The Man Who Invented Management

The Man Who Invented Management
BusinessWeek
November 28, 2005
By John A. Byrne, with Lindsey Gerdes in New York

Little more than six months ago, I was sitting within a foot of Peter F. Drucker's right ear -- the one he could still hear from -- in the living room of his modest home in Claremont, Calif. Even that close, I had to shout my questions to him, often eliciting a "What?" rather than an answer. Yet when he absorbed my words, his mind remained vigorous even as his body was failing.

He had often said that at his age "one doesn't pray for a long life but for an easy death." Since then he had struggled through a series of ailments, from life-threatening abdominal cancer to a broken hip. Oversize hearing aids plugged into both ears, he had a pacemaker in his chest and needed a walker to get around his ranch home on Wellesley Drive. Over 20-plus years, I often met or spoke to Drucker in the course of reporting any number of business and management stories.

On that spring morning in April, in black cotton slippers and socks that barely covered his ankles, Drucker seemed unusually frail and tired -- not at all in a mood to ponder his legacy. "I'm not very introspective," he protested in his familiar guttural baritone, thick with the accent of his native Austria. "I don't know. What I would say is I helped a few good people be effective in doing the right things."

Let others now speak for Drucker, who died peacefully in his sleep at home on Nov. 11 at age 95, eight days shy of his 96th birthday:

"The world knows he was the greatest management thinker of the last century," Jack Welch, former chairman of General Electric Co. (GE ), said after Drucker's death.

"He was the creator and inventor of modern management," said management guru Tom Peters. "In the early 1950s, nobody had a tool kit to manage these incredibly complex organizations that had gone out of control. Drucker was the first person to give us a handbook for that."

Adds Intel Corp. (INTC ) co-founder Andrew S. Grove: "Like many philosophers, he spoke in plain language that resonated with ordinary managers. Consequently, simple statements from him have influenced untold numbers of daily actions; they did mine over decades."

The story of Peter Drucker is the story of management itself. It's the story of the rise of the modern corporation and the managers who organize work. Without his analysis it's almost impossible to imagine the rise of dispersed, globe-spanning corporations.

But it's also the story of Drucker's own rising disenchantment with capitalism in the late 20th century that seemed to reward greed as easily as it did performance. Drucker was sickened by the excessive riches awarded to mediocre executives even as they slashed the ranks of ordinary workers. And as he entered his 10th decade, there were some in corporations and academia who said his time had passed. Others said he grew sloppy with the facts. Meanwhile, new generations of management gurus and pundits, many of whom grew rich off books and speaking tours, superseded him. The doubt and disillusionment with business that Drucker expressed in his later years caused him to turn away from the corporation and instead offer his advice to the nonprofit sector. It seemed an acknowledgment that business and management had somehow failed him.

But Drucker's tale is not mere history. Whether it's recognized or not, the organization and practice of management today is derived largely from the thinking of Peter Drucker. His teachings form a blueprint for every thinking leader (page 106). In a world of quick fixes and glib explanations, a world of fads and simplistic PowerPoint lessons, he understood that the job of leading people and institutions is filled with complexity. He taught generations of managers the importance of picking the best people, of focusing on opportunities and not problems, of getting on the same side of the desk as your customer, of the need to understand your competitive advantages, and to continue to refine them. He believed that talented people were the essential ingredient of every successful enterprise.

RENAISSANCE MAN
Well before his death, before the almost obligatory accolades poured in, Drucker had already become a legend, of course. He was the guru's guru, a sage, kibitzer, doyen, and gadfly of business, all in one. He had moved fluidly among his various roles as journalist, professor, historian, economics commentator, and raconteur. Over his 95 prolific years, he had been a true Renaissance man, a teacher of religion, philosophy, political science, and Asian art, even a novelist. But his most important contribution, clearly, was in business. What John Maynard Keynes is to economics or W. Edwards Deming to quality, Drucker is to management.

After witnessing the oppression of the Nazi regime, he found great hope in the possibilities of the modern corporation to build communities and provide meaning for the people who worked in them. For the next 50 years he would train his intellect on helping companies live up to those lofty possibilities. He was always able to discern trends -- sometimes 20 years or more before they were visible to anyone else. "It is frustratingly difficult to cite a significant modern management concept that was not first articulated, if not invented, by Drucker," says James O'Toole, the management author and University of Southern California professor. "I say that with both awe and dismay." In the course of his long career, Drucker consulted for the most celebrated CEOs of his era, from Alfred P. Sloan Jr. of General Motors Corp. (GM ) to Grove of Intel.

-- It was Drucker who introduced the idea of decentralization -- in the 1940s -- which became a bedrock principle for virtually every large organization in the world.

-- He was the first to assert -- in the 1950s -- that workers should be treated as assets, not as liabilities to be eliminated.

