enjoyed successful spells at Lambda School and Masterclass as VP Growth and VP of Marketing, respectively. If that was not enough, Adam is also a prolific angel having made investments in Superhuman, Table22, and FitXR to name a few. In Today's Episode with Adam Grenier We Discuss: 1.) Entry into the World of Growth with Uber: How did Adam make his way into the world of growth with Uber and Ed Baker? What are the single biggest takeaways from his time at Uber, Lambda and Masterclass? What does Adam know now that he wishes he had known when he started in growth? 2.) Growth: What it is? Why You Do Not Need a Team for it? How does Adam define the term "growth" today? What is the role of "Head of Growth"? Why does Adam believe that you do not need a growth team? How can leaders infuse growth principles, mindsets and metrics into existing teams? WHat are the single biggest mistakes founders make when thinking about growth? 3.) Hiring Growth Mindsets: How to Ask the Right Question: What are the clearest signs to Adam that someone has a growth mindset? What are the right questions to ask to see how they think? How does Adam use tests and case studies to determine the growth mindset of a person? What did Uber teach Adam about the best practices to hire for growth? 4.) Uber: Scaling a Monster and Spending $1BN on Ads: What are some of Adam's biggest lessons from spending $1BN on advertising at Uber? Why at anytime were there 200 people paying for ads with their personal credit cards? Why does Adam believe China was "the wild-west"? How did all of their competitors in China have Uber data? How do growth mechanics, channels and disciplines compare between US vs China?

Hebrews: The Supremacy of Jesus - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

Show Sponsor AnyQuestion - https://link.anyquestion.com/Greg-Bennett   Support the show at https://www.patreon.com/user?u=26936856 "The Greg Bennett Show"   The Greg Bennett Show has always focussed on high-performance individuals, and these two are two of the best in the world at what they do. In this episode of The Greg Bennett Show, Greg is joined by Yuriy Timen & Ed Baker. Both of them are world-leading growth experts. They ignite business growth through deep understanding and expertise in key areas such as product development, strategy, market research, organizational development, and so much more.   Ed Baker is a Harvard grad with a Stanford MBA, led International growth at Facebook until they reached 1 billion Monthly Active Users and went public, and then led the growth and product teams at Uber. Ed is now the founder and CEO of AnyQuestion. You can find his previous episodes in episodes 95 and 138.   Yuriy Timen is a seasoned growth expert with experience in building successful growth engines for organizations. Yuriy has a proven track record of success, having led growth at Grammarly for 8 and 1/2 years and contributing to the growth of companies such as Canva, Airtable, Otter.ai, and others. He now advisors some of the world's greatest tech companies. This man knows how to build subscription businesses.   Timestamps 3:29 - Interview with Yuriy & Ed begins. 6:33 - Some back ground on Yuriy and how he found his place in product growth of Facebook. I didn't want to wear a suit to work 17:28 - Yuriy explains some of the lessons he learned at Grammerley, and how he only understood them in hindsight. 23:34 - What are the first steps you do when you advise or strategise growth in a company, and how do you know that the growth startegy is working? For any growth strategy for it to be successful, you have to have an appropriate growth culture 34:21 - Is paid marketing a good way for gowth? 40:03 - For a non profitable early stage company wanting growth, is SEO a good growth strategy in the current environment? 43:44 - What companies should be considering when it comes to fremium v. premium offerings and what is working, and what doesn't work. There's gotta be someway to try the product for free 50:05 - How does A.I affect growth strategies and how can companies embrace it? 54:27 - What parallels do you derive from your 'outside work' life, to your dealing with business and product growth? 1:00:16 - Interview concludes.   Links Be sure and check out bennettendurance.com Find Greg on social media: Twitter @GregBennett1 Instagram @GregBennettWorld   And follow Yuriy Timen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuriytimen/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTimenator

Casey Winters is the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite. Prior to Eventbrite, Casey led the growth product team at Pinterest. Before Pinterest, Casey started the marketing team at Grubhub and scaled Grubhub's demand-side acquisition and retention strategies.  Elena Verna is the Interim Head of Growth at Amplitude. Former exec @ Miro, Netlify, SurveyMonkey. Growth Advisor to companies including Krisp, MongoDB, Ledgy, Builder.io and SimilarWeb. Kieran Flanagan is SVP Marketing at HubSpot, where he has helped the business grow internationally, move to a product-led business, quadrupled its marketing demand, and built out its media team, including the acquisition of ‘The Hustle.' Andy Johns career started in growth at Facebook when the company scaled from 100M-500M active users. Since he has worked in some of the leading growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Quora and more recently at Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President. Bangaly Kaba is the Director of Product Management @ Youtube. Prior to Youtube, Bangaly led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart and before Instacart was Head of Growth @ Instagram, helping grow Instagram from 440M to > 1B monthly actives in 2.5yrs. Ed Baker is a growth advisor to various startups including Lime, Zwift, Whoop, Crimson Education, GoPeer, and Playbook. Ed was the VP of Product and Growth at Uber from 2013-2017. Prior to Uber, Ed was the Head of International Growth at Facebook. Adam Fishman was the Chief Product and Growth Offer @ Imperfect Foods. Before Imperfect, Adam was VP of Product and Growth @ Patreon, Before Patreon, Adam was the Head of Growth @ Lyft, Adam was the first growth and marketing employee hired and grew the team to 18 people. In Today's Discussion on When To Hire a Head of Growth: 1.) When is the right time to hear your first growth hire? 2.) Is this hire a senior growth leader or a more junior growth engineer? 3.) What can early-stage startups do to entice senior growth leaders to their early-stage company? 4.) What data infrastructure should be in place prior to hiring your first growth hire? 5.) What does the optimal onboarding process look like for all growth hires? 6.) What can founders and CEOs do to set their growth hires up for success?

Lance has a fantastic interview with Mary Inman and Ed Baker who are lawyers from Constantine Cannon and represent whistleblowers for fraud in Medicare Advantage and other managed care programs.

In this episode of The Greg Bennett Show, Greg has a wonderful conversation with one of the brilliant minds of the 21st century. A key figure in developing growth with some of the world's leading tech companies. He is the CEO and Founder of AnyQuestion. The purpose of AnyQuestion is to democratize access to insights from the world's greatest experts to help people fulfill their human potential. With the mission to become the most impactful living library of trusted insights and expertise authored by the world's greatest experts in every field. This episode is loaded with quality information on how to build a succesful business.    Father of four. Harvard Grad, MBA at Stanford Business school, Investor, Entrepreneur, and Growth Specialist. Previously Vice President of Growth at Uber and Head of International Growth at Facebook.  Ed Baker is also an extraordinary athlete, winning his first Ironman after only 6 months of being in the sport of Triathlon.   Timestamps 2:48 - Interview starts 6:22 - Ed and Greg discuss the similarities between sport and starting a business. 7:55 - Ed describes how he came about to be entreprenurial, right back to his first venture (datesite) in the late 90's. Ed built the first website Datesight.com which launched in 1999. In one week every student in Harvard had signed up - Ed's interest was in the math behind the growth. Understanding how to get one user to share with one other user - Growth art and science - how has human behavior changed. 12:56 - How The Greg Bennett Show podcast inspired Ed to start his new venture, AnyQuestion.com 18:50 - Book: The Cold Start Problem - Andrew Chen (audiobook version) Ed describes how Uber began, and compares the learnings he made at Uber to how he is aplying them in his new company AnyQuestion.com 29:11 - Ed explains his process from taking an idea and turning it into a viable business. 37:19 - Building a team in a start-up, can be similar to building a team in sports. 43:54 - How different is it starting a business in today's software driven world, as opposed to 20 years ago when the internet was around but nowhere near the penetration it now has. The online tools for starting a business have dramatically changed and improved. 45:44 - Raising funds to start a business can be tricky. Ed explains his view and what has worked for him in previous ventures. Now Ed is able to view the investment process from the 'investors' perspective, which enables him to understand what and how to pitch your new business idea. 51:46 - Interview Concludes   Links Be sure and check out bennettendurance.com Find Greg on social media: Twitter Greg Bennett Show Instagram The Greg Bennett Show   Check out Ed Baker at: AnyQuestion: AnyQuestion.com/EdBaker  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/uberedbaker/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/uber.ed.baker/ Web - https://www.edbaker.com/ Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUAl559y7ZY&feature=youtu.be facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ed.baker.ironman/

