Happiness has been a theme of this week. According to Deming, people are entitled to joy at work. Our visit to Ashikaga today was the best example of this theme. Ashikaga is known as the "5S City" for using 5S throughout the city. At a luncheon, a former Ashikaga Red Cross Hospital chairman said we focus on customer happiness instead of customer satisfaction.

Today is the "Tree Ring Day." If you've ever seen a tree stump's top, you'll notice that it has a series of concentric rings. A tree's rings can tell us how old the tree is and what the weather is like each year. Each company we visited this week was like tree trunks. In some cases, the rings on their tree trunks are wide, while in others, they are narrow.

It was a busy day today. We left the hotel at 9:15 am and returned at 6:30 pm. Isao Yoshino joined us on the bus, and today's tours were honored by his presence. The highlight of my day was asking Mr. Yoshino what Dr. Deming's impact was on Toyota during the bus ride.

Having been rerouted through Guam to reach Narita, I finally arrived in Nagoya on Sunday. We met Isao Yoshino on Monday morning as part of Katie's Leaning to Lead, Leading to Learn book. For over 40 years, Isao Yoshino held various managerial positions. Mr. Yoshino oversaw NUMMI's manager training program. The Kanri Nouryoku (Kan-Pro) program was one of Mr. Yoshino's most notable contributions to Toyota. Using A3 as the standard method for problem-solving was popularized through this manager development initiative. Mr. Yoshino gave us some amazing insights in his lecture on Toyota managers.

For years, I've wondered why organizations like Delta, American Airlines, Marriott, and American Express can't eliminate a mainframe-based general-purpose operating system called TPF (Transaction Processing Facility).

Ron Moen fills in some gaps in his writing "Foundation and History of the PDSA Cycle." In his paper, he illustrates the history of the PDSA from Galileo and Bacon to American pragmatism. C.I. Lewis wrote "Mind and the World Order" in 1929, profoundly influencing Dr. Walter Shewhart and Dr. Edwards Deming.

The first woman to earn a Ph.D. in computer science and a primary contributor to the BASIC programming language.

What is your organization's standard? In your organization, what does quality mean? Is it just the standard, or is it the standard? Does quality mean what you must do, or does it gives you a competitive edge? Whenever I think of a Volvo, I immediately think of safety. When I think of Toyota, I think of quality and reliability. I think about toasters when I think of my bank. To put it another way, I think about something different from quality.

According to Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist from the 19th century, most wealth resides in the hands of a small number of people. Pareto's work rests on the principle that 80% of consequences arise from 20% of causes. It is also known as the 80/20 rule and the "Law of the Vital Few." While teaching at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Pareto wrote about the 80/20 connection. Pareto showed in his work, Cours d'économie politique, that 20% of the population owned 80% of the land in Italy.

Deming is known for introducing statistical process control (SPC) into quality control from inspection. Genichi Taguchi rounded out the total quality process by integrating quality control into the design stage. SPC was improved by employing Taguchi's methods and statistical experiments before production began. Deming's work s considered revolutionary, while Taguchi's is evolutionary. Taguchi provided approaches that helped improve products and processes at the design stage, while Deming provided management theories.

We can make two types of mistakes when trying to improve a system. It is a mistake to make local changes to a stable process. The term "common cause variation" is used by Dr. Deming to describe this type of system. The second type of mistake is when we treat abnormal events for normal ones. This type of variation is referred to as special cause variation by Dr. Deming. Making mistakes like these is tampering. A stable system is considered to be in statistical control.

It's 4 am Oslo time. I hope I won't have to write another post like this. It was a response to a suicide in our DevOps community in 2015 that I wrote a blog post regarding suicide.

These books were probably on Dr. Deming's bookshelf at some point. The deeper I dig into Dr. Deming’s management philosopy the more I find references to great minds born in the 19th century.

Nobel Prize physicist Percy Williams Bridgman was also concerned with specifics when creating synthetic diamonds using extreme pressures. His gauges kept breaking down when he worked under extreme pressure, so he had no idea what pressure levels he had reached. This work led him to describe a general philosophical doctrine called Operationalism. It is based on the idea that we can only know the meaning of something if we have a way of measuring it. In 1927 Bridgman's published, The Logic of Modern Physics.

According to some historians, Dr. Deming's contributions were largely founded by Dr. Walter Shewhart. Shewhart influenced Dr. Deming most, but Deming added some significant secret suave to Stewart's ideas that are worth exploring. 

According to W. Edwards Deming, variation is an inherent part of life and needs to be managed to improve a system. According to Deming, the prevailing system of management destroys people's intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, and curiosity to learn. As he describes in one of his famous quotes, the system is responsible for 94% of quality issues, not the individual. There is no better example of this philosophy than his Red Bead Game. Deming used the concept of his Red Bead Game back in the 1950s when he arrived in Japan. However, the game is probably most known from his Four Days with Deming seminar in the 1980s.

We sometimes joke that every DevOps presentation must include Deming's "Survival is not mandatory" quote. He did not make that exact quote; there is no evidence. When writing my book about Dr. Deming, I wanted to find the specific citation for the famous quote. He does not mention it in any of his books or writings. Although the Deming Institute cites a source, no specific paper or publication is cited. However, Deming is well known for using the notion of survival in his lectures, papers, and books. Deming references Darwin's survival of the fittest in Out of the Crisis, published in 1982.

In the past few years, I have done a considerable amount of research on Dr. Deming. I thought I'd share some of the books I've used for my research. Ratings and comments are based on memory and should not be considered specific commentary. The AWS ranking shows how popular the books are. I hope you enjoy it.