W. Edwards Deming is probably best known for his "14 Points for Management", the key actions management must take to ensure quality, productivity, and success. Among other things, this plan encourages leaders to stop doing business based on price alone, to constantly improve the production system, to utilize job training, and to encourage pride in workmanship. Deming also taught management leaders to encourage cooperation at all levels. In addition, he instructed them to assure job stability and to equally value all employees. He is credited for many other things like contributing largely to the "Japanese Industrial Miracle," whereby Japan not only recovered from the damages of World War II, but quickly came out ahead as a world economic
Deming’s Theory of Knowledge stresses that a leader must understand the system he or she is attempting to manage. Without understanding this system, it cannot be managed or improved. He also makes the case that optimization of the parts does not optimize the whole, and system optimization requires coordination and cooperation of the parts. I currently work as a Mathematician in the Systems Analysis Division (SAD), which is part of the Systems Engineering Directorate (SED); so all the quality control, process improvement, statistical methods, and other theories of Deming relates heavily to my daily job, which is why I chose his theories to reflect upon within this essay. As an analyst I can see exactly where the “rubber hits the road” when it comes to his theories, especially his work in the statistics world. I work in the SAD, and that is divided into two branches, the Methodology and Lethality Branch, and the Operational Simulation and Analysis Branch. Both branches do similar types of analyses, but do not really work “together” so to speak, even though they are all housed on the same floor of a building within a few feet of each other. The lack of communication between the parts of the organization has more recently been recognized and several Six Sigma projects are under way to provide cross-training to employees in the two branches, as well as to standardize the inputs and outputs of our mathematical models so that both sides of the division can more