What is God Really Like? - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

Transformed - Ed Baker by Orchard Hill Church

Kevin Cahill, President and Executive Director of the Deming Institute, reflects on growing up with Dr. Deming, learning about his grandfather's impact on the world, and his own Deming journey. Kevin also describes The Deming Institute's origins, the DemingNEXT initiative, and using Deming in the real world. (Please note: the punctuation errors in this description are due to Libsyn's system.) SHOW NOTES Books mentionedThe New Economics and Out of the Crisis, both by Dr. Deming (available via www.deming.org) Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming's 14 Points, by Andrew Stotz 0:00:36 Growing up in the Deming family 0:04:29 Watching If Japan Can, Why Can't We? with my grandfather 09:07 Kevin's own Deming journey 14:21 The origins of The Deming Institute 21:35 Why Deming, why now   39:14 Introducing DemingNEXT 46:06 Andrew's Deming journey 53:34 Deming in the real world TRANSCRIPT You can download the complete transcript here. 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 here with featured guest, Kevin Cahill. Kevin, are you ready to share your Deming journey? Kevin Cahill: Absolutely, Andrew. Excited to be here, looking forward to it. AS: Yeah. Well, I think we gotta kick this off by introducing you. Tell us what is your connection to Dr. W. Edwards Deming. KC: Well, I'm very fortunate to be his grandson, and also very fortunate that as I grew up in the Washington DC area, I got to spend a tremendous amount of time with my grandparents, my grandfather, Dr. Deming, and his wife, Lola Deming, who also assisted him in his work for many, many years, and got to know them growing up. And so, it was absolutely fascinating to see this man that I knew as a kindly, gentle, soft-spoken man who worked out of the small basement of his house in Washington DC, not in a big office, this little, tiny basement that used to flood in the rainy season and was just very, very small. And I always wondered what he did because everything that I saw was just figures and numbers and all this stuff, and he never talked about work. When we were together with him on Thanksgivings and Christmases, he was always talking about family and what it was like with my mother and her sisters growing up. So, a very different perspective of who this man was. That all changed at one point in my life but growing up, it was a very different kind of relationship. AS: You know, my first connection with your grandfather was when I was like 24, and I was just in awe, but I was also in terror because I watched him pretty strict, pretty tough when he was dealing with people that just had nonsense questions in some cases, or had the wrong idea, and he really needed to straighten them out in one way or another. And it's kind of surprising, but now that I think about it, in our families, we don't bring that toughness necessarily into the family. Is that the case? KC: That was the case. We never noticed that. He would sit at the dining room table, and he would just be quiet at the head of the table, and occasionally he'd pull this little notebook out and make some notes. I always wonder what he was writing. I found out later. Something came to mind, and then, occasionally, in the middle of the dinner, he would say... He would have this great story about my mother or something that he had. He would tell us growing up, and he just burst into this fantastic laughter of his, and it was so much fun. And we really didn't know what he did. We knew he traveled, and we knew that... Like I said, growing up, we would get scrap paper from his office, and it always just had sheets of numbers on the one side, and my brother and I would always joke that, man, "I'll tell you the one thing we don't wanna do in life is grow up and do what he's doing." [chuckle] AS: That's tough stuff, whatever it is he's thinking about. And I'm just curious. What was his relationship with his wife, Lola? KC: Oh, she was just this terrific lady. They met, and they actually worked together. I believe was at the Fixed Nitrogen Lab in Washington DC, and they co-wrote some papers together. She had a master's degree in mathematics at a time, early in the last century, when women just didn't have advanced degrees, and she helped him for decades with his work. And I remember seeing a lot of photos of her traveling with him to Japan and around the world. That was absolutely fascinating. She was just a brilliant woman in her own time, and with what she was able to do in terms of helping him. And she doesn't get enough credit for what she did to assist him. AS: And before we get into the Institute, I just wanna understand your own personal journey in life. You developed... You saw that stuff, and you thought, "I'm not gonna study that." But tell us just a little bit about your own personal journey in your education and in your work life. KC: Sure. So like I said, I didn't really know much about what he did. But when I was a freshman in college, my family had moved away from the DC area to Los Angeles, and I came back for the summer for a job that I had. I called my grandfather, grandmother, and said, "Hey, you have an extra little, tiny room in your house. Is there any chance I could stay there for the summer?" And they, of course, said, "Yes." So, I stayed there for the summer. And in June of 1980, my mother called me and said, "Your grandfather travels around and has been to Japan. They're doing a show on NBC on June 24th, 1980 called, 'If Japan Can, Why Can't We?' And your grandfather is gonna be mentioned in that show for some of the work he's done in Japan." You can imagine how excited. This was at a time when there were three networks, ABC, NBC, CBS. There was no cable. There was nothing. KC: And this was gonna be on prime time. And so she said, "Just make sure your grandfather watches it." And so, that night of 1980, I had to go downstairs and get him in the office and say, "We've gotta go upstairs and watch this show." And so, we all traipsed up to the third floor and sat down on his couch, and my grandfather, my grandmother, and then my grandmother's sister, who was also living at the house, we all sat down to watch the show. And a few minutes into it, you saw my grandfather who was, at the time, almost 80 years old, and he had about a 15-second part in the show, and I just remember being so excited, "Oh my god. That's you. It's so cool." KC: And then there was nothing. That was it. And for the longest time... And you could tell my grandfather was getting very fidgety. He was ready... He mentioned something... He was unhappy with a few things they were saying in the show that he thought were off-base, and he was kind of mumbling a little bit about that. And he was getting ready to leave and go back down and do some work. And then they started talking about a man who was considered the... Helped transform Japan and was considered the key person in that Japanese transformation. And at that point, I looked over to my grandfather, 'cause I hadn't said anything in about 20 minutes, and I said, "Do you know who that is?" KC: And the announcer, he said, "It's Dr. W. Edwards Deming." And it was just this disconnect. This is the man I know, who I grew up with, and the Emperor of Japan has given you credit for the Japanese economic miracle. I still get goosebumps when I think about that moment. I just could not believe it. And then we watched the rest of the show in just stunned silence. And of course, he had some comments, and at the end, they talked about the National Paper Corporation and how he had helped them, and I just remember thinking, "This is gonna change everything." KC: And you know what, Andrew? I was actually a little bit sad because I thought, "He's 80 years old, almost 80. He's probably..." People are gonna call him, but he may not work for more than another year or two. And then I can tell you, it was astounding because, like I said, his office was in the basement, and my grandmother and my great-aunt and I would stand at the top of the stairs, 'cause my grandfather used a speaker phone, and his assistant would say, "Dr. Deming, you've got Don Peterson, the chairman of Ford Motor Company, on the phone. You've got the head of Xerox on the phone." You've got the head of all these different companies, and we're hearing him talk on the speaker phone, and it was just astounding. It was an amazing, amazing period. KC: So at that point, I knew things were gonna change in my life. I just didn't know what or how or anything like that. And as I moved through college and then graduated, I was just amazed that my grandfather was continuing to work and just being quoted on news articles and everything like that, and on TV shows, just continuously. And as I got into the business world in a media business, I knew a little bit about my grandfather's philosophy, some things like how important systems are and understanding that and operational definitions. KC: And there were some of the elements of the 14 points that I understood, breaking down barriers within the organization. And so even as an assistant, what it did, my grandfather's philosophy, even though I couldn't impact anything at the top, what I was able to do within my own sphere of influence was extraordinary in terms of how it helped me move up through the organization at a much, much, much more rapid rate than I would ever have been able to do. And so... AS: And what would you say were the core... What was the core things if you say, you didn't know all of the different things that he said, but there was those core things that really stuck with you. What would you say was the one or two core things, particularly thinking about the listener or the viewer out there who's thinking, "Wow, I would like to be able to make that impact, and I'm not sure how quickly or how much time I have to learn everything." KC: That's a really interesting question. I would say one of the key things that I did was making the system visible that we were actually working in. So, we were a media company that was selling advertising time on TV stations around the country. And we had all this workflow that we had to do, and nobody was making it visible what that flow was. And I remember when I was trained, and I was started off as an assistant to an assistant, and they were training me, all the training was done by memory that somebody else did it. So, a lot of times they were teaching me things that were erroneous that I was trying to do and so, as I got into that position, I made sure that I put that process down so that when I moved up, and I could hand it off to somebody else, they could see what that process was. And some of it was visual, and some of it was work instructions. Other things were like operational definitions of... Somebody was saying, "Hey, can you get this done for me?" "Well, by when?" "By the end of the day?" "By the end of the week?" "By the end of the month? KC: So, there were a lot of little things like that that made a difference in terms of the way, I thought, that helped the other people within the organization, that really made a difference, and helped me move up very quickly within that organization. AS: And then, how did you go from your career to now, The Deming Institute? Maybe you can talk to us about that and tell us about The Deming Institute and the aims of The Deming Institute. KC: As I continued to move up and took on greater roles and responsibilities within this media organization, again, my grandfather and... I would call him and ask him questions about things that I needed help on. I remember one time, in particular, I had an assistant who could not get a particular job done, and we worked on it and worked on it, and I tried to make it visible. I tried to do different things, and I called my grandfather one day. I asked him a question, and I said... And he gave me some page numbers in one of his books to read. He didn't give me the answer; he gave me some page numbers. And it was fantastic because the way I was explaining it to her what needed to be done was the way I understood how it needed to be done and the way I learned. It was not the way she learned. And so, once we had her learn and express this in a different manner, we never had another issue with the job going forward. All this gave me the understanding after I went to one of my grandfather's seminars and continued to read the books. It gave me a sense that I could go out and start my own business. KC: And so, I did with a colleague of mine, and he and I co-founded a software company that provided the sales systems to these companies like I worked for. And without having my grandfather's knowledge, I would never even begun to start a company like that. So, a startup is at such an incredible advantage if you understand the Deming philosophy. Because at the time we started it up, there were two companies that had about 90 share of the market on two different ends of the market. But when we were doing this in 1999, the internet was just starting to hit. And there were, I remember, about 15, 20 different companies that all were trying to get into the same space. Within two years, they were all gone except for two of us. They didn't have the value of understanding what my grandfather had taught, that I had learned from him. And then my partner had in the terms of the way we ran and operated the organization. So, to fast forward, we kept the company for a while, merged it with another company, and then ended up selling it to a big publicly traded company. And in retrospect, I almost wish we hadn't. KC: But by doing that, I ended up at The Deming Institute. And then what was fascinating was I spent two years of what I call penance, staying at that company because of the contract. And Andrew, that was when I saw in just... What I experienced and what we had to put people through, because of the way they looked at things and the way they operated, was just extraordinary in terms of how much it hurt me, how much I knew it was hurting the people that worked for me in the business units that I was running. And I couldn't wait to get out of there. And when I did, I spoke to my mother, Dr. Deming's daughter, Diana Deming Cahill, who founded the Institute with her father and her sister. And I said, "This is an opportunity for me to give back what I have learned from my grandfather," to take an organization that's an all-volunteer organization, that was really focused on maintaining and gaining as many of my grandfather's assets as possible without really saying, "Well, what are we gonna do with all these things now that we have all the videos?" And they did a phenomenal job of getting the videos and articles, and all these different things in getting the organization started. And so, that was kind of the continuation of my journey, was to move into this role and to be one of the leaders in the organization in terms of helping move it forward. AS: So, let's talk about... What you've described in some ways is something that I think anybody that gets deeper into Deming realizes, is that it's really a management philosophy rather than... Like a lot of times for people that don't know much about Deming, but they've heard his name, they go, "Oh yeah, quality, statistical quality control" or something like that. And they miss the whole aspect that it is a way of thinking, it's a way of managing, it's a way of interacting with other people. Like you said, the idea of trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes to make sure... The job of the senior management is to make sure people are trained to the level that they need to be. Maybe you can just talk about the Institute, generally, and that concept of what it is. What is Dr. Deming's teachings? And what is the Institute about? KC: So the Institute, the aim of the Institute, excellent question, is "Enriching society through the understanding of the Deming philosophy." And that can take all sorts of different directions that you might be able to go in. And so what we try to do is, we look at, "Okay. Here's what the aim is; by what method can we achieve that aim? which is what my grandfather always talked about. And we also understand that people out there, like I just mentioned earlier, learn differently. Some people are auditory learners, some people are visual learners, and there's different ways of creating learning environments for people. That's one of the things that I think is great about this podcast, and I'm so thrilled that we're getting back into it and doing that 'cause many people learn by listening to podcasts like this and gain something out of it. Other people need to be in an environment where they're physically there to actually gain something. Others can do it online. Others can do it through webinars, so there's so many different things. So, I believe our responsibility is to utilize what he has given us in a manner that can reach the broadest number of people and have the greatest impact so that they have that yearning for new knowledge. And then when they have that yearning, we have a means by which that they can continue to learn, understand, and apply it. AS: Maybe you can just talk about what's going on with the Institute, but also before you do that, I think for... Not everybody can understand. What is an institute? Is it for-profit? Is it not-for-profit? Are there 100 employees? Is it a few people? Is there a board? Are they volunteers? What is the Institute? KC: Well, I can tell you. I'll talk a little bit about it, but one of the best things I would say, Andrew, is go to www.deming.org, and they can learn a little bit more. But when my grandfather and my mother formed the Institute, they decided to have it be a nonprofit. And I know there was a lot of questions about that because a for-profit organization, there's a lot of things a for-profit organization can do, but there's a lot a nonprofit can do, and I think it was important for my grandfather and my mother that this be something that is a nonprofit, a 501 [c], not-for-profit organization because it also opens a lot of doors. KC: When my colleagues and I and other board members call people, and we're calling from The Deming Institute, a lot of times they'll take that call 'cause they know we're not calling to sell them something and try to sell them a whole bunch of expensive services and things like that. We're calling to help and make a difference. And so, while sometimes there are constraints with the nonprofit that we can and can't do, as you start to look at them, you realize it also opens up a tremendous number of opportunities that we might not also have as a nonprofit. KC: So, we're a nonprofit organization. We have a board that has a number of family members on it besides my mother. My brother is on it. He's vice chairman, my mother is the chairman, and then I'm on it. And then we have several other board members who have been terrific in terms of supporting us. Paula Marshall is on there, Steven Haedrich is on there, Keith Sparkjoy is on there, Kelly Allan. So, we have this fantastic group that provides guidance for us and support for the organization and helps me... I'm also on the board and serve as the president of the board. And we just have this fantastic group. We also have just a outstanding staff right now that has helped propel this forward, whether it's the online learning that we're launching, whether it's our communication, whether it's our administration or fund development, all these different things that we have responsibilities for as a nonprofit. We've just got an unbelievable team, and they all operate virtually. We don't have a single office. We also have this advisory council. We have a Deming fellow and Dr. Ravi Roy who's out there. We have an emeritus trustee board. So, we have a lot of people that worked with my grandfather, and then a lot of others who have this just belief in this philosophy, in these principles, and they know they need to get out there, and they're helping us get it out there. AS: So, before we go on, I think it's kind of important to talk about, "Why Deming? Why Now?" And I'm curious to hear your idea about that. There's all kinds of new books out there. There's all kinds of gurus. There's all kinds of people talking about all kinds of things, "Come on, Kevin, this is old stuff. The world has moved on." Tell us, "Why Deming. Why now?" KC: Andrew, I get that all the time that... Hey, I remember hearing about