By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004).
In this podcast Bob Mason and Clare Crawford-Mason discuss meeting W. Edwards Deming and creating the NBC white paper – “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” They also discuss the decades of pursuing and promoting Deming’s management ideas, including their work co-creating the 32 volume Deming Library (which is now available from the Deming Institute) in this podcast.
Clare Crawford-Mason:
The world has changed so much in our lifetime, and there are so many things that are going from, from a new global world, communication and so on that if you don’t have an underlying basis of how you view what is happening you are lost.
The complexity we have in organizations today is not easily understood correctly without an understanding of variation and a view of the organization as a system. The challenges current managers face require an understanding of management that encompasses these ideas. And unfortunately our default management education and practice fail to do this.
[Dr. Deming] saw processes where other people only see single events.
They also discussed their work in health care (including The Nun and the Bureaucrat). Bob Mason:
The leaders in the hospital systems that we studied said “our root problem is not medical science but is a management problem.
Related: Podcast with Clare Crawford-Mason Discussing Dr. Deming’s Ideas on Management – Respect for Employees, Don’t Waste the Ability of People – Deming’s Ideas Applied in High School Education