Will I love Out of the Crisis?

Deming showed me how to think about organizational performance improvement. I was moving from a clinical psychologist in private practice to an organizational psychologist helping companies develop change strategies. I had studied and loved statistical variation in the context of scientific research, but not in the context of addressing real-world challenges. 

But Deming does something very surprising. He starts by understanding variation and then moves on to understanding organizational culture. Not the theoretical frameworks we all know, but the work world from the view of the front-line employee. Deming’s insight is that the central challenge of culture change is understanding… show more.

Before Agile and Lean had rocked the software development industry, William Deming was busy forging this new world of work.

Out of the Crisis is predominantly a management book, but it’s really the spark that started the lightweight movement in software delivery. A key concept in the book is how to identify the work system's performance, separate from the performance of individuals.

W. Edwards Deming was an original quality and productivity expert in the US during World War II, and the important period afterward for supply chains and the US economy. His principles ring true today in a global supply chain and US economy that is often looking for easy answers to problems that can be solved through foundational principles in culture, management, and statistics. Rather than splashy, quips and anecdotes, Deming offers approaches that led to the United States becoming the world's most productive and people-centered economy in the world, but now that is lost. In reading Deming, we can gain… show more.

The book refers to the crisis in western industrialized countries in the 1980s. It emphasizes the role of management and the focus on processes for inducing changes and improvements. Deming, a statistician and physicist by training, moved his attention to management consulting, as a necessary step to ensure results and enhanced impact. The Deming message needs to be updated to the big data analytic era. Modern data scientists have powerful analytics and immense data sets to work with. They can significantly contribute to their organization’s bottom line by improving quality, productivity, and competitive performance. Deming’s book provides a context for… show more.