this guy that helped Japan after World War II, "We're closing on past 75 years on that. Why do we need this guy now? Why do we need this philosophy now?" And what I can tell you is it has worked. Every time it is used in an organization, as they begin that journey and continue down, I never hear that it doesn't work. Now, there are some companies who've tried it, and they're already too far gone to be able to even come back from the abyss that they've already gotten in. As my grandfather put it, "the pit they've already dug themself in," and sometimes you just can't do that. KC: But when these organizations do use this, and we have so many of them that do, it is astounding how it works. And so, the books that you're talking about and all these, what we call, oftentimes, "flavors of the month" that you hear about, just wait five years and see, does anybody really using them anymore, or have they moved on to the next flavor of the month and the next flavor of the month? You go back 20 years and look, a lot of those things are gone, or they've morphed into something completely different where they may have kept the name, and now they've kind of combined a few things to try to keep it going. But the one constant is Deming works and works, and the research shows that it makes a difference. And to me, in this world right now, where we are seeing all these issues with supply, with polarization, with the need to break down barriers, whether it's between countries or within different organizations, there is an answer. Deming, my grandfather, provided that answer, and he showed that pathway. How do you do it, and then how do you get to that next step that, all of a sudden, leads to resolution of these issues that we're facing right now? AS: Yeah, it's a great point, and there's so much there... KC: What do you think? AS: Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I was thinking... The question that we often get, I often get too, I'm sure you get it, it's like, "Well, why isn't this everywhere? Why isn't his teachings everywhere?" And I was thinking about it, and my answer to that is, one of the most powerful things in this world is probably meditation. If you could meditate properly for 30 minutes a day, it would probably calm your mind, and it would make the world a better place and all that. But how many people actually do it? Very few. And I would say that my answer to that is that what Dr. Deming talked about was a transformation. And how many people are ready to make a transformation in their life? It's easier to pick up the flavor of the month and say, "Oh, let's do that, and let's do that," But what he's talking about is moving to a whole other level of starting to think of things as a system. And you and I have talked about caring for the elderly folks in our lives. And nowadays, doctors get more and more specialized, and they can't see the bigger picture. And everything operates in a system, and it's difficult to think in that way. AS: And so, part of what I feel like is that what he's challenging, the challenge that he has put before us, is to start to transform our thinking, to understand statistics, to understand systems, to understand how to acquire knowledge, and to bring this together into something that can really make a difference. And that's not easy. That's a journey. KC: No, it's not easy, and I think you hit it right on the head, Andrew. And I think part of the challenge is, if you're leading an organization, and you came out of, whether it's business school or you moved up through a certain way, well you are leading that organization because you learned how to do it a certain way. Well now, all of a sudden, your organization is having trouble. Because I can tell you right now, and I think it was a Rob Rodin, who worked with my grandfather, said this, "Somebody right now around the corner, around the world, believes they can do what you're doing better, cheaper, and faster than you." KC: And they're just looking at you as an opportunity because you can't innovate as fast anymore. You can't do this as much. I can build a better this, better mouse trap, and all that type of stuff. But the challenge is, is that you've now... If you're leading that organization, you've gotten there. You have gotten to this point by doing it a certain way. Well now, all of a sudden, you're being asked to learn to do something differently, and I think that was... One of the big challenges my grandfather had was that in... When that program aired on June 24th, 1980, there were companies who were in crisis. Don Peterson, who was the Chairman and CEO of Ford when I met with him, when he spoke at one of our conferences at University of Michigan, and he said... KC: One of the things he said to me was, he said, "We were two billion dollars in debt, and we were close to going under, and two years before," I believe it was two years before, "I was named 'CEO of the Year' in the U.S." And he said, "But even for me," he said, "It was so hard for us to change because we'd always done it this way. We always had these already systems in place, and now you're asking us to do these different things." And so, I think sometimes it gets rejected. The other thing that I would say, Andrew, is in 1980, while these companies did Deming at that point, they were in a crisis. And oftentimes, it's not until you're in the crisis that you end up saying, "Hey, I need to do something." And you can listen to podcasts by Paula Marshall and Steven Haedrich, who are on our board, where they were in deep crisis when they came to Deming and now, all of a sudden, they're huge advocates 'cause it not only pulled them out, but it made their organization successful. So oftentimes, it takes a crisis to have people say, "Hey, it's worth looking at something else." AS: It reminds me of one of his quotes, "Learning is not compulsory, neither is survival." And I was thinking, when you were talking about, "Hey, your competitors are learning this," think about the transformation. When we were young, if you saw "Made in Japan" on a product, it meant low quality. And there was a transformation that happened and, all of a sudden, Japan became high quality. Now, think about China. Everything that most people have seen in the, let's say, past 20, 30 years, China, "made in China," was low quality. But they are moving up the quality ladder so fast. And I would argue that, in fact, they haven't really even gotten to some of the Deming teachings of taking that to a real transformation where you start to really bring the quality into the brands and all of that. And there is a possibility that China could go through that transformation, or at least some Chinese companies, just like the Japanese companies did. And then, "ho-hum," I'm sitting in middle America, and I'm realizing, "Whoa, wait a minute. They're transforming. What about me?" And I think that that's a lesson that you're talking about, too, is this idea that, "If you don't wanna learn, other people are learning around you, and by implementing this, you can protect yourself." KC: You make a really good point. That's a very salient point. That's really key that if things are going well for you... And a lot of companies we're looking at before, for example, COVID hit, everything was going well. They weren't planning on a COVID hitting. They weren't... Supply chain was not an issue, and now, all of a sudden, people are having to rethink how they run and operate their business. And I'll tell you, it's fascinating, my colleague, Kelly Allan, and I have... A matter of fact, you went through one of the seminars that he put on, I believe, in Hong Kong if I remember correctly. And when he and I were traveling through the Asia-Pacific region, Singapore area, and we were going to a lot of different companies, one of the questions we would ask... And it happened to me when I started my business, my start-up, and we were struggling for a while, and we sat down at the table one day, there were only about 12 employees in the company, and we were really having a hard time. And we sat down and we talked about, "Does everybody understand what the aim of the business is?" And of course, they knew that... We had put some Deming ideas, and we were using Deming in there, they were like, "Oh yeah, yeah, we know that, Kevin. That's really important that we all know the aim of the business." KC: So, we all wrote down the aim of the business. Well, guess what? All 12 people, including myself, wrote down different aims. So, we were working hard and giving our best efforts towards different aims. Can you imagine how much money, time, energy, and effort were being wasted because, Andrew, you were working for... You thought the aim was this, Kevin thought it was this, somebody else thought it was this. We saw the same thing in these companies as we traveled all around the country and around the world, and we would ask them, "What is the aim?" And these people, it wasn't from lack of... They were all working hard and giving their best efforts, but they all had a different understanding of the aim. Can you imagine how much more efficient and effective you'd be if everybody understood what the aim was? Just that alone... We have never once... Kelly and I together, going into different organizations and talking, never once have we seen one, unless they were a Deming organization, where everybody in that room understood what the aim was, had the same understanding of what the aim was, put it that way. AS: They all had an aim. KC: They all had an aim. Somebody thought it was making money, somebody thought it was selling more products, somebody thought it was... So... AS: It reminds me of this... After many years of myself in the financial world, and I'm advising companies, and I'm... And I had these two clients and... Individually, the CEOs were fascinating and smart and all that. And individually, each member of the team, from both of these companies of the management team, were highly qualified, very experienced in their areas. And one of those companies was doing really well, and the other was doing really poorly. And I just remember thinking about that, and I thought to myself, "Number one, success is, you gotta have the right CEO." And the right CEO or the right leader, let's say, has gotta set the right direction. But more importantly, that's not enough. You can have a great guy, a man or a woman that's great, and they've set the direction. But if you let people fight against each other, you're never gonna get there, so it's that coordination amongst the management teams that's like, that's the magic. And you can't get coordination if everybody doesn't know what's the aim that we're working towards, so that coordination is kind of the systems-thinking aspect of Dr. Deming that I learned. Let's talk about the aim of the podcast. Here we are, and I'm just curious, what are your thoughts on where this podcast goes and what's the purpose? KC: So what I see, the aim of the podcast is also tied into what listeners can expect, and that aim... What I see as the aim of the podcast is raising awareness and understanding of the Deming philosophies and teachings by presenting stories, sharing knowledge of the Deming philosophy, in a variety of different voices and from a variety of different types of organizations. And I think we look to do this by providing real-world examples of what makes Deming such a ground-breaking, unique, and unrivaled successful approach, which we just talked about a little while ago. I think we... We're also going to... And you and I've talked about this, is explore why is Deming different and so much more valuable than the wide variety of improvements and improvement programs and flavor-of-the-months out there? And I think with this podcast, it's really valuable for us to explore the Deming advantage in all of those type of organizations, how it's been implemented in different types of industries and businesses. Because one of the things, Andrew, and you and I have spoken about this before, is a lot of people think, "Well, I'm not gonna do Deming. That's manufacturing. When your grandfather was alive, he focused on manufacturing. It was Ford, it was General Motors, it was Xerox, it was... And all manufacturing companies, and if he wanted it for more than manufacturing, why didn't he spend time?" KC: Well, the thing I would say on that is, that's where the greatest need was at that time, was in the manufacturing. But he spent time; he knew it was important to have this in education, in nonprofit, in government. He started to work, towards the latter part of his life, with Congress several times, trying to get them, as you can imagine how polarized they are, they all wanna help the country, but they all see, "We gotta do it this way or this way. And it's my way or the highway." How do you get to work together, think together, learn together, act together? And so, for us, if we wanna explore that, how it's been implemented in different types of organizations and businesses and industries, and what that transformation is like for these individuals, what challenge... Because it's not all a piece of cake, as you know. What "aha moments" did they have? What challenges were along the ways? Impacts and benefits? And then, talk to people at different stages of their Deming journey. KC: We've got a couple of people that you and I've talked about that are on... That have been doing this... Like Paula Marshall who is the CEO of Bama Companies. She worked with my grandfather. I think she is the only one who not only worked with my grandfather, but has been the CEO all the way through to this day and is still implementing it within her organization. And so, I think the last thing I'd say is we believe that by providing people information and inspiration, they're gonna yearn to learn more, and they're gonna wanna delve deeper into Deming and hopefully apply it in their lives and organizations. And what could be better? AS: Yeah, yeah. And I just wanna highlight that one word. One of the first words that you said is "stories," and this is a great podcast or a great platform for telling stories. We're not gonna go into super technical details about things. We've got great resources, we've got great books, we've got all that stuff. But the stories, and importantly, as you just said, to chronicle the stories of the people who knew Dr. Deming at the time while we have that opportunity, but also all the other people that are going through... And I think the other word that I like is the "journey" and the "transformation," and highlighting that journey and transformation. That's very exciting. So, how do people get the podcast? KC: So, there's a couple of different ways that you can get the podcast going forward. For those of you.. There's many of you that have listened to the podcast in the past. We've had almost 1.6 million podcast... What would you call it downloads or listens? AS: Yeah, downloads. KC: And so, what we're gonna do is we're still gonna make that available just like we always have. But in one of our newer programs, which is called DemingNEXT that we're just launching right now, that program is a subscription program, DemingNEXT. We're gonna put the podcast in there with the video that you and I are talking right now, through Zoom that we're using, so that it will be in there with the video, audio, and then the transcript. And then our producer on the programs, in DemingNEXT, is also putting it in a different format so that you're not just watching a video with the words right next to it, it's in a very, very nice format. I think you saw a sample of that that I sent you the other day, and it's gonna be really cool how it's gonna be accessible through that mechanism so that within that subscription service, you'll be able to see it. But for those who aren't in the subscription, they'll still be able to hear it, just like they always have. AS: So, if somebody is listening to it, let's say they've never really heard that much about Dr. Deming, they're listening and thinking, "This is good stuff. I like what I'm hearing on the podcast." Where do you want them to go so that they get that? Is it... Tell us the website and tell us where they should start. KC: So, what I would suggest is you go to www.deming.org. And then from there, depending upon what you're looking to do, as an individual or with your organization, you're going to see that we have this online program, DemingNEXT, that we're just launching. We have workshops, in-person that we're gonna hopefully going back to soon, seminars in-person. We also have virtual workshops, webinars, some conferences coming up. So, there's a whole different, wide variety of ways that you can learn. But I think one of... The big thing that I would say is the launch of our DemingNEXT program which is an online learning program. It's a blended learning program where we're building in all sorts of webinars into it as a part of it. So, it's not just online. KC: That opens us up to a whole different world that, as you know. You attended a seminar in person in Hong Kong, and I wanted to talk about that in a few minutes, but I don't know how many people were there, maybe 40, 50, 60, whatever that is. It's not 400, 800, 600, that we need to get that pivotal number of people that are learning this stuff, understanding, and applying it. So, the DemingNEXT online is a mechanism for us to be able to do that around the clock, around the world, at any time, with organizations of different sizes where they can use these in their own learning management systems. They can use it in our learning management system. They can use it in working with their consultants who they're... Who are advising. There's all sorts of different ways to do that. AS: So, if someone is listening and think, "My goodness, I need my management team to get, to understand, some of these things," they can use the resources that DemingNEXT, just directly and say, "Hey, you guys, I want you to... Everybody to listen to this particular module," or that type of thing. Or if there's a consultant out there that's helping people implement, they could say, "Wow, why don't I use that as a tool within my toolbox?" So, it sounds like... It's really gonna be something that can be implemented across a company without having to go to a seminar if they can't or whatever. KC: You hit it right on the head because what we have is that... We'll oftentimes have CEOs and executives come with their management teams to a workshop or seminar like the one you went to. Well, then they come to us afterwards and say, "This is fantastic. We're gonna start to implement it, but I've got another 200 people in my company. I don't have the ability to send them to the seminar, or have you bring the seminar to us." Some companies are doing that, but others are saying, "We don't have the ability to do that, yet I want everybody within the organization to have an understanding of the common language, what we're talking about when we talk about a special cause, a common cause, an operational definition, system, system of profound knowledge, understanding variation theory of... Just a basic understanding." KC: And so, that was one of the things that pushed us to develop this DemingNEXT is, to not only have it available for leadership and management, but for all levels of the organization to be able to understand, learn, and apply it, and not to push back. Because that was one of the things, again, going back to Don Peterson and Ford was, even though they sent hundreds of people every month, sometimes thousands, he had 150,000 people around the world, they couldn't send everybody through. And the people that didn't go through were the ones that were a challenge. Not because they wanted to be a problem, but because they didn't understand what was being talked about when management was saying, "Hey, we need to look at our suppliers differently." KC: Well, no, that's not how we do it. And so, it's hard. You know what it's like. When you push against somebody, they push back. They always do. So, what you need to do is provide them a level of understanding, and then it's accepted, and then they're not pushing back and fighting you. They're actually embracing it. And so, that's one of the advantages of using this approach, is that it can be blended learning. It can be done at your own and, like you said, with consultants. We already have a number of consultants that have their own specific external portal tied into our DemingNEXT where they're working