Book Review: What Would Deming Do?

Mis-Attributions, Mis-Quotes, Missing Sources, and Mysteries

What is quality? The basic problem anywhere is quality. What is quality? A product or service possesses quality if it helps somebody and enjoys a good and sustainable market. Trade depends on quality.

Deming, Dr. W.E. The New Economics, 3rd ed. (p. 2)

THE AIM for this post is to follow-through on a commitment I made earlier to provide my thoughts on Niels Pflaeging’s new book of quotations, What Would Deming Do? Nurture Great Organizations and Societies Guided by W. Edwards Deming’s Best Quotes, after giving it a read-over. I pre-ordered my copy on Amazon and began reading it shortly after taking delivery via Kindle on March 1st.

Quick Review for the Impatient

Hold off for the second edition, this one has a number of quality issues that seriously affect its utility for readers.

What Is the AIM of the book?

While Niels doesn’t state this, we can infer from the title that it’s to inspire readers toward improving their organizations and society with some of the good doctor’s profound insights, witticisms, and seemingly counterintuitive quips. After spending the weekend reading it cover-to-cover, I think it unfortunately falls short of the mark, as I’ll detail later.

Who Is the Intended Audience?

Again, not stated, but we can infer anyone who wants to learn more about Deming’s theory and philosophy of leadership through his words.

What’s Inside?

Within its 168 pages is a collection of 152 quotations ostensibly sourced from ten books by Deming and other authors who were either directly connected to, or strongly influenced by him, and The Deming Institute quotations collection. The quotes are arranged into eight thematic chapters (People at Work, Learning, Sustainability, Systems, Societies, Excellence, Measuring, and Managers), with each prefaced by a quote or excerpt and some thoughts from Niels about the theme. You also get a very brief overview of The System of Profound Knowledge and his 14 Points, and a short, impassioned, and inspiring essay for why the world needs Deming’s knowledge now, more than ever.

Misguided by W. Edwards Deming’s “Best Quotes”

An old adage goes that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, however, I think you could reasonably expect a book of the “best quotes” of Dr. Deming to contain, as best as could be ascertained, words and thoughts directly attributable to him— to do otherwise would be misguiding the reader.

I began to have my doubts on this when I encountered two entries that seemed, to my eyes, out-of-step with Deming’s style:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t initially verify these because none of the 152 quotes have any citations or cross-references to any of the books in the listed Sources or other materials. An online search quickly yielded these phrases were originally authored by either Confucius or Lao Tzu and often mis-attributed to Deming.

My curiosity piqued, I pulled up searchable copies of all ten listed Sources through the Internet Archive, deming.org, and my own Kindle library to search for any mention of the phrases and came up empty. And so began my weekend visiting many rabbit holes in search of attributions for each and every quote…

Mis-Attributed, Misquoted, Missing, and Mysteries

First, the good news: The majority of quotes in the book can, in fact, be traced to Deming through either the listed Sources or other publications— it just would have been nice to have even basic citations pointing the way to originating Source(s).

The bad news? 55 entries or 36% fall into one of four categories:

• 7 are mis-attributed to Deming in various forms.

• 9 are misquoted or paraphrased from an original source. This happens as quotes become memes and lose some fidelity as they are traded through time.

• 14 have missing or lost sources, most of which I was able to locate, including some really interesting finds such as articles in the New York Times, People Weekly (!!), and an obscure collection of Deming quotes called Quotations of Dr. Deming: The Little Blue Book, that began in 1992 from the notes of a PoliSci student at the University of Hawaii in Honalulu.

• 25 have mysterious or unknown origins that could not be confirmed; Deming may have said them, but there’s no supporting evidence I could find. These I suspect were pulled as interesting filler. I did find many of them on inspirational posters.

I’ve compiled my research into a dialogue map you can view here.

Dialogue Map detailing the errors I found in What Would Deming Do?

My Research Methods

For the curious, I’ve included links to all the online sources I used to cross-check each quote in my dialogue map (the frame just to the right of the book cover), including fifteen original books you can search and check out for free from the Internet Archive, along with links to the last interview Deming gave to Industry Week Magazine. I’d open each of these in a separate tab on my browser, along with some search engines and run keyword searches while stepping through each tab. Entries that couldn’t be found I’d search against my Kindle library, eg. for Dr. Joyce Orsini’s book, The Essential Deming.

What Would Make This Book Better?

• Using quotes that can be cited against confirmed sources.

• Adding context in the form of background details or points of interest to help frame the quote’s aim and what Deming was communicating. I’ve done this with some entries in my dialogue map, above.

Conclusion: Do Not Get This Book (Yet)

One thing you may observe when you read Deming’s works or books about him, and listen to his speeches is that he gave credit for the ideas of others that informed his own. In Out of the Crisis, for example, he’s effusive in his crediting of Dr. Lloyd S. Nelson, noting “The reader of this book will find on nearly every page application of Dr. Nelson’s pronouncements.”; in The New Economics he credits Dr. Barbara Lawton and Dr. Nida Backaitis for their input into the third chapter, “Introduction to a System”, and his doctoral thesis student, Cureton Harris, for teaching him about American management.

Deming was not just practising humility, but leading by example in demonstrating that we all work together as a system whether we realize it or not: We help each other learn.

In this light, it’s rather ironic that a book of quotes by the man responsible for igniting the Japanese quality miracle would be a meta-commentary on its own quality and utility as a source of learning, yet here we are. The lack of citations, mis-attributions, mis-quotes, missing sources, and mystery sources make it difficult for the reader to use the book to fulfill its aim of guidance through Deming’s “best quotes” when more than a third don’t even originate with him and 25 can’t be reliably sourced one way or another. Considering it only took me a weekend of effort to do basic background research, I’m left wondering why this wasn’t done while pulling the material together for the book?

My recommendation is to give this book a pass for now until Niels fixes the issues for, hopefully, a second revised edition.