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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if Deming (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Japan) contributed to the Toyota Way? A lot of the Toyota Way seems inspired by his teachings.

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I work at Toyota, and they credit him on day one of training on the Toyota philosophy. Toyota's success is just a function of them listening to western consultants after the war when western companies would not.

There are also some broader macroeconomic reasons that these philosophies took root in post-war Japan. The combination of a weakened currency and strong New Deal style labor laws (that were proposed but thwarted by Detroit) was unique. Labor was cheap but politically dominant and materials were in short supply (I believe Shoichiro took power in the wake of a nearly catastrophic strike that gave him very few options beyond innovating on process).

Or maybe it is the result of filling hollow, generic advice with some meaning. I'd really love to hear the original advice given by western consultants.

Deming had some genuinely counterintuitive stuff to say. The focus on reducing variance was obvious in retrospect, once you do the math, but important at the time.

Funny enough once cars from Japan started kicking the ass of the big three, they paid those people a lot to come to the US again and copy Japan.

I believe so.

He is almost revered, in Japan.

I'm told he was laughed out of the US, which is why he set up shop in Japan.

Now you imagine, how good do your ideas have to be an American coming to Japan just after World War II, and all the industry leaders of somewhere that was famously insular go "yeah, actually, this is good, this is what we should do, let's get this guy to meet everyone"?

>yeah, actually, this is good, this is what we should do, let's get this guy to meet everyone"

Or they go "they won, I guess we're obligated to try doing it their way at least once".

Japan’s destruction was extremely total; even if you did not get hit by the nukes, your city was most likely firebombed to the ground. The economy was in shambles, everyone who was still alive was struggling to eat as the logistics chain had totally broken down, etc.

In that context it is not really surprising that Japan rejected many of its old institutions and ways.

Japan already did that in the 19th century when they were shopping around for foreign experts in industry and the military for their modernization. Not a stretch to do it again considering people involved in that process were still alive.

A strange variant of this is Japan's reaction to getting anti-Semitic propaganda from Europe was that these people secretly controlling the world sounded pretty cool and competent, so they tried getting them to immigrate. Though, it didn't really work out.

He probably had an influence but I find it curious that he always gets brought up around these topics, as if he's the primary explanatory variable for Japanese manufacturing success.

I learned about him only recently and despite his supposedly strong influence, he isn't talked about much.

Fwiw, I hear about Deming so often that my bias is that he’s over represented! Then again, my dad was in the field so he was practically revered in my childhood.

Yep, same. My dad introduced "total quality management" into New Zealand and I heard about Deming a hell of a lot growing up.

The general storyline is that the US automakers mostly ignored Deming and he took his work to Japan. One always strongly suspects a degree of myth in such stories but certainly the Deming Japanese manufacturing story was standard fare for a lot of early-on DevOps presentations.

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