with clients in a completely different environment to help support what they're already teaching them. AS: It's exciting. That's a whole other level. When you think about my own Deming journey, I think about, there was limited resources. There are some books, and I found what I could find and that type of thing, but you kinda had to piece it together. And so, I think I'm really excited, and I feel like the journey going forward, it's so important to get this message out. But the ability to get it out now is really there, and so I would say that's really accomplishing the main aim of the Institute. KC: You're right, and for those who are listening who know about it, a lot of my grandfather's videos, writings, case studies, articles, things like that that he did, they're also in there. But we've spent a lot of time using subject matter experts, some of whom worked directly with my grandfather, to help us develop specific courses that are tied into the way adults learn. Adults, a lot of times, don't wanna sit and watch my grandfather go through the red bead experiment for an hour and the lessons of the red beads on a video recording that is 40 years old. The audio is not that great, the video is not that great, but you know what's interesting, Andrew, what we have found is once they go through some of the developed courses that we've worked on, then all of a sudden they wanna learn more. They then go and watch it. They'll spend the hour watching my grandfather do the red beads and lessons of the red beads or talk about the 14 points in these long-form video formats that were acceptable back in the '80s and early '90s. But we need to get them there to be able to say, "I wanna learn and go ahead and do this." AS: Yeah, it's... The method of learning has changed so much. But it's so fun to watch those old videos 'cause you see his reactions, and you see the way he's berating people and making... He was also a very funny guy at times. He would really have some great cracks. [chuckle] KC: Yeah. He really did. Let me ask you a question if you don't mind. How did you come to know about my grandfather, and what was kind of your Deming journey? You and I came across each other years and years ago, but I'd love for the audience to also hear that. AS: So, I was a young guy, studying finance at Cal State Long Beach in Los Angeles, and I got a job at Pepsi in operations in Los Angeles. And Pepsi was also kind enough to pay for my MBA if I got good grades, and I did. And basically, I worked in operations, and I just saw all of these troubles. Now, I happened to be... It was 1989 when I went to work for Pepsi. And I had learned how to use a computer so I could make charts and graphs, and I started charting stuff and putting stuff up on the walls. And I had this habit I've had all my life, is I just chart performance of different people and put it up there, and then I don't say anything about it. And then, I just let people go and look at it, and then they start asking questions. And then you start getting information from that, and so that was kind of where I... And then there was a manager at Pepsi, he's like, "Oh, you're really into statistics." I wasn't necessarily into statistics, but he thought I was, and he said, "You ought to go to listen to this guy." AS: And so, Pepsi flew me in 1990, in October of 1990, to George Washington University and to take the instituting Dr. Deming's methods for management of productivity and quality. And I got 1.44 continuing education credits for it. But I remember... KC: Wow, you got some CEUs. AS: Yeah, I remember going to this event. It was a huge room. I was 23, maybe 24. I was a young guy, all the older people in there. And I just thought, the only thing I'm gonna do is, I'm just gonna go to the front row. And I just sat in the front row listening, and it just... Everything was blowing my mind. I had been working for a year or so in Pepsi, and I'd seen all of the problems we had in the factory, and then here was the solution. And so, I really caught on to that, and I went back and I started to try to implement that. And then, I started to realize what he was talking about. Change has to happen from the top because a young guy trying to make an impact, you can do something, but you can't make a huge impact. And that was kind of my first beginning. And then I got Dr. Deming's book, "Out of the Crisis." I still have the one he signed at that time, and I got a great picture of me with him at that time. AS: And then I went back, and my roommate, Dale, and I used to read chapters and discuss them in my apartment, in our apartment where we lived in L.A. And then another time in 1992, he had a seminar done by quality... What was it called? A quality enhancement seminar. Yes, that was 1992. And so, I got a double dose, and I listened to him and was blown away. I just kept learning. And then I eventually moved to Thailand, and I was a young guy teaching finance, and I went to work in finance. But the point was, my best friend, that he and I were reading those chapters of Dr. Deming's teaching. Dale came, and we set up a company called CoffeeWORKS here in Thailand, and we just really wanted to implement Dr. Deming's teaching. We weren't fanatical about control charts or anything like that. We were operating in pretty much chaos here on the outskirts of Bangkok, but we definitely tried to implement ideas like systems thinking and treating people with respect and dignity and trying to get out fear in the workforce. That's a little bit of my journey. KC: So, how is the company doing? AS: Well, we've survived, and we've survived COVID, that's for sure. And basically, we've been in operation about 28 years. And so, we have about roughly 100 employees, and we're growing, and we're profitable, and we've learned a lot. I would say that also operating in a foreign country has always been a challenge. But I would say we're doing okay, and our objective is to try to make sure that we are making an environment where employees really enjoy their work and feel trust and feel cooperation in particular. KC: And with you saying that, we're hearing in the States, and you're experiencing it, how many... So many companies seem to take it for granted that, hey, the employees are gonna stay because this is really their only job opportunity here, and that has been just spun completely out of control with the advent of COVID. And now, all of a sudden, people are saying, "Wait a second. I wanna be at a company where I feel I can make a difference, and I enjoy being there because I've now realized that life can be pretty darn short, and I need to have, as my grandfather always talked about, joy in work." And we would talk to executives in organizations in years past, a lot of times, we would never bring up joy in work because they didn't see it that way. It was just "grind it out," have these people just work. And now, all of a sudden, there's this realization how important that is, and I think that's another... Once you implement that Deming philosophy, it has an enormous impact on employee retention, on joy in work which is keeping people there, that they wanna stay. They wanna be a part of something where they enjoy being there, and I think that's just one more reason why the Deming philosophy, we talked about it earlier, is still even relevant today, and more so than ever. AS: And that's part of driving out fear, is making a trusting place and Dale's... Now, it's interesting situation in my case. I never worked as an employee in my own company. Dale is the managing director, and we own it equally. But we decided in Thailand, it would be better if I focus my efforts on building my career in the world of finance. AS: Now, this is where I think my experience with Dr. Deming becomes interesting. The first part is that I felt like I really wanted my employees in the coffee business to understand it, and that's the reason why I started taking notes about the 14 points and thinking about how would I explain this. The way he talked, I don't think it's gonna translate very well into Thai language and for Thai people. How do I simplify that? And that's when I started writing the book, "Transform Your Business with Doctor Deming's 14 Points," and ultimately translated it into a Thai language so that the employees would be able to get some access to this and understand it, and that was my only real goal. I did put it up on Amazon. But the main thing was how do I bring this teaching to these people who really didn't know anything about it? KC: Oh, that's interesting, I didn't know that was really the basis for the book. I know there's some companies that we've mentioned already today who actually have purchased your book and use it as kind of a book club type thing that they do with their team members as they go through the one that you wrote. So, that's pretty interesting. I didn't realize that about... With you about the 14 points. AS: Now, the other angle that I think it's been interesting because one of the things that Dr. Deming talked about was the idea of "don't be focused on quarterly results," but isn't that the whole financial world? KC: Well, it's funny 'cause I was just about to ask you. With all your focus on finance and understanding it, you've gotta run up that... Even if you're not a publicly traded company, we talk to organizations that are always focused on that. One of the suppliers that we work with at the Deming Institute, we literally left them about six months ago because you could always tell it was it... I'd always look, and I'd go, I'd start getting the phone call going, and if I hadn't thought about it, it's gotta be the end of the quarter 'cause, man, they're just trying to sell me something now. And they were always trying to gain their numbers, do something by the end of the quarter. And I said, "You know what, I'll let you watch it, as my guest, go through some of the DemingNEXT stuff because as long as your management will do it because you have no idea the impact you're having," and we left them because... KC: And we ended up going with a different vendor because we could see this happening, and it was getting worse and worse. And we were told there was a new CFO that had come in. There was a real focus on, "we've got to get the numbers up." And so, what they ended up doing was cutting customer support because that was an easy one. People like us already had a contract with them for a certain amount of time, and they figured they might be able to get us to renew it. But the impact... Stop. I can keep going on and on. AS: Well, maybe I'll just explain it. I grew up as an analyst in the stock market in Thailand, and I was eventually voted the number one analyst in Thailand. And I was the head of the CFA Society for Chartered Financial Analysts which was an honor of a lifetime. And I had seen, maybe... I've met with maybe a thousand fund managers, and I've taken them to meet with a thousand CEOs. And a CEO asked me, "What would be your advice from everything you learned?" And I just said, "Never listen to analysts. They don't know about your business. They don't know how to run your business, and you have to be very careful. All they wanna do is set a fire of quarterly earnings." Which brings me to, having taught finance all my career, when I walk into a finance class nowadays, I tell the students, the first thing I tell them is, "Finance adds no value." And that puts their head in a spin, particularly, 'cause they're studying that topic, and I said, "What adds value?" AS: And we have a long discussion about what adds value in a business, and I say, "Ultimately it's the products and the service, and finance is a support function just as human resources. And the purpose of finance is to operate as a mirror to reflect management's decisions to help us see the consequences, short term and long-term, of management decisions. And it's when finance starts being the head of the business that you get into trouble." Never make, as I say, "Never make the right finance decision over the right business decision." AS: Always make the right business decision over the right finance decision. So, I've come at finance from a very, very different perspective, and that's allowed me also to help my clients improve their profitability and help them really think about profit very differently than a lot. And that's where I think the combination of my experience with Dr. Deming, as well as my finances, bring me to a place that I really enjoy talking about the finances of a business. KC: Yeah, and I think what you said is really important because if the focus of the company is on... is solely on making a profit, they may make a profit to the detriment of the organization that eventually puts it out of business. I always loved what, I think it was Isaacson's book on Steve Jobs, where he was talking to Jobs about what was really the... I don't think they use the word aim, but what was the aim of the organization? And it wasn't to make money. Apple wasn't there to make money. It was to make insanely great products that help people. And then, the money was a byproduct of it. They sure did well taking that approach. Now, you look at somebody like Enron, for those of you that remember Enron. Well, their goal was to make money. Well, that didn't work out so well. And you can see that the finance, like you said, if that's where it becomes the focus on is how do we just make money, and every decision is based on making money, eventually that is going to bite you big time. And the companies that focus on that are usually gone at some point within a certain amount of time. AS: Yeah, and that's one of the reasons why I feel like Deming is such a critical tool, or critical knowledge, that people need to have now because we're slipping into an era of data. And we are very fast, quickly slipping into this era where a young person graduating from university today may think that their job is setting key performance indicators and tracking them, and you can almost imagine the ideal job... I have a cartoonish picture in my head of a young manager these days with a bunch of screens in front of them and KPIs going. And then they've got this button that sends an electrical shock to the employee who's not hitting their KPIs, and then that's it. There's business and there's management, and I fear that a lot people are feeling like being tough on KPIs is what good management is, and they're lost on that. KC: Well, and I can say if they come in and start to learn Deming, whether it's using DemingNEXT, whether it's using other resources or videos or books or things like that that we have, if their focus is on solely on KPIs, I encourage you. Come in and read and go through and learn some of this, whatever the best way for you to learn is, because it will open up a completely new world in terms of understanding what the impact of those on the organization. KC: And it's usually a detrimental impact. And what the potential is by looking at things a little bit differently, or a lot differently, depending upon where you are, but you're right. There's so much stuff, and you hear about big data all the time, and we've all seen so much. So many journalists, and I always feel bad for them because they're looking at these data figures, whether it was COVID or other different things, and they make interpretations that are oftentimes erroneous. And we see it all the time. Andrew, it must drive you crazy when you see, "Well, the stock market was down yesterday, it must mean this is happening." Two days later, "Well, the stock market is up because this is happening." Talk about not understanding variation and special and common cause and reacting to a common cause as a special cause. It's unbelievable. But once you understand it, you start to see things, and it opens up a completely different world for you. AS: And one part of my business is managing people's money. And for that part of my business and investing, it's so critical what I learned from Dr. Deming about that they're ultimately... What I say is that we can understand the variation and the randomness of a flip of a coin or at the roulette wheel. We understand these core principles of randomness and variation, but we then kind of abandon all that when we go into life, and we don't... We miss that there's this subtle thing happening below the scenes and the outcomes of things that we're seeing. There is a portion of those outcomes being driven by randomness and variation. And if we don't have awareness of that, we will get misled, and it will happen all the time to amateurs in the stock market that will assign special causes to different things. And they get all excited about things, and they miss the whole randomness and variation. And that is a carryover from the world of what Dr. Deming taught in statistics into the world of the markets and investing. KC: Yeah, it's a big problem. I talk to people all the time. And that treating a special cause as a common, you know, common variation as special variation, and vice versa, ends up being huge. And the thing is, we already know it in our lives. We know to get to the grocery store is gonna take us between 9 1/2 minutes and 11 minutes, and the average is, whatever, 10 minutes. But we know we're never gonna arrive there exactly at 10 minutes. We know. And when you ask people, "Why is it?" Well, because there's variation in there. It's 9 1/2 to 11 minutes to get there. Yet they go in their companies and they teach. They, all of a sudden say, "Well, I got there in 9 1/2. Oh my gosh. I got there really quickly." That's great. Okay. Well then, the next time when you get there at 10 1/2, "What did I do wrong?" And they try to fix that instead of understanding that, "Well, wait a second. I know how this works when I go to the store. Why do I not apply the same concepts when I'm in the business?" AS: And every now and then, they come home, and they say, "It took me two hours to go to the store." Oh, what happened?" "Well, I had a flat tire, or there was a fire, and there was a..." And all of a sudden, you start to understand special causes. Now, I think I would like to wrap it up at this point and ask you, do you have any parting words for the audience? What would you like the audience to understand about what's going on at the Institute? What's going on with the podcast? Let's leave them with something exciting. KC: Well, I don't know how exciting this is, but one of the questions that I get right now, Andrew, is what would your grandfather say about DemingNEXT? Because it's completely different. It's not always using just him because there's people out there that tell me, "Unless you're using Deming's exact words, then it's wrong." And I'm like, "No, no." My grandfather, when I look through his books, quoted people all over the place, whether it was Don Wheeler, whether it was Ed Baker, Joyce Orsini, he was always learning. Bill Scherkenbach. He was learning from everybody. KC: And I would say the one question I get a lot now is, what would your grandfather think about DemingNEXT? And I gotta tell you, I believe he would be absolutely thrilled because he would see that as another means, another way that we have done a PDSA Plan-Do-Study-Act where we have tried to improve the means for us to get his message out to a broader audience. And I think he would be absolutely thrilled with what we've done, how we're doing it, why we're doing it. And I believe he would be very excited about what that impact is to get that message out. Because I know when he departed from this earth, I think the thing that probably bothered him the most was he didn't have more time to get his message out. He knew that he was running out of time as he got older, and he formed this organization to get that message out. And I think that, to me, is an important thing, is by what method are we getting this message out that will accommodate the needs of how people learn, understand, interact within their own organizations? AS: Well, ladies and gentlemen, you've heard it from the man who probably is the closest to understanding the ultimate aims of Dr. Deming. Kevin, I wanna thank you for this great time together and sharing your personal experiences, as well as divisions, and the opportunities that I see at the Institute and what you're doing. That concludes another great story from the worldwide Deming community. Remember to go to deming.org, as Kevin has told us, to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, "People are entitled to joy in work."

