The Deadly Diseases

Diagnosing What Ails the Modern Organization

The 14 Points… constitute a theory of management. Their application will transform Western style of management. Unfortunately, deadly diseases stand in the way of transformation… Alas, cure of the diseases requires complete shakeup of Western style management (fear of takeover, for example, and short-term profit).

There are diseases and there are obstacles. The distinction is intended partly in terms of difficulty of eradication and partly in terms of severity of the injury inflicted…

Enumeration of the Deadly Diseases

1. Lack of constancy of purpose to plan product and service that will have a market and keep the company in business, and provide jobs.

2. Emphasis on short-term profits: short-term thinking (just the opposite of constancy of purpose to stay in business), fed by fear of friendly takeover, and by push from bankers and owners for dividends.

3. Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review.

4. Mobility of management; job hopping.

5. Management by use only of visible figures, with little or no consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable.

   Peculiar to industry in the U.S…

6. Excessive medical costs.

7. Excessive costs of liability, swelled by lawyers that work on contingency fees.

- Dr. W.E. Deming. Out of the Crisis. (pp. 97-98)

ALTHOUGH written decades ago (Out of the Crisis was published in 1986…), Dr. Deming’s Seven Deadly Diseases of Western Management have sadly stood the test of time, continuing to afflict most U.S. and Canadian businesses and causing unknown and unknowable losses. We’ve become, in the 28 years since his passing, strangely accustomed to resting on our laurels and doing, as Dr. Eli Goldratt once observed, “almost anything before they will shift their paradigm.” We’ve become complacent with sustaining practices and behaviours that stifle our ability to improve.

The Seven Deadly Diseases are Dr. Deming’s diagnoses of readily-identifiable symptoms of the failure of top-management to manage what is important. In her collection of his essays, letters, and speeches, The Essential Deming, Dr. Joyce Orsini includes this excerpt from Deming’s 1987 article for Executive Excellence, where he elaborates:

Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, and of machine-time, all of which raise the manufacturer’s cost and price that the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste. The inevitable result is loss of market. Loss of market begets unemployment…

What must management do? Management obviously have a new job. Where can management learn about the transformation that is necessary? Management can not learn by experience alone what they must do to improve quality and productivity and the competitive position of the company.

Everyone simply doing his best is not the answer, either. It is first necessary that people know what to do. Drastic changes are required. The first step in the transformation is to learn how to change: that is, to understand and use the 14 points and to cure the seven deadly diseases.

(pp. 15-16)

When Dr. Deming was rediscovered by top-management after the 1980 NBC Whitepaper special, If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?, there was a deeply-felt motivation for change because suddenly there was context all around for what he had been long-advocating. As he’d predicted in the 1950s and 1960s, the Japanese were producing higher quality products for the same or less cost than Americans and were rapidly closing in on dominating several markets — they were seemingly unstoppable.

We are in a similar predicament today, with economic conditions mirroring the crisis of the early 1980s: A lagging balance of trade, poor productivity, record levels of inflation and debt, price sensitivity and shock, pressure to impose import tariffs to protect industry, and a pressing need to begin to improve something. The diseases were never cured, and so have returned, and with them an obligation to press them back, once more.

Reflection Exercise

Using the lens of the Seven Deadly Diseases above, and the examples in the video, compile a simple database of things you observe in your own organization or another that correspond to each disease. Provide some evidence and thoughts about each observation - it could be possible that an observation fits more than one disease or cascades from one to the other. Note it and consider why. As a consequence of thinking about the diseases, are there others that come to mind? For Canadian readers, consider the 6th and 7th diseases in your context: What other diseases might the “absence” of excessive medical and liability costs incur?

Here’s one to get you started: While I think it implied in the totality of Deming’s theory of management, another Deadly Disease occurs to me inspired by a phrase he attributed to friend and associate, Dr. Gipsie Ranney: The confusion of causes with effects, aka linear thinking by connecting unrelated phenomena or events together through “common sense” or prior experiences. This affliction contributes to host of other sub-optimizing behaviours

Recommended Reading

- Deming, Dr. W.E. Out of the Crisis. (pp. 97-125)