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Lean Seeing Red with Dr. Deming


round 1988, in front of 300 GM execs at a four-day seminar in Warren MI, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the legendary systems manager whose work infl uenced the development of the Toyota Production System, loudly berated Jim Manley, then a plant statistician at GM’s Willow Run facility.


Up to that moment, Manley had been happy to be there: GM had hired Deming to educate management on systems thinking and what would later be called lean thinking, and insisted that all of the com- pany’s manufacturing and assembly plant managers attend Deming’s seminars. Manley—not a manager—was there, he explained, because “the guys that I worked with, like my manager at the time, thought the whole thing was malarkey.


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ISO W. Edwards Deming


“The manager didn’t want to waste four days on listening to some so-called expert tell him how to do his job. So he turned to his second in command and said, ‘you go.’ But the second in com- mand didn’t want to go either, so the assignment tumbled down the line until it came to me.


“I was thinking, this is fantastic! I get to go to Warren! I ran out to JC Pen-


ney and got a new suit, thinking that I’d get to hobnob with all of these executives, and they’d see how wonderful I am, and it’s going to make my career path.” Instead, the legendary Deming had Manley at the front of the room with a few others, and was scolding him, saying “Don’t you care about the company? Try harder!”


And now would be a good time to explain that Manley was tak- ing part in Deming’s red bead experiment (see http://blog.deming. org/2014/02/deming-red-bead-experiment/). Manley and others were role-playing workers while Deming role-played a manager—hence the hectoring. The experiment presents the workers with a task: to use a dimpled paddle to remove white beads from a box without removing any red beads. While the workers struggle, the manager measures their success rates, congratulating those who seem to do better and getting tough with those who are doing less well. What the workers and observers come to realize is that there’s no way to succeed. (In Star Trek parlance, it’s the Kobayashi Maru of management training). Manley recalls that he was on his fourth round as a ‘worker,’ trying and failing at the task, when “I fi nally thought ‘horse hockey—I’m never going to get only white beads until the red beads are out of the box.’ “I swear that at that just that moment, Dr. Deming smiled at me. He could see that I understood that as a manager it was my job to give work- ers a system that produced the quality and the output that I was after. “That was really a turning point in my life. Now I run that experiment with every person I work with. Because as Dr. Deming always said, if you are the manager, you own the system. The workers can only perform as well as the system will allow them to work. It’s important to understand that viscerally.”


® 86 ManufacturingEngineeringMedia.com | November 2014


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Photo courtesy W. Edwards Deming Institute


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