Casey Winters is the Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite where he leads the PM, product design, research, and growth marketing teams. Prior to Eventbrite, Casey spent close to 3 years at Pinterest where he led the growth product team. Andy Johns is one of the pre-eminent growth leaders of the last decade. Andy's career started in growth at Facebook when the company scaled from 100M-500M active users. Since he has worked in some of the leading growth orgs at companies like Twitter, Quora and more recently at Wealthfront as Head of Growth and President. Bangaly Kaba is the Head of Platform Growth @ Popshop Live, a live streaming mobile marketplace that combines commerce, entertainment, and social. Prior to Popshop, Bangaly led the product growth and consumer product orgs at Instacart and before Instacart was Head of Growth @ Instagram, where he built and led the product team that helped grow Instagram from 440M to > 1B monthly actives in 2.5yrs. Elena Verna is a master when it comes to all things starting and scaling growth organizations. Previously, Elena spent over 7 years as SVP Growth @ SurveyMonkey where she ran product, growth marketing, and data teams. Post SurveyMonkey, Elena worked with the rocket ship that is Miro both as Interim CMO and as an advisor. Ed Baker is an angel investor and growth advisor to various startups including Lime, Zwift, Whoop, Crimson Education, GoPeer, and Playbook. Ed was the VP of Product and Growth at Uber from 2013-2017. Prior to Uber, Ed was the Head of International Growth at Facebook. Rob Schutz is Chief Growth Officer and Co-founder at Ro, the healthcare technology company building a patient-centric healthcare system. Under Rob's growth leadership, Ro has become one of the fastest-growing companies in the country. Prior to Ro, Rob was VP of Growth at Bark, the makers of BarkBox, and helped scale revenue from zero to $100 million. In Today's Episode with Ed Baker You Will Learn: 1.) Casey Winters: How does Casey define "growth"? How does it differ from product? How do the best growth leaders decide between art vs science when making growth decisions? 2.) Andy Johns: What is Andy's biggest advice to founders looking to build their first growth team? What unexpected choice did Andy decide to make at Twitter that moved the needle for new user acquisition? 3.) Bangaly Kaba: What were some of Bangaly's biggest takeaways from scaling Instagram from 440M users to 1BN? What decisions did Bangaly make without data? How did they go? What did he learn? 4.) Ed Baker: What are Ed's biggest takeaways from facebook around structuring growth teams? What are Ed's biggest pieces of advice for startyups looking to grow internationally? What were some of Ed's biggest learnings from working with Travis @ Uber? 5.) Elena Verna: What is the difference between a good vs great growth model? When does one need to change or amend their growth model? How does one know when it is working? 6.) Rob Schutz: Why does Rob believe that startups should not diversify their customer acquisition channels too quickly? How does Rob assess resouirce allocation and spend on new channels? How did this process look when partnering with the MLB for Ro?

