Appendix B: Deming s Management Principles

Overview

Top management must carry out 14 obligations for improvement of quality, productivity, and competitive position.

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive, stay in business, and provide jobs. (Create and publish for all employees a statement of the aims and purposes of the company. The management must constantly demonstrate its commitment to this statement.)

2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age, created by Japan. Western management must awaken to the challenge, learn its responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place. (Understand the purpose of inspection, for improvement of processes and reduction of cost. Always remember that inspection ”at best ”is an appraisal tool about 79% effective.)

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item on a long- term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

6. Institute training on the job (skills oriented).

7. Institute leadership. The aim of leadership should be to help people, machines, and gadgets do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul , as well as supervision of production workers. (There is a difference between being a supervisor and being a leader. Management must understand what that difference is and how to manage it.)

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. (Create trust. Create a climate of innovation.)

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production and problems that may be encountered with the product or service. (Optimize toward the aims and purposes of the efforts of teams , groups, and staff areas.)

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations , and targets for the work force that ask for zero defects and new levels of productivity.

11. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership. Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. (Substitute leadership and introduce new methods for improvement as well as learn capabilities of processes and how to improve them.)

12. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from stressing sheer numbers to quality. Remove barriers that rob people in management and engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. (This means abolishment of the annual merit rating and management by objective.)

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the organization to work to accomplish the transformation. (The transformation is everybody's job.)

Deming also wrote about some of the negative forces that would allow an organization not to embrace the above points and, more generally , the notion of continual improvement. He called them the seven deadly diseases.