Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

The big squiggly mess in the article is filled with people. I think Deming’s deepest concept was giving workers on the production line simple tools to improve processes on their own. His books are filled with exhortations to trust the workers. This is what American managers could never bring themselves to do.

Even in manufacturing, the application of statistical process control was never entrusted to the workers, but became a department of its own, with bureaucracy, OKRs, and elaborate software.

View on HN

He would say to trust the workers, but also all the other things you need to do in addition to trusting the workers. Look at his 14 points. You need to do all the things to get all the benefits.

This is why Deming never landed here. He espouses a complex view, and most people just aren't that smart or skilled. He also espoused pride in craftsmanship, quality, and analysis, things most American workers don't value as much as the Japanese, which is another reason Toyota took them up so quickly while it took us 50 years.

> He also espoused pride in craftsmanship, quality, and analysis, things most American workers don't value as much as the Japanese

Is that American workers or American managers? Because in my experience, it's usually managers pushing against those values. It seems like American business culture sees quality and craftsmanship as money left on the table that should be sent to the shareholders, so there's always pressure on workers to cut corners. Also American managers are too quantitative, and quality and craftsmanship are hard to quantify (unlike dollars).

Workers like "craftsmanship, quality, and analysis," not the least because they make their job more satisfying (no one enjoys pushing out low quality junk), but most aren't stubborn enough to keep pushing for them against management resistance.

The biggest impediment to the 14 points for most companies is *shareholders*

Famously it's workers too. Look at NUMMI. Before the NUMMI initiative, GM's workers [at their worst plant] were atrocious. Not only did they not care, they sometimes intentionally sabotaged cars. They brought prostitutes to the plant, drank on the job. It was crazy. Management made it worse, but the workers chose to stop giving a shit.

Then Toyota came in, taught them TPS, and the transformation was night and day. Read the interviews and stories. Workers reported they gained more pride in their work, it made them want to do better, and they did do better. So we can have pride in our work, but it's not ingrained culturally like it is in Japan.

To loosely paraphase George Carlin: "Where do you think Managers come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from the same place Workers do: American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities. This is the best we can do folks. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out."

What's the fastest way to get promoted to a manager at a fast food chain -- show up on time and do your job. If anything, the managers are workers who cared enough to do a decent job.

American managers don’t espouse pride in craftsmanship, quality, etc. The actual worker cares.

Not all workers, not all managers. It's more messy than that

Let’s just say c suite and one level below over the years have been mba hack jobs without any domain expertise or experience. Their only claim to “success” is financial engineering. Those guys.

> His books are filled with exhortations to trust the workers. This is what American managers could never bring themselves to do.

This is one of the big differences in the military, with far more trust given to the "workers" in the US and generally western countries compared to others.

Which is also a relatively recent thing, all things considered. If I remember correctly it was primarily WWII Germany that pioneered this approach, which was then quickly adopted by everyone else

Sort of. The word to search the web for is Auftragstaktik. Here's the Wikipedia page on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics

I've heard this dichotomy in terms of military command presented in many different ages and different ways. It is primarily the difference between communicating the goals of an operation versus communicating how to achieve those goals. Most recently I've listened to accounts that it explains Russia operational failures in the invasion of Ukraine. I've also read analysis suggesting that it was a relevant difference in the battle of waterloo.

It was practiced by the Prussians during the Franco Prussian war. In WWI, it led to the small team grenade tactics, the Germans deployed to try to overcome trench warfare. It culminated with the blitzkrieg tactics of WWII.

In case anyone is interested, I enjoyed the book "Turn the Ship Around!" by L. David Marquet, about management lessons applied by the author who was a US Navy submarine captain. It does very much emphasize giving trust, responsibility and accountability to workers (or enlisted personnel, in this case).

One of my favourite techniques from that book is to remove the centralised backlog. People's ideas for improvement shouldn't be everyone's administrative burden. There are too many ideas for that.

Instead, keep a central record of the things that need to be done right now, and if something is important to do later, then someone will probably keep track of it personally and bring it up later when it is more relevant.

Pray we never need statistical process controls for the mass manufacturing of military objectives.

Deming's exhortations exist because they are aspirational, essentially propaganda for his vision of organizational cybernetics. "Deming was part of the Teleological Society with Wiener, Turning, von Neumann, and others during and after the Second World War — one of the groups that was the precursor to the Macy Conferences and worldwide cybernetics movement that also led to the development of the Cybernetics Society." [0]

"[Deming's] view of cooperation stood in stark contrast to business as usual, which emphasized competition, even within one’s own company. Throughout his life, he demonstrated how even competitors working together benefited their respective companies and, more importantly, their customers." [1]

0. https://cybsoc.org/?page_id=1489

1. Willis, John. Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge: How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future (p. 164). (Function). Kindle Edition.

>Even in manufacturing, the application of statistical process control was never entrusted to the workers, but became a department of its own, with bureaucracy, OKRs, and elaborate software

That is wrong thinking. While you can go overboard with bureaucracy, the line worker doesn't have the the background (or time) to evaluate statistics. You need an expert in statistics at times to see if what looks like a pattern really is. Mean while the line worker needs to spend their time on what they are good at.

Trust the line worker is important, it just isn't a shortcut to people who really know specialized domains.

The line worker has a canny instinct for the right answer long before the statistics are significant though.

Kinda what Gladwell talks about in Blink

Sometimes, but a few times those instincts are very very wrong. Blink is interesting, be sure to read the criticism though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink:_The_Power_of_Thinking_W... - it isn't clear that the book is correct.

In my experience, the line worker's instincts are to be trusted but verified. If we blindly follow every crisis from the line we'd quickly find ourselves in a pit. These crises need to be backed up with context and a sense of criticality as there are finite resources to work through problems, and solving one person's immediate problem on the line may have a crushing impact elsewhere.

You don't need expertise in statistics to draw control charts. You might need that expertise to teach people to draw control charts, but not to draw them.

Line workers are the reflexes of the organisation. They can react to trouble before the central nervous system (management) is even aware that something has happened.

Deming’s idea is that each line worker is responsible 1) for understanding and minimizing variation in their specific area of work, and 2) for speaking up when they have ideas on how to do that better.

It is management’s job to protect their ability to do that, and integrate the information from workers to make decisions about what to change next.

Deming taught statistical methods that regular workers could learn and use, mostly based on simple tables and pencil-and-paper graphing. It predates the computer age. And you can go far with those methods, or just a spreadsheet.

Fancy statistics get you in trouble anyway. If the effects are too weak to see in a graph, chances are there are more important things to work on.

Deming’s revenge was the cratering of American manufacturing in the early 80’s.

In one of Goldratt’s last books he confesses he refused to translate his books to Japanese until late in life because he feared if he did that the 80’s would have been twice as bad as they already were. People here were just not open to new ideas.

> the application of statistical process control was never entrusted to the workers

I has been a long time since I have looked at it, but I think not even Toyota did that, though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com