In many primitive cultures,
people believe that names have magical power. We believe we are
more sophisticated than that. We believe that it's numbers that
do the magic.
Our trust in numbers as a magical high road to organizational
productivity began in the early part of the Twentieth Century.
People then thought that science and engineering were going to
usher in a new utopian life for us all.
Frederick Winslow Taylor captured the attention of businesspeople
by dramatically improving efficiency at the companies he worked
with. He called his work "Scientific Management."
Scientific Management spawned time and motion studies, industrial
engineering and, by the time the US entered the Second World War,
Operations Research. Operations Research was and is the use of
mathematical tools to improve decision making.
Industry and the military turned to masters of this arcane art
to help improve efficiency and productivity. Two of the people
who applied Operations Research to help America win the war were
W. Edwards Deming and Robert Strange McNamara. They were both
brilliant thinkers, but with different approaches.
Deming developed ways to increase the speed of production and
improve the quality of finished goods. He taught principles of
statistical quality control to assembly line workers and their
supervisors.
Even though Deming's techniques improved operations during the
war, they couldn't survive the success that came with peace. After
the war, American industry seemed to forget Deming's methods in
the flood of demand for American products. Deming went off to
Japan where he taught statistical process control to the Japanese.
At the time, the word "Japanese" was synonymous with "shoddy"
when it came to manufactured goods. But Deming changed that. By
the1980s, companies like Sony and Toyota, using his methods, had
given Japanese goods a reputation for quality.
Belatedly, American businesses began to adopt the statistical
quality control techniques that Deming, and others like Joseph
Juran, and Philip Crosby had been teaching for decades. They worked
in America just like they'd worked in Japan.
W. Edwards Deming's approach to operations research gave us better
cars. Robert McNamara's gave us many of the stupidities of the
Viet Nam War.
At the start of World War II, McNamara left a teaching position
at Harvard to work with General Curtis LeMay and the Army Air
Force. They needed help. Spare parts inventory was scattered all
over. Nobody really knew how much there was or where. Cargo ships
often delivered goods where they weren't needed.
McNamara worked out important logistics and inventory problems.
He helped coordinate massive projects, like the development of
the B-29. He made things run better.
After the war, McNamara was hired by Henry Ford II at the Ford
Motor Company. Like the military in World War II, the Ford Motor
Company needed what McNamara and his friends, dubbed the Whiz
Kids, could provide. When he got to Dearborn, McNamara found Ford
estimating its accounts payable by weighing stacks of invoices.
McNamara became President of Ford in 1960. A month later he accepted
John Kennedy's invitation to become Secretary of Defense. He saw
it as another opportunity to work magic.
In McNamara's ideal world, the system works efficiently, guided
by a kind of Grand Wizard, able to set aside emotion and use the
power of undiluted reason. In this view, the only real issue is
making sure that the wizard in the middle has a constant flow
of information.
That works with some problems. McNamara made many efficiency
improvements at the Defense Department.
But the Grand Wizard method doesn't and didn't work with war.
Instead it led us into a looking glass world of body counts and
other statistical measures that fattened the printouts without
actually measuring what was happening on the ground.
That, in turn, led some commander to pressure their subordinates
for better numbers. It was a recipe for disaster.
Deming and McNamara were both masters of the same the statistical
and modeling methods. The difference was in approach.
Deming imagined statistics and mathematics as tools for everyone
to use. His system, which he called The Deming Management Method,
involved teaching people on the front lines to use the tools.
He included guidance for management such as "institute training
on the job" and "drive out fear." His approach gave us better
Toyotas and better toasters.
McNamara imagined something different. He saw himself, or some
other superior human being, as the architect of a system that
would take the human messiness out of things. That approach gave
us tragedy.
It cannot be the numbers that are magical. The numbers will only
help us do magic if we use them as tools to help us make better
decisions in a world of human beings.
Top of page
There are several
good books and Web resources on Deming, McNamara, Scientific Management
and Statistical Quality Control.
For a look at where it all started, read The
One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency
by Robert Kanigel.
You can also go right to the source and read an excerpt from
Taylor's Principles
of Scientific Management, published in 1911.
Virginia
Postrel wrote an excellent article about operations research
for the Boston Globe.
One of Deming's most popular books is Out
of the Crisis. It includes his theory of management including
his "14 points for management".
The Web site for the W. Edwards
Deming Institute.
An excellent site with links to lots of resources on quality
is located on Clemson
University's Continuous Quality Improvement Server.
Robert McNamara, the Whiz Kids and the War in Viet Nam are well
covered in The
Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam
2 November 2004
Reprinting and Reposting This Column
You may reprint or repost this article providing
that the following conditions are met:
- The article remains essentially unaltered.
- Wally Bock is shown as the author.
- The notice Copyright 2004 by Wally Bock or similar appears
on the article.
- Contact information for Wally is included with the article.
You may refer readers to this Web site as a way to meet this
requirement. Please link to http://www.bockinfo.com/
- Here is the wording we suggest when linking to this site.
"The article you've just read can be found on Wally Bock's extensive
Resource Web site along with many other articles and resources."
Any other reprinting or reposting requires specific permission
which is almost always granted. Click
here to request permission if necessary.