In search of better things, the Godzillavangelists travel back to 1991 to stand in awe of Moon Shoes, Seinfeld, and Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah! Old favorite guests Ed Baker and Sandra Cheng are back to sort through this convoluted mess of time travel, nationalistic bugaboos, and the world's greatest android M11. Next time, we'll be covering 1992's Godzilla vs. Mothra. Big bug fans rejoice. Godzillavangelists is a satirical, critical work not affiliated or endorsed by Toho, Legendary Pictures, or anyone behind the Godzilla series. Visit our website at Godzillavangelists.com! We're also on Twitter @Godzillacast, and Instagram @Godzillavangelists! And we have a Godzillavangelists Facebook page too!

Ed Baker is an angel investor and growth advisor to various startups including Lime, Zwift, Whoop, Crimson Education, GoPeer, and Playbook. Ed was the VP of Product and Growth at Uber from 2013-2017. Prior to Uber, Ed was the Head of International Growth at Facebook, a company he joined after they acquired a startup he co-founded called Friend.ly, which had grown to over 25 million users. In Today's Episode with Ed Baker You Will Learn: 1.) Ed Baker: Entry into Growth: How Ed made his way into the world of growth from his start founding a dating site while at Harvard? How he made his way to lead international growth at Facebook? How his time with Facebook led to his joing Uber to start Uber's growth team? What were Ed's biggest lessons from Uber and Facebook? How did his approach to growth and mindset change as a result of his time there? 2.) When is the Right Time: When is the right time for startups to hire their first growth leads or reps? How should they determine whether to promote from within or hire externally? What are the biggest mistakes startups make on the timing of this hire? How can startups accurately assess whether they have product-market-fit? 3.) Who To Hire: Step by step, how does Ed structure the interview process for all new growth hires? What are the must ask questions for growth leaders to ask candidates in interviews? What are the clear signs and answers that suggest a 10x growth hire? What literal tests does Ed do to determine the quality of a hire? How do the best perform? 4.) Onboarding and Integration: What is the optimal onboarding process for all new growth hires? How do the best growth hires start in the first 60 days? What do they achieve? What are some of the early signs that a growth hire is not working out? How should the relationship be between the CEO and the Head of Growth? How can the Head of Growth foster a strong relationship between growth and product teams?

In the Incarnation, God, in his perfection and glory, moved toward broken humanity in all of our mess and suffering in order to save us. Our response is learned hopefulness This is grace in its purest form. We did nothing, and still do nothing, to deserve it. This God-initiated movement toward us happened (and still happens today) out of the pure goodness of God's heart toward his wayward children; his lost world. Because God has moved toward us in love, we then, though we are weak, are to move toward others in their pain and suffering. God goes with us as we move. All we have to offer is his love, and it is more than enough. This is who God is. This is who we, as God's children, are called to be.

It's the week of Thanksgiving here in the US and in this week's episode of Pages n' Pages we talk about all the books we're thankful exist. From childhood favorite to recently reads, we focus on books that have had an impact in our lives over the years. Let us know what books you're thankful for! Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Books we mention: Tiger King: The Official Tell-All Memoir by Joe Exotic Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe, The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Gilded by Marissa Meyer, Seven Days in June by Tia Williams, Heartstopper by Alice Oseman, House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune, Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, Bet Me by Jennifer Crusie, Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Falling Up and A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein, The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, The Frog Princess by ED Baker, Fangirl and Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan, Stephanie Plum series by Janet Evanovich, The Hating Game by Sally Thorne, Untamed by Glennan Doyle, Red, White and Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston, Dumplin' by Julie Murphy, In Death series by JD Robb, The Princess Bride by William Goldman, Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, Harry Potter series by she who must not be named. Check out Pages n' Pages on Instagram. These opinions are entirely our own. Image by Kapona via Vector Stock.

What should we do with what we are given? It's a question Christians ask. Given, that is, by God who is the author of life, and time, and talent, and all creation. Life is God's gift. So is time, the form in which life passes from cradle to grave, from birth to judgment. How shall we use life and time through the fleeting hours that we have them? What will we do with the talents implanted in each of us by God? Why has He given each of us just that unique combination of skills and potential which makes every human being different from every other? How should we use the goods our efforts acquire? Is all that we earn ours to use as we please? If not, how much may we keep for ourselves? What do we owe the Lord, and our neighbor? These and similar questions come to focus in the term “stewardship.” We invite you to explore with us the meaning of stewardship as taught by the Scriptures. We urge you to react to what is said, and to search the Bible for yourself to see if what we urge upon you is true. And we suggest that you discuss stewardship with friends, and in Life Groups. All because we believe that stewardship is what the Christian life is all about.

Ed Baker, was last on the show in episode 61, if you haven't listened to that episode I encourage you to do so... He is one of the most remarkable people I've had the privilege of having on the show.   Father of four. Harvard Grad, MBA at Stanford Business school, Investor, Entrepreneur, Growth Specialist, and remarkable Triathlete.   A quick brief on his background He built a company called Friend.ly about 15 years ago to 25 million users very rapidly. Mark Zuckerberg recognized this and brought Ed over to be the Head of International Growth at FaceBook. Facebook was built to over a billion users around the world and Ed played a significant role in making that happen.  Soon after, Ed was approached by a small start-up called Uber to become the Head of Product and Growth. Ed accepted this role and played a huge part in building Uber into what it is today... Not a bad track record. Ed left Uber to focus on family, investing, advising, and his Ironman training and racing.    In 2021, it was time for Ed to start something new. In this episode, Ed describes the new app he has built that Launched on Oct 25, called AnyQuestion. Ed discusses why he built AnyQuestion, what is the app and how it works.    Use my referral link https://anyquestions.app.link/Greg Bennett, to get a $1 for a 1st-week trial. OR go check out any of the experts.      

Join endurance athletes Smurf & Smurfette and their special guests as they talk through all things endurance sport, whether it be training, nutrition, balance, equipment, racing and much much more!On this week's podcast, we talk with entrepreneur, age group triathlon and family man Ed Baker. Ed is an angel investor and growth advisor to various startups and has led the growth of global businesses such as Facebook, Uber, Zwift and Whoop. Ed has also been incredibly successful in age group triathlon having won his age group at Ironman 70.3 Mont Tremblant (2018) and Ironman 70.3 Texas (2018), as well as taking the overall age group title at Ironman 70.3 Santa Cruz (2021), Ironman 70.3 Maine (2021), Ironman Copenhagen (2018) and Ironman Lake Placid (2018). We talk with Ed about;His life as a marathon runner during his college years and his Olympic dreamBusiness and family life before finding triathlonTransitioning in to triathlon under the guidance of Matt DixonHis initial success and the lessons learned through 2018 an 2019The obstacles along the way including bike crashes and heart concernsJumping back in to racing this year following 2.5 years with no racesTraining and nutrition under the guidance of new coach Dr Dan PlewsPreparations for Ed's first Ironman in 3 years at Ironman CaliforniaShowlinkswww.smurfandsmurfette.com.auWyn RepublicSFuelsRun Like A GirlSmurf & Smurfette Instagram PageSmurf & Smurfette Facebook Page

Many of us struggle to love other and ourselves well each and every day, so how don't know how to do this well, are we supposed to love God? In the Bible, we are called to love God with all of our Heart, Mind, Soul and Strength. For the next few weeks we will be looking at the bible to learn how we can Love God better, and what that in turn will mean for our lives.

