Re: REQUEST: why should education and self improvement be

["William J. Latzko" <latzko@worldnet.att.net>]

>[Student request - please copy sladejeff@hotmail on responses:
>Hello, my name is Jeff Slade, I am aware of the 14 points. But I am 
>curious about your perspectives on why education and self improvement 
>should be encouraged

Dear Jeff,

Deming always explained that "good ones' are hard to get. By "good ones" he 
meant people who had knowledge, particularly profound knowledge. Education 
and self improvement help to make such "good ones".  Hence, point 13 about 
education.

It was Deming's point that any form of education and/or self improvement 
was useful not only to the student but also to the firm. Therefore, he 
contended that companies should encourage education and self improvement. 
As a minimum, they should not handicap the student who is engaging in this 
effort. For instance, he said that companies should not send a student, 
studying at night, on filed trips that would cause the student to miss classes.

I teach at Fordham. Every term one or more students come to me to ask for 
time off to go on such field trips. Companies that are underwriting the 
students education do this with a frightening frequency. Quite often, they 
send students to a training course that duplicate what the student was doing.

Simply put, the mind like the body tends to improve with training. Any type 
of training. Deming often made the point that it did not matter what one 
studied as long as one studied. He thought that companies supporting only 
courses that they thought were directly related to the company's work were 
foolishly undervaluing other forms of education. For example, when I ran a 
quality department at a money center bank, one of my employees wanted to 
study law. Strictly speaking, this was not one of the "approved" courses of 
study. All the same, I managed to get support for him. He took his degree 
and passed the bar exam for New York. We then transferred him to the legal 
department. There he became a star performer as he was the only person in 
that department familiar with the operation and with the law.

Hope this helps.

Bill Latzko
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William J. Latzko                              Voice: 201-868-5338
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