W. Edwards Deming offers 14 important point for Management. He believes that their unwillingness to plan for the future can result in loss of jobs, loss of business and loss of investment. It is written in simple language that anyone can understand. He thinks that a transformation is necessary to acquiring good management skills. This book was originally published in 1986 but the principles still apply today. He is a brilliant man and his book reflects that. I only wish industry had paid attention to him then. Maybe we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in today. If you are in management or interested in management this is a must read. Very good book.

I heard Deming speak in Philadelphia during the early 1980s. I was a business reporter on a newspaper at the time. Japanese industry was flying high. People were wondering why their products were so far superior to American-made counterparts, especially automobiles. The answer was largely Deming, who, after World War II preached the gospel of quality. He was laughed at by American industry. With the U.S. being the only developed country that wasn't in shambles after the war, we were able to make anything of any quality and the world would buy it; they had no alternative. Deming found his audience in Japan, where "cheap Japanese transistor radio," became a stereotype of low-priced, cheap imported goods in the 1950s and 1960s. Deming's impact was so great that the Deming prize for quality became one of the most revered honors in Japan. I've never forgotten one thing he said in his talk. The typical U.S. management approach to evaluating productivity was to look at all the workers and see how many widgets each turned out in an hour and then fire the one who made the fewest. This was illogical because there will always be a highest producer and a lowest producer. The crucial question to ask is whether everyone is meeting a reasonable standard of productivity, not who's on top and who's on the bottom. Maybe they are all superior employees? Maybe none of them are, but arbitrarily chopping off the one on the bottom tells you nothing.