JE Deming

[Thorshammer]

I work for a company that uses many of Deming's principals to this very day. To see the impact of the drill down theory look at Toyota. If you have ever driven a 69 Toyota Corona you would know it was Absolute ****. Then 11 years later The Toyota Corolla. in 1980. Think about what the big 3 produced in 1969, then think about the Buick Skylark in 1980, what a piece of ****. The Corolla was an almost perfect car for a daily driver commuter for the average person. Cheap, very reliable (after the ignitor issue got fixed) Toyota recognizes JED as the single most influential change in their business to this day. Or so I have read.

BTW he did approach the American auto manufacturers with the same concepts and they all turned him down, but what should we expect from the same group that ran Tucker into the ground. But thats life in the big city.

We currently see Chinese copies of older units, They approach manufacturers of discontinued vehicles and buy the tooling, and produce the products, they make money, the original tooling gets sold, and usually there is some sort of extended parts availability for the older models. Economically at least in the short run it's good. Long term maybe not so good!


Erik Madsen

[Alfred1]

Yup, you have to give the Japanese a lot of credit even though they got many of their ideas from foreigners.

Didn't the US government, for many decades after the war, have a pretty relaxed attitude about trade with Japan and allowed the Japanese to have a very closed market to foreign goods? I vaguely remember back in the early nineties that the US actually closed their ports to Japanese goods for a few days to finally force the Japanese to remove a lot of their red-tape regulations that kept American goods (e.g., rice and film) from the Japanese market. Japan has had a pretty stagnant economy since that time when they have had to play by basically the same rules as everyone else.

[DonNewton]

Ah, yes. . .Mr. Deming. Refresh my memory, but about halfway through his list of things a good manager is supposed to do is "Avoid the use of cliches." Just what are the other statements, if not cliches?