All across the country we're busy trying to improve American education. How? By applying the techniques commonly used by American business management --frequent evaluations to find out who is doing a poor job, career ladders and merit pay to reward the productive worker and easier dismissal for the weak and incompetent. But will it work? Does it work in the private sector?
There's no question that attracting and retaining high quality teachers is indeed very important. If you don't have competent people, nothing is going to help. But even with them, will schools improve if they're managed the same way American business has traditionally been managed -- by a sort of carrot-and-stick approach to employees? Before we impose this system on American schools, shouldn't we at least listen to the critics who say that this type of management is what has made American industry a failure in comparison with our Japanese counterparts?
For over a quarter of a century, W. Edwards Deming told American business that unless it changed its approach to productivity and quality, the economy would be destroyed. Unfortunately no one was listening. Deming had gone to Japan in 1950, invited the 45 top industrialists to come to a meeting and told them about his methods of producing high-quality goods at a lower cost. The story of "Deming's Way" is told in an article under the title by Myron Tribus in the Spring 1983 issue of New Management, a quarterly publication of the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Southern California. Tribus is director of the Center for Advanced Engineering Study at M.I. T. and formerly vice president for research and engineering at Xerox as well as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for science and technology.
Within six weeks of Deming's visit, Tribus writes, "some of the industrialists reported productivity gains of as much as 30% without purchasing any new equipment." Since then Japan has become a proving ground. But in spite of the fact that Deming's way has worked, "American managers travel to Japan, marvel at the behavior of factory workers, and conclude that it is something that is inherent in Japanese culture. The mangers thus come home convinced that it is not their fault. They blame their problems on the American workers, on taxes, on regulation, on the decay of society -- in short, on anything except their own managerial philosophies .... They do not realize that Deming has developed an entirely new concept of how to manage systems of machines and people."
What are the different approaches? The American manager aims to "run the company as profitably as he can and to expand its business .... The American idea of a good manager is one who sets up a system, directs the work through subordinates and, by making crisp and unambiguous assignments, develops s set of standards of performance of his employees. He sets goals and production targets for his people. He rates the employees as objectively as he can. He identifies poor performers and gives them further education to meet standards, or he replaces them. He hopes thereby to create the most efficient system possible."
By contrast, the manager who follows Deming's way "sees his job as providing consistency and continuity of purpose for his organization, and seeking ever-more-efficient ways to achieve this purpose. For him, making a profit is necessary for survival, but is by no means the main purpose. The basic purpose of his organization is to provide the best and least-cost [product] for his customers, and continuity of employment for his workers. He does not view the concepts of 'best' and 'least cost' as contradictory."
This manager, writes Tribus, "believes that he and the workers have a natural division of labor: They are responsible for doing the work within the system, and he is responsible for improving the system. He realizes that the potentials for improving the system are never ending, so he does not call upon consultants to teach him how to design the 'best' system. He knows that doesn't exist. Any system can be continuously improved. And the only people who really know where the potentials for improvement lie are the workers themselves."
Tribus notes that under the Deming approach, everyone in the system is involved in studying it and proposing how to improve it, each person spending about 5% of the time doing this. He writes: "The employees will then view the setting of work standards as a dumb idea, since it inhibits their ability to improve the system. They will not need to 'manage by objectives' because they will be engaged in constantly redefining their objectives themselves, and recording the performance of the system." And, most important, workers and manager alike "will find that, in most systems, 80 to 85 % of problems are with the system and 15 to 20 % are with the worker. This is an important fact to understand, for it frees workers to speak out without fear, a quality which the Deming manager assiduously cultivates.
"Under Deming's Way, the manager understands that he needs the workers not only to do work, but to improve the system. Thus he will not regard them simply as flesh and blood robots, but as thinking, creative human beings. No one will have to teach him to be nice to people. He will not try to motivate with empty slogans -- such as 'Zero Defects!' because workers will be measuring and counting the defects themselves, and helping to remove them. He will not ask them to sign pledges to be polite to customers. Nor will he select the 'Polite Trucker of the Week' award. Instead, he and they will study the records of repeat orders and ask what they can do to improve the statistics."
Deming's way of management and the Japanese success with it over more than 30 years demonstrate that improving systems improves quality, even with an existing work force and existing equipment. Will American schools adopt the old American business model of train-evaluate-reward-punish ... or will they take the path that's enabled the Japanese to swamp their American competitors? Nobody knows, and nothing's guaranteed. Here's how Tribus described how Deming must have felt over the quarter of a century that U.S. industry ignored his warnings: "The ultimate curse is to be a passenger on a large ship, to know that the ship is going to sink, to know precisely what to do to prevent it, and to realize that no one will listen!"