At the very center of the Christian faith lies a Community; a loving, self-sustaining, beautiful Community. The Trinity - God as Three-in-One - is the Mystery at the center of it all. We want to spend the summer exploring the Trinity by looking at each unique person that makes up the Godhead. We will first spend 5 weeks asking: Who is Jesus? Next, we will move to look at 4 key attributes of God the Father. The fact that God is trustworthy, holy, generous and self-sacrificing. Last, but not least, we will spend 2 weeks pondering how God the Spirit works in the world and in our lives. At the heart of our faith, lies a Community. A Community we are invited into because of God's love for us and God's desire to bring us into unity with himself.

After the discovery of the burnt car that belonged to millionaire Houston oilman Ed Baker, speculation was abound. Though the medical examiner finally ruled that the body found inside was indeed Edward Gerald Baker's, some folks didn't buy the ruling. They insisted the oilman had faked his own death and skipped country to avoid the lawsuits against his company or worse – jail time. Harris County Sheriff's Investigators, however, didn't really buy that. Though they seemed to believe that Ed's death was the result of an elaborately planned suicide, they couldn't prove it and still had to leave their minds open to the theory that the man was killed as the result of a mob hit. To this day, exactly what happened to Ed Baker remains a mystery. Part 2 of 2.Submit your DNA data from a consumer testing company to Othram's database, dnasolves.com. It's only used for law enforcement investigations: https://dnasolves.com/user/registerYou can support gone cold – texas true crime at https://www.patreon.com/gonecoldpodcastFind us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by using @gonecoldpodcastInc. Magazine, The Miami Herald, The Houston Chronicle, and the television series Unsolved Mysteries were used as sources for this episode.#WhatHappenedToEdBaker #Houston #HoustonTX #HarrisCountyTX #Texas #TX #TexasTrueCrime #TrueCrime #TrueCrimePodcast #Podcast #ColdCase #Unsolved #Disappearance #Mystery #UnsolvedMystery

In November of 1985, rice farmers harvesting crops just north of the Texas small town Katy found the smoldering remains of a car in one of the fields. Inside the vehicle, Harris County Sheriff's Deputies found a badly charred and disfigured body. Later that day, it was discovered that the burnt car belonged to millionaire Houston oilman Ed Baker. As the investigation progressed, the murky waters only muddied further. To this day, precisely what happened to Ed Baker remains a mystery. Part 1 of 2.Special thanks to Steve Owens of Fascination Street podcast for lending us his voice in the episode. You can listen to his amazing -and fascinating – podcast here: https://www.spreaker.com/show/fascination-street Submit your DNA data from a consumer testing company to Othram's database, dnasolves.com. It's only used for law enforcement investigations: https://dnasolves.com/user/registerYou can support gone cold – texas true crime at https://www.patreon.com/gonecoldpodcastFind us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram by using @gonecoldpodcastInc. Magazine, The Miami Herald, The Houston Chronicle, and the television series Unsolved Mysteries were used as sources for this episode.#WhatHappenedToEdBaker #Houston #HoustonTX #HarrisCountyTX #Texas #TX #TexasTrueCrime #TrueCrime #TrueCrimePodcast #Podcast #ColdCase #Unsolved #Disappearance #Mystery #UnsolvedMystery

In this episode of The Greg Bennett Show, Greg has a wonderful conversation with one of the brilliant minds of the 21st century. A key figure in developing growth with some of the world's leading tech companies. Ed is also an extraordinary athlete, winning his first Ironman after only 6 months of being in the sport of Triathlon.   Father of four. Harvard Grad, MBA at Stanford Business school, Investor, Entrepreneur, and Growth Specialist. Previously Vice President of Growth at Uber and Head of International Growth at Facebook. He speaks Mandarin and Japanese. And just recently at the youthful age of 39, he found Ironman. And he’s not just good at his new chosen sport, he’s exceptional.   At his first Ironman at 2018 Lake Placid he won overall in 9hr 18, only a few months after he started the sport, and qualified for Kona IM World Championships in the process… a month after that breakthrough at Lake Placid he then went and raced the Copenhagen IM and was first age grouper in 8.27 and finished 10th overall including the professionals.   On top of all of that, he’s a great guy, incredibly down-to-earth, and simply a genuine person.   In this episode, Ed describes his journey into endurance sport and how running in high school enabled him to find confidence and belief in himself in a time when many of us are struggling with insecurities and are finding ourselves. He discusses his time running at Harvard and post University and then his void of physical activity for 10 years as he was consumed by work building his own company's Datesite.com, Friend.ly, and then eventually at Facebook and Uber.   He describes the cultures of Facebook and Uber and his relationship with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.   Ed shares how he decides to invest and become an advisor in various companies. We discuss growth and how Ed has used both science and art to grow all these companies.   A lot to learn from this one, from one of the great minds in investing and entrepreneurship.   Discount Codes and Deals   Athletic Greens - a FREE year supply of Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/greg Hyperice - get an additional 10% off with code GREG10 at hyperice.com FormSwim Goggles - formswim.com/greg for $15 off - The coupon will be automatically added to the cart. Or use code GREG15 at checkout. Vital Choice - https://www.vitalchoice.com/ use promo code: 1welllbalanced5 at checkout    

Dr. Ed Baker, FACOG, an OB/GYN and Senior Director, Medical Affairs, Cervical Cancer Solutions at Roche Molecular Diagnostics, discusses advanced biomarker technology that provides evidence and insights that simplify testing, find cervical cancer earlier, and give physicians more definitive information for confident diagnosis and decision-making. He talks about how this technology substantially lowers the risk of missed disease in HPV positive women and the critical role the medical lab plays in cervical cancer prevention. Dr. Baker trained and received his medical training at Loma Linda University. After completing his specialty training in Obstetrics and Gynecology, he practiced in the San Francisco bay area as a community physician for nearly 10 years.

In our final episode, the sisters discuss unsolved murders of the 1980's. Cassie covers the death of Ed Baker & the murder of Dian Harlin and disappearance of Hugh Harlin. While Gina covers the murder of primatologist Dian Fossey & the drowning of actress Natalie Wood. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

In this Episode I am joined by Ed Baker. Ed runs his own training and services company, is an MVP, MCT and all round awesome guy. In this episode Ed shares his journey from Police Officer to running his own business teaching Azure. We discuss the value of certifications, our feelings on maths, school and apprenticeships and Ed has finally come round to the naming of Azure Stack HCI. Twitter: @edbaker1965 Blog: www.ed-baker.com My Links: www.lisaattheedge.com https://anchor.fm/lisaattheedge https://www.patreon.com/lisaattheedge https://www.buymeacoffee.com/lisaattheedge

- The Rest of the Pie is a teaching series about how we can steward what remains after we give to God’s work through the church. Giving a part of our money, time, energy and work to the church is a requirement and a joy for those who follow Jesus. We often teach about stewarding the part we give. We might think what is left, after we give, is for us to use however we choose. The scriptures are clear this is not true. All we have is a gift from God and we are called to steward all of it for him. How are we stewarding the Rest of the Pie?

November 8, 1985. Harris County, Texas. A burned-out Jaguar belonging to 52-year old Ed Baker, the millionaire chairman of a Houston-based oil investment business, is discovered in a remote field. The charred remains of what is believed to be Baker's body are in the passenger's seat and since he had been suffering from serious financial problems and claimed he was receiving death threats, there is suspicion that Baker was murdered by people he owed money to. However, some people suspect that Baker staged an elaborate suicide in order to ensure his family could collect on his life insurance policies. Did Ed Baker kill himself or was he the victim of foul play? Or could he have actually faked his own death and fled the country? We shall explore all the different theories on this week's episode of “The Trail Went Cold”, which covers a very bizarre unexplained death. This episode of The Trail Went Cold is brought to you by Best Fiends, a unique and exciting puzzle experience unlike other puzzle games out there. Download it FREE on the Apple App Store or Google Play. Additional Reading: https://unsolved.com/gallery/ed-baker/ https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Ed_Baker https://www.inc.com/magazine/19861001/1703.html Houston Chronicle (November 10, 1985) “Interlock: Art, Conspiracy and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi” by Patricia Goldstone “The Trail Went Cold” is on Patreon! Visit www.patreon.com/thetrailwentcold to become a patron and gain access to our exclusive bonus content. “The Trail Went Cold” is now doing a weekly livestream show on GetVokl every Thursday from 7:00-8:00 PM ET as part of their “True Crime Thursday” line-up. For more information, please visit their website. The Trail Went Cold is produced and edited by Magill Foote. All music is composed by Vince Nitro.

November 8, 1985. Harris County, Texas. A burned-out Jaguar belonging to 52-year old Ed Baker, the millionaire chairman of a Houston-based oil investment business, is discovered in a remote field. The charred remains of what is believed to be Baker’s body are in the passenger’s seat and since he had been suffering from serious financial problems and claimed he was receiving death threats, there is suspicion that Baker was murdered by people he owed money to. However, some people suspect that Baker staged an elaborate suicide in order to ensure his family could collect on his life insurance policies. Did Ed Baker kill himself or was he the victim of foul play? Or could he have actually faked his own death and fled the country? We shall explore all the different theories on this week’s episode of “The Trail Went Cold”, which covers a very bizarre unexplained death. This episode of The Trail Went Cold is brought to you by Best Fiends, a unique and exciting puzzle experience unlike other puzzle games out there. Download it FREE on the Apple App Store or Google Play. Additional Reading: https://unsolved.com/gallery/ed-baker/ https://unsolvedmysteries.fandom.com/wiki/Ed_Baker https://www.inc.com/magazine/19861001/1703.html Houston Chronicle (November 10, 1985) "Interlock: Art, Conspiracy and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi" by Patricia Goldstone “The Trail Went Cold” is on Patreon! Visit www.patreon.com/thetrailwentcold to become a patron and gain access to our exclusive bonus content. “The Trail Went Cold” is now doing a weekly livestream show on GetVokl every Thursday from 7:00-8:00 PM ET as part of their “True Crime Thursday” line-up. For more information, please visit their website. The Trail Went Cold is produced and edited by Magill Foote. All music is composed by Vince Nitro.

