The Day the Music Stopped and The Day Rational Business Died

Fifty years ago today in a frozen field near Clear Lake, Iowa, an airplane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. (the Big Bopper) Richardson and pilot Roger Peterson crashed, killing all three rock stars and their pilot.

George Lucas' 1973 cinematic love letter to the “teen car culture” of the early 1960s, "American Graffiti," includes the memorable line: "Rock 'n' roll's been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died."

Fifty-nine years before the infamous 1959 plane crash, a business legend was born in Sioux City, Iowa…W. Edwards Deming. By 1959, Dr. Deming was well into his transformation of the Japanese manufacturing industry. He is regarded as having had more impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual. Despite being considered somewhat of a hero in Japan, he was only beginning to win widespread recognition in the U.S. at the time of his death in 1993.

To echo the words of George Lucas, “Rational business has been going downhill ever since Dr. Deming died.” Ten years before Dr. Deming’s death, Bill Capodagli had the privilege of working with and being trained by Dr. Deming.

Dr. Deming’s teachings of Profound Knowledge were comprised of four parts:
1. Appreciation of a system: understanding the overall processes involving suppliers, producers, and customers (or recipients) of goods and services;
2. Knowledge of variation: the range and causes of variation in quality, and use of statistical sampling in measurements;
3. Theory of knowledge: the concepts explaining knowledge and the limits of what can be known;
4. Knowledge of psychology: concepts of human nature.

The System of Profound Knowledge is the basis for application of Deming's famous 14 Points for Management:
1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs.
2. Adopt the new philosophy. We are in a new economic age. Western management must awaken to the challenge, must learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move towards a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust. 5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease cost.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.
9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.
11. Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership.
Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute workmanship.
12. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.
14. Put everyone in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everyone's work.

In the early 1980s, Dr Deming was warning American business about what he called “The Seven Deadly Diseases” (also known as the "Seven Wastes"):
1. Lack of constancy of purpose
2. Emphasis on short-term profits
3. Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
4. Mobility of management
5. Running a company on visible figures alone
6. Excessive medical costs
7. Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees

Short-term mentality, excessive medical costs, lack of purpose…sounds like the editorial page from one of today’s newspapers. We never listened to Dr. Deming back in the 1980s. The future of rational business rests on the embracement of his teachings even more today. Instead of throwing money at the problem in the form of a TRILLION DOLLAR stimulus package, let’s apply Deming’s system of Profound Knowledge.

The notion seems almost silly today, but 50 years ago not even the musical pioneers themselves were certain that rock 'n' roll would survive much into the 1960s, whether before or after the Day the Music Died. "Buddy Holly totally was the model for the Beatles and everything that came after," says Dion DiMucci, the Bronx-born rock troubadour with blues roots and a doo-wop streak who remains the sole surviving headliner from the 1959 tour.

Will Dr. Deming’s teachings be reborn and become a model for business in this new century; or will this truly be the day that rational business as we knew it in the 1980s died?