Profound Book Club August 4. 2023 (Afternoon Session)

Summary of John Willis Book Club Discussion

Key Takeaways

• John discusses his approach to writing the Deming biography, wanting to tell compelling stories while staying respectful and avoiding potential issues with the Deming Institute. He focused on conveying the cultural context of 1980s America to understand the impact of Deming's message.

• There is discussion around Deming's focus on analytical statistics, SPC control charts, and revealing patterns to subject matter experts, rather than just reducing data to KPIs. Deming disliked Six Sigma and MBAs.

• They talk about the importance of community, collaboration and trust in Japanese culture and companies, in contrast to American focus on metrics and goals. John gives the example of a Japanese bullet train cleaning crew.

• Deming loved Japan and Japanese culture, so he likely learned as much or more there as he taught them. His management philosophies aligned with the cultural values he experienced in Japan.

• OpenContext founder discusses his company's approach to CMDB and integration with tools like PagerDuty. John recommends he connect with others after since they are working on similar problems.