In our 40th "Deming Lens" episode, host Tripp Babbitt shares his interpretation of wide-ranging aspects and implications of Dr. Deming's theory of management. This month he looks at the book, The Reckoning" and some of the implications of it. Podcasts mentioned in this episode: 1. Paula Marshall 2. Kevin Cahill 3. Ed Baker 4. Monta Akin 5. Clare-Crawford and Bob Mason   SHOW NOTES [00:00:14] Deming Institute Podcast - Episode 40 [00:00:27] Episode 40 - My Top 5 Favorite Episodes [00:02:06] 1. Paula Marshall [00:04:20] 2. Kevin Cahill [00:05:17] 3. Ed Baker [00:08:52] 4. Monta Akin [00:10:09] 5. Clare-Crawford and Bob Mason TRANSCRIPT Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:14] In the fortieth episode of The Deming Lens, I will go through my top five favorite podcast episodes. Tripp Babbitt: [00:00:27] Hi, I'm Tripp Babbitt, host of the Deming Institute podcast and the Deming Lens, and this is Episode 40. I thought I would switch things up a little bit. I was doing a lot of reflecting over the past week or so, thinking about all the people I've had the pleasure of interviewing for the Deming Institute podcast. So I kind of came up with lack of a better term, my five favorite podcast episodes. And there are a ton of people that merfolk every interview I've done. I've either learned something or just had great enjoyment. Tripp Babbitt: [00:01:08] And talking to folks that admired the work of W. Edwards Deming, people like Alfie Kohn and David Langford and Dick Steele and Ron Moen and Cliff Norman and Dan Robertson and I could go on and on and on. There are a ton of good interviews, some better than others, as I got better at doing podcasting. But it was it has been a real enjoyment for me to learn from different people and not just gaining knowledge, but but the. History of how different people came into contact with Dr. Deming's work or him or himself. And so my top five, I'll just first name them, go through him a little bit, and I hope that you'll take an opportunity to listen to some of these folks. Tripp Babbitt: [00:02:06] But my number one is Paula Marshall. Second is my inaugural interview with Kevin Cahill. My third was Ed Baker and my fourth was Monáe Aiken from Leander School District, and my fifth was Claire Crawford and Bob Mason that I had the opportunity to talk to. So let me just talk about starting with Paula Marshall. I, I love that episode so much because not only did you get a little history, but Paula Marshall is a dynamic person. She has a lot of personality. She's fun to talk to. And she owns a company called Bamma Companies, and they make the apple pies for McDonalds all over the world and still do. And so she runs this family, basically family initiated and family owned business. And we got into a conversation about performance appraisals. And I wish I would have known about better audio quality back in those days because is one of the early interviews. But my interview with her is a little bit sketchy on the audio. Tripp Babbitt: [00:03:19] But overall, it was one of those interviews that just I got a lot of energy from it, like a lot of energy from Paula Marshall and talking about her experience in having poor quality at Bamma companies and how she was kind of nudged towards going to one of Dr. Deming's four day seminars, her interactions with them, but also just how he interacted with her and going and moving away from performance appraisals and what she had done up to that point. I'll let you listen to the episode itself. But and I later had the opportunity to meet Paula at a couple of Deming Institute events. But I think you will enjoy it if you haven't if you've not listened to some of the early interviews. Again, I apologize about some of the quality of it. I was the no, really what I was doing at the beginning. Now we're six years later. Seven years later. Tripp Babbitt: [00:04:20] The second one is Kevin Cahill, the inaugural. Now, obviously, even when I interviewed Kevin, I did not have my own equipment. I hadn't purchased any equipment because I wasn't sure how this would go. And the equipment for podcast can be very expensive once you start getting mixers and digital recorders and things of that sort. So I actually had a friend that had podcasting equipment and so I use that for my interview with Kevin. But I really enjoyed that interview because of the stories he told about Dr. Deming, including how what happened the night that he watched the NBC White Paper. If Japan can, why can't we? And just the the storytelling there and the history of it isn't lost with me. Tripp Babbitt: [00:05:17] Third, Ed Baker, now Ed Baker.He his interview was interesting to me. He he traveled along with Dr. Deming, with Ford. And it kind of goes through the Ford story, talks about Taylorism. He talks about the improvement methods of today. Tripp Babbitt: [00:05:37] But the reason I probably enjoyed the Ed Baker interview is because I had to prep so much for that. Not only did I read his book, but I read about it. Baker looked for previous references and other books, but I just remember it from a lot of preparation standpoint. I read the book twice, but I think before we did the interview and there's a lot of good things in there. He'll tell basically the message that I that I think I got out of that interview was, you know, whether it's Lean or Six Sigma or TQM or any other improvement methodology that most of the people that are enjoying those methodologies are missing the system of profound knowledge. Tripp Babbitt: [00:06:21] So, again, that would be appreciation for system theory and knowledge, theory, variation and psychology and and those four things that were being emphasized as opposed to just the statistical process control types of things that a lot of people focus in on, on Six Sigma and Lean. I think this is quite a. Tripp Babbitt: [00:06:47] Quite a bit of this, but he also talks about in there about Jim McConville, our mattress Mac, as he's known at gallery furniture in the story of what happened there. Tripp Babbitt: [00:06:58] And that was one of the Jim McIngvale is a person that has been mentioned a number of times in Dr. Deming's books as someone who changed from very sales type of attitude to understanding a system. And he's he's well known in the Houston area for a lot of things that he's done, like when they had the hurricane, how he opened his stores and just let people in during that time period and kind of not only paying it forward, but that, you know, these are it's funny you think about if people are selfish enough, they'd be altruistic as kind of the thing because you treat everybody really well. And I think that that when I think of Jim McIngvale, I think of that quote, not that he said it, but just what applies to to him. But Ed Baker talking about that story was good. Excuse me. Good for me. He also was very influential in that interview. Got me thinking about thinking and how we need to change thinking the way we think about things. And I developed this model I call the ninety five method, but it involves looking through a customer lens but looking through a thinking lens. And and Ed Baker talks quite a bit about thinking and influence the udemy training that I put it put out there based off of a lot of the things out of that interview and what kept getting deeper and deeper in understanding, thinking that was going on, mental models and things of that sort. Tripp Babbitt: [00:08:52] The fourth interview that I really enjoyed was with Monta Akin, and Monacan is a, first of all, just a sweetheart of a person, but she shared the story. She worked at the Leander School District. I believe she's retired now. Tripp Babbitt: [00:09:09] But how she had listened to things that were happening with David Langford and Sitka, Alaska, and about how education was being applying the Deming method with some of the things that David Langford was doing. Tripp Babbitt: [00:09:28] And she was really the first person to really talk about education. As someone from a school district, I'd listen to the story of David Langford and had interviewed them, but just her grasping some concepts and, you know, waking up in the middle of the night while watching, you know, if Japan can, why can't we? And our interactions with David Langford all were really relevant to me. And I'm kind of a, I don't know, amateur history buff, not only about Dr. Deming, but but a number of other things and really enjoyed that history. Tripp Babbitt: [00:10:09] And the fifth person that I really became one of my favorite episodes is with Claire Crawford Mason and Bob Mason, her husband, and just a number of things that really stand out in my mind. I go back to all five of these quite often, actually. And Claire Crawford, Mason talks about how she first met Dr. Deming and and some of the things that were happening that led up to the white paper of Japan can why can't we, which you can watch at the Deming Institute website. I think it's also on YouTube, if I remember correctly. Tripp Babbitt: [00:10:45] But kind of the the what launched Dr. Deming back in this country, even though he was already famous over in Japan and just the history of how everything kind of degenerated into this white paper. And, you know, we didn't have a like today for some of you, we don't have a thousand.We didn't have a thousand channels back in 1980, basically ABC, NBC and CBS. Tripp Babbitt: [00:11:15] And that was it. I mean, really that that you would listen to. So they almost had those three stations had a virtual monopoly on as far as television goes or communication goes. But the history of that is really relevant to me. I enjoyed that type of history, again, the same type of thing with mine again. And, you know, there were different quotes out of there. You listen to how Dr. Deming loved the fact that Bob Mason went to Harvard. We went to the business school and how Dr. Deming thought they were teaching the wrong things in Harvard Business School. Tripp Babbitt: [00:11:56] And every time he would meet with Bob or see Bob, you would ask him about all the bad stuff that Harvard was teaching about business, which is not only funny, but it was interesting to me. So anyway, those are my top five. Tripp Babbitt: [00:12:12] I didn't mean to slight anybody. I've learned so much from working with all of these or interviewing all of these different people and some of the conversations that I've had with them and certainly the post conversations that I've had with a lot of these folks about things that maybe were more relevant to me or thought were relevant to me and not necessarily relevant to the broader audience. Tripp Babbitt: [00:12:35] But anyway, those are my top five. I will put links to those and this episode so people can can go and listen to them on their own. But that's what I wanted to cover this week. I hope this change would be a little bit different for you and learning about some other episodes and some of the things we've I don't know what the number is now of episodes that we've done, but it's a lot. So thank you for listening and we'll talk again in a month or so. Tripp Babbitt: [00:13:10] Thank you for listening to the Deming Institute podcast, stay updated on the latest blogs, podcasts, programs and other activities at Deming dot org.    

Often, when we study people from the Bible, we feel as if we are studying larger-than life figures, people who are not at all like us, people who are extraordinary. Whether or not we recognize it, this can make us feel as if God can’t work through us because our lives are too “ordinary.” But what if God loves to work through ordinary people? What if God’s best work is often done in the quiet of our ordinary days, through ordinary activities, ordinary moments, ordinary relationships? What if the ordinary is actually - in the Kingdom of Jesus - truly extraordinary? We look forward to exploring many of the ordinary people from the pages of Scripture, through whom God did extraordinary things throughout history. We hope this series, (Extra)ordinary, will inspire each and every one of us that no moment is simply ordinary when God is involved! We may be ordinary people, but we worship, and are empowered by, an extraordinary God!

Fighting the Tyranny is a show designed to expose global government and the New World Order. We tackle all the fronts that they attack us on daily. Whether your fight is G.M.O.'s, chemtrails, election fraud, agenda 21, vaccines, false flags, the federal reserve, to undeclared wars. I hope you find a home here at Fighting the Tyranny on freedomizerradio.com. Open dialogue is open and encouraged. Pull up a chair to the virtual round table and let's talk about the issues.       On this weeks episode I will have 2016 Presidential candidate, Ed Baker on to talk about today's issues and the things that affect us today. I will go over with him his platform and his stance on the issues. Open phone lines for the show so please call in and join the discussion. See you at the virtual round table, Wednesday at 6:30 PM central standard time on freedomizerradio.com!