I recently read an article on the Quality Digest website titled, “Deming, Systems Thinking, and the Future,” by Tripp Babbitt, who specializes in systems thinking. His article starts with, “W. Edwards Deming did a great disservice. He left a prescription for what the United States should do to improve government, manufacturing, and service.”

The gist of the article was that by creating a prescription for managers to follow, (i.e., Deming’s 14 Points for Management), he was preventing managers from actually doing what made Toyota successful: getting themselves and their employees to habitually challenge the status quo and figure out the solutions specific to their processes, one obstacle at a time.

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