Deming: “Eliminate numerical quotas for the work force” and exhortations for accountability, since they are “directed at the wrong people”

“What is wrong with posters and exhortations? They are directed at the wrong people”.

So Deming wisely argues.

For Deming:

· Such exhortations are problematic since they to “arise from management’s supposition that the production workers could, by putting their backs into the job, accomplish zero defects, improve quality, improve productivity, and all else that is desirable”

· “The charts and posters take no account of the fact that most of the trouble comes from the system”

· “Exhortations and posters generate frustration and resentment. They advertise to the production worker that the management are unaware of the barriers to pride of workmanship”

· “The immediate effect of a campaign of posters, exhortations, and pledges may well be some fleeting improvement of quality and productivity, the effect of elimination of some obvious special causes”

· “In time, improvement ceases or even reverses. The campaign is eventually recognized as a hoax”

· “management needs to learn that the main responsibility is theirs from now on to improve the system, and, of course, to remove any special causes detected by statistical methods”

· Installing new machines led to greater productivity, which then led to new production goals. The new goals “will create questions and resentment among production workers”

· “Their first thought is that the management is never satisfied. Whatever we do, they ask for more”

· More useful could be posters that “explain to everyone on the job what the management is doing month by month to (for example) purchase better quality of incoming materials from fewer suppliers, better maintenance, or to provide better training, or statistical aids and better supervision”

· Deming challenges exhortations for accountability, – saying “Hold people accountable! For what? What is meant by “crystal clear”? What is failure? Whose failure—the employee’s failure or the system’s failure?”

· He argues we should, perhaps “Eliminate numerical quotas for the work force”

· These types of quotas are a “fortress against improvement of quality and productivity.”

· And he had “yet to see a quota that includes any trace of a system by which to help anyone to do a better job … [they’re] totally incompatible with never-ending improvement”