-- He originated the view of the corporation as a human community -- again, in the 1950s -- built on trust and respect for the worker and not just a profit-making machine, a perspective that won Drucker an almost godlike reverence among the Japanese.

-- He first made clear -- still the '50s -- that there is "no business without a customer," a simple notion that ushered in a new marketing mind-set.

-- He argued in the 1960s -- long before others -- for the importance of substance over style, for institutionalized practices over charismatic, cult leaders.

-- And it was Drucker again who wrote about the contribution of knowledge workers -- in the 1970s -- long before anyone knew or understood how knowledge would trump raw material as the essential capital of the New Economy.

Drucker made observation his life's work, gleaning deceptively simple ideas that often elicited startling results. Shortly after Welch became CEO of General Electric in 1981, for example, he sat down with Drucker at the company's New York headquarters. Drucker posed two questions that arguably changed the course of Welch's tenure: "If you weren't already in a business, would you enter it today?" he asked. "And if the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?"

Those questions led Welch to his first big transformative idea: that every business under the GE umbrella had to be either No. 1 or No. 2 in its class. If not, Welch decreed that the business would have to be fixed, sold, or closed. It was the core strategy that helped Welch remake GE into one of the most successful American corporations of the past 25 years.

Drucker's work at GE is instructive. It was never his style to bring CEOs clear, concise answers to their problems but rather to frame the questions that could uncover the larger issues standing in the way of performance. "My job," he once lectured a consulting client, "is to ask questions. It's your job to provide answers." Says Dan Lufkin, a co-founder of investment banking firm Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. (CSR ), who often consulted with Drucker in the 1960s: "He would never give you an answer. That was frustrating for a while. But while it required a little more brain matter, it was enormously helpful to us. After you spent time with him, you really admired him not only for the quality of his thinking but for his foresight, which was amazing. He was way ahead of the curve on major trends."

Drucker's mind was an itinerant thing, able to wander in minutes through a series of digressions until finally coming to some specific business point. He could unleash a monologue that would include anything from the role of money in Goethe's Faust to the story of his grandmother who played piano for Johannes Brahms, yet somehow use it to serve his point of view. "He thought in circles," says Joseph A. Maciariello, who teaches "Drucker on Management" at Claremont Graduate University.

Part of Drucker's genius lay in his ability to find patterns among seemingly unconnected disciplines. Warren Bennis, a management guru himself and longtime admirer of Drucker, says he once asked his friend how he came up with so many original insights. Drucker narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. "I learn only through listening," he said, pausing, "to myself."

Among academics, that ad hoc, nonlinear approach sometimes led to charges that Drucker just wasn't rigorous enough, that his work wasn't backed up by quantifiable research. "With all those books he wrote, I know very few professors who ever assigned one to their MBA students," says O'Toole. "Peter would never have gotten tenure in a major business school."

I first met Drucker in 1985 when I was scrambling to master my new job as management editor at BusinessWeek. He invited me to Estes Park, Colo., where he and his wife, Doris, often spent summers in a log cabin, part of a YWCA camp. I remember him counseling me to drink lots of water, ingest a super dose of vitamin C, and take it easy to adjust to the high altitude. I spent two days getting to know Drucker and his work. We had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. We hiked the trails of the camp. And I became intimately familiar with his remarkable story.

Born in Austria in 1909 into a highly educated professional family, he seemed destined for some kind of greatness. The Vienna that Drucker knew had been a cultural and economic hub, and his parents were in the thick of it. Sigmund Freud ate lunch at the same cooperative restaurant as the Druckers and vacationed near the same Alpine lake. When Drucker first met Freud at the age of eight, his father told him: "Remember, today you have just met the most important man in Austria and perhaps in Europe." Many evenings his parents, Adolph and Caroline, would gather the intellectual elite in the drawing room of their Vienna home for wide-ranging discussions of medicine, politics, or music. Peter absorbed not merely their content but worldliness and a style of expression.

When Hitler organized his first Nazi meeting in Berlin in 1927, Drucker, raised a Protestant, was in Germany, studying law at the University of Frankfurt. He attended classes taught by Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. As a student, a clerk in a Hamburg export firm, and a securities analyst in a Frankfurt merchant bank, he lived through the years of Hitler's emergence, recognizing early the menace of centralized power. When his essay on Friedrich Julius Stahl, a leading German conservative philosopher, was published as a pamphlet in 1933, it so offended the Nazis that the pamphlet was banned and burned. A second Drucker pamphlet, Die Judenfrage in Deutschland, or The Jewish Question in Germany, published four years later, suffered the same fate. The only surviving copy sits in a folder in the Austrian National Archives with a swastika stamped on it.

