Re: Drucker, Deming and Quality

["C. Robert Clements" <clementz@kos.net>]

Balaji S. Reddie wrote:

>On the other hand Peter Drucker did not have very kind things to say of
>Deming - I don't really remember the book I'm referring to but I do
>remember him saying something to the tune of....."Deming's TQM is the
>spit of Taylor's Scientific Management"...
>
Hello Balaji,

The source of your Drucker quote is from "Management Challenges for the 
21st Century," p. 139, published in 1999.

Following is the context of the quote, beginning at the bottom of p. 138:

***

And yet every method during these last hundred years that has had the 
slightest success in raising the productivity of manual workers--and 
with it their real wages--has been based on Taylor's principles, no 
matter how loudly its protagonists proclaimed their differences with 
Taylor. This is true of "work enlargement," "work enrichment" and "job 
rotation" --all of which use Taylor's methods to lessen the worker's 
fatigue and thereby to increase the worker's productivity. It is true of 
such extensions of Taylor's principles of task analysis and industrial 
engineering to the entire manual work process as Henry Ford's assembly 
line (developed after 1914, when Taylor himself was already sick, old 
and retired). It is just as true of the Japanese "Quality Circle," of 
"Continuous Improvement" ("Kaizen"), and of "Just-In-Time Delivery."

    The best example, however, is W. Edwards Deming's (1900-1993) "Total
    Quality Management." What Deming did--and what makes Total Quality
    Management effective--to analyze and organize the job exactly the
    way Taylor did. But then he added, around 1940, Quality Control
    based on a statistical theory that was only developed ten years
    after Taylor's death. Finally, in the 1970s, Deming substituted
    closed-circuit television and computer simulations for Taylor's
    stopwatch and motion photos. But Deming's Quality Control Analysts
    are the spit and image of Taylor's Efficiency Engineers and function
    the same way.

Whatever his limitations and shortcomings--and he had many--no other 
American, not even Henry Ford (1863-1947), has had anything like 
Taylor's impact. "Scientific Management" (and its successor, "Industrial 
Engineering") is the one American philosophy that has swept the 
world--more so even than the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. In 
the last century there has been only one worldwide philosophy that could 
compete with Taylor's: Marxism. And in the end, Taylor has triumphed 
over Marx.

***