Majerus, Medscape article, and Hoopes' book

["Jim Clauson, Breakthrough Systems" <jim@jclauson.com>]

DENizens,

The following is from 3 separate email - combined to facilitate easier reading.

1.  John's original message
2.  the text of John's letter to the editor
3.  a summary of James Hoopes' book referencing Deming

jc

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1.  John Majerus's original message:

Please see the reference to Deming in my letter to the editor of Medscape:

  http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/521301

It was an extremely brief summation, but I hope that I got it right: 
"Deming taught that problems can be best addressed by looking for 
systemic causes rather than trying to affix blame on individual 
culprits." As I tried to point out in the letter, what you can end up 
with when you do the opposite--go out of your way to affix blame on 
individual culprits--is workplace mobbing.

I'm also wondering if anyone has looked at James Hoopes' criticisms 
of some of Deming's views and tried to answer them specifically? This 
reference is also in the letter.

Regards,
John Majerus
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2.  the text of John's letter to the editor

The site above is a subscription site, so John provided the text:


To the Editor,

I read with great interest the article by Dr. Roland F. Chalifoux 
Jr., "So What Is a Sham Peer Review?[1]" and the accompanying 
editorial by Charles Bond.[2] Although I did not see it mentioned as 
such, it appears that what is described here could fall under the 
more general category of "workplace mobbing," a phenomenon identified 
by the late Dr. Heinz Leymann in the 1980s. The pejorative label of 
"disruptive doctor" bears much resemblance to that of "difficult 
professor," as outlined by Ken Westhues[3,4] in his online essay, 
"'The Difficult Professor': a Pernicious Concept."

Although the factors described show a doctor's career to be uniquely 
at risk, I think that the lessons pointed to here may give all of us 
pause, doctor and allied health professional alike. In the case of 
the allied health professional, the "annual performance review" is 
what may similarly come into play as a mobbing instrument, with 
potentially devastating results to those who have an established 
history, as Westhues points out, of typically above-average 
performance. The management guru W. Edwards Deming,[5] although he 
has been criticized as being naive in this regard, may have had it 
right when he advocated the abolishment of the individual annual 
performance review altogether.

I particularly like the following take on Deming's view of 
performance appraisals given by Harry Goldstein[6] in the IEEE Spectrum:

Deming viewed all performance appraisals -- starting with grades in 
elementary school and moving up to merit systems for rewarding and 
punishing employees -- as a continuum of pain meted out over a 
lifetime. He believed that people are born intrinsically motivated 
with high self-esteem and tend to enjoy learning and cooperating with 
others. These attributes are gradually eroded by the extrinsic 
motivators employed by educators and businesses, until the only thing 
left is a desiccated husk ready for the trash heap -- or retirement.

Deming taught that problems can be best addressed by looking for 
systemic causes rather than trying to affix blame on individual 
culprits. James Hoopes,[7] while critical of some of Deming's 
beliefs, still praises Deming as someone who "towers over most other 
gurus in the real good that he did." It is sadly ironic then, Hoopes' 
description of the final days of Deming's life:

With extraordinary energy and dedication, Deming worked up until 
within a few weeks of his death from kidney failure at the age of 
ninety-three, giving one of his famous seminars to a large audience 
while tethered to an oxygen bottle. In the hospital, near the end, he 
suggested ideas for better care, then lamented the miserable 
management skills of this doctors, who used his suggestions to 
correct individual nurses instead of improving the system in which 
the nurses worked.

John Majerus
Senior Programmer/Analyst
Biomedical Informatics
Rochester, Minnesota
<mailto:jmajerus@acm.org>jmajerus@acm.org

References
    * Chalifoux R, Jr. So what is a sham peer review? MedGenMed. 
2005;7:47. Available at: 
http://medgenmed.medscape.com/viewarticle/515862 Accessed November 15, 2005.
    * Bond C. Editorial in response to "what is sham peer review?" 
MedGenMed. 2005;7:48. Available at: 
http://medgenmed.medscape.com/viewarticle/515869 Accessed November 15, 2006.
    * Westhues K. "The difficult professor": a pernicious concept. 
Available at: http://mueller.educ.ucalgary.ca/Difficult/default.html 
Accessed January 12, 2006.
    * Westhues K. Homepage at the University of Waterloo. Available 
at: http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/ Accessed January 23, 2006.
    * Deming WE. Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, Mass: Massachusetts 
Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study; 1986.
    * Goldstein H. Appraising the performance of performance 
appraisals. IEEE Spectrum. 2006. Available at: 
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemplate.jsp?ArticleId=w110101 
Accessed January 12, 2006.
    * Hoopes J. (2003). The Statistician - W. Edwards Deming. False 
Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas 
Are Bad for Business Today. Cambridge, Mass: Perseus; 2003.
==================================================================
3.  a summary of James Hoopes' book referencing Deming

False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their 
Ideas Are Bad for Business Today

FROM THE PUBLISHER
"In this critical history of American management, business historian 
James Hoopes offers modern managers a more realistic perspective. He 
reminds us that the corporations' ability to create wealth depends on 
managerial authority, so top-down power and its potential abuse are 
here to stay in corporate America." "The origins of today's misguided 
management practices are rooted in the influential theories of the 
early twentieth century gurus, who aimed to temper management's 
authoritarian power with democratic principles. False Prophets 
vividly tells the story of these colorful and flawed characters in 
the context of the ever-changing American political and cultural 
climate. It introduces us to: Frederick W. Taylor, the first 
management guru and the father of scientific management who 
ruthlessly sped up workers by timing their every motion; Mary Parker 
Follett, the forgotten pioneer whose ideas on "followship" remain 
vitally useful in corporate life; Elton Mayo, the Australian 
immigrant whose intellectual chicanery on the subject of human 
relations put the Harvard Business School on the map; W. Edwards 
Deming, who brought quality management to America via a detour 
through Japan; and Peter Drucker, who left Germany in protest of 
Hitler's tyranny and tried bravely but unsuccessfully to make power 
morally legitimate in American corporations." This penetrating and 
fascinating book critically examines the gurus' ideas and traces 
their evolution to modern business applications. Hoopes challenges 
the popular movements that followed as a result and sharply 
criticizes today's gurus for continuing to perpetuate bad management 
in the name of democratic values. In the process, he shows executives 
and managers how to recognize fad from fact and gives them new 
guidelines for using authority effectively and responsibly.