Drucker immigrated to London shortly after Hitler became Chancellor, taking a job as an economist at a London bank while continuing to write and to study economics. He came to America in 1937 as a correspondent for a group of British newspapers, along with his new wife, Doris, whom he had met in Frankfurt. "America was terribly exciting," remembered Drucker. "In Europe the only hope was to go back to 1913. In this country everyone looked forward."

So did Drucker. He taught part time at Sarah Lawrence College before joining the faculty at Bennington College in Vermont. He could be a difficult taskmaster. One Bennington student recalled that Drucker said her paper "resembled turnips sprinkled with parsley. I could wring his fat frog-like neck," she wrote in a letter to her parents. "Unfortunately, he is a very brilliant and famous man. He has at least taught me something."

Drucker was a professor of politics and philosophy at Bennington when he was given the opportunity to study General Motors in 1945, the first time he peeked inside the corporation. His examination led to the publication of his groundbreaking book, Concept of the Corporation, and his decision, in 1950, to attach himself to New York University's Graduate School of Business. It was around this time that Drucker heard Schumpeter, then at Harvard University, say: "I know that it is not enough to be remembered for books and theories. One does not make a difference unless it is a difference in people's lives."

CREATING A DISCIPLINE
He took Schumpeter's advice to heart, beginning a career in consulting while continuing his life as a teacher and writer. Drucker's most famous text, The Practice of Management, published in 1954, laid out the American corporation like a well-dissected frog in a college laboratory, with chapter headings such as "What is a Business?" and "Managing Growth." It became his first popular book about management, and its title was, in effect, a manifesto. He was saying that management was not a science or an art. It was a profession, like medicine or law. It was about getting the very best out of people. As he himself put it: "I wrote The Practice of Management because there was no book on management. I had been working for 10 years consulting and teaching, and there simply was nothing or very little. So I kind of sat down and wrote it, very conscious of the fact that I was laying the foundations of a discipline."

Drucker taught at NYU for 21 years -- and his executive classes became so popular that they were held in a nearby gym where the swimming pool was drained and covered so hundreds of folding chairs could be set up. Drucker moved to California in 1971 to become a professor of social sciences and management at Claremont Graduate School, as it was known then. But he was always thought to be an outsider -- a writer, not a scholar -- who was largely ignored by the business schools. Tom Peters says he earned two advanced degrees, including a PhD in business, without once studying Drucker or reading a single book written by him. Even some of Drucker's colleagues at NYU had fought against awarding him tenure because his ideas were not the result of rigorous academic research. For years professors at the most elite business schools said they didn't bother to read Drucker because they found him superficial. And in the years before Drucker's death even the dean of the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont said: "This is a brand in decline."

In the 1980s he began to have grave doubts about business and even capitalism itself. He no longer saw the corporation as an ideal space to create community. In fact, he saw nearly the opposite: a place where self-interest had triumphed over the egalitarian principles he long championed. In both his writings and speeches, Drucker emerged as one of Corporate America's most important critics. When conglomerates were the rage, he preached against reckless mergers and acquisitions. When executives were engaged in empire-building, he argued against excess staff and the inefficiencies of numerous "assistants to." In a 1984 essay he persuasively argued that CEO pay had rocketed out of control and implored boards to hold CEO compensation to no more than 20 times what the rank and file made. What particularly enraged him was the tendency of corporate managers to reap massive earnings while firing thousands of their workers. "This is morally and socially unforgivable," wrote Drucker, "and we will pay a heavy price for it."

The hostile takeovers of the 1980s, a period that revisionists now say was essential to improve American efficiency and productivity, was for Drucker "the final failure of corporate capitalism." He then likened Wall Street traders to "Balkan peasants stealing each other's sheep" or "pigs gorging themselves at the trough." He maintained that multimillion-dollar severance packages had perverted management's ability to look out for anything but itself. "When you have golden parachutes," he told one journalist, "you have created incentives for management to collude with the raiders." At one point, Drucker was so put off by American corporate values that he was moved to say that, "although I believe in the free market, I have serious reservations about capitalism."

We tend to think of Drucker as forever old, a gnomic and mysterious elder. At least I always did. His speech, always slow and measured, was forever accented in that commanding Viennese. His wisdom could not have come from anyone who was young. So it's easy to forget his dashing youth, his long devotion to one woman and their four children (until the end, Drucker still greeted his wife of 71 years with an effusive "Hello, my darling!"), or even his deliciously self-deprecating sense of play.

During his early consulting work with DLJ, the partners flew out to California to meet with Drucker at home. After one of his famously meandering monologues, Drucker thought everyone needed a break.

"Well, boys," he said, "why don't we relax for a few minutes? Let's go for a swim."

The executives explained that they hadn't brought their swimming trunks.

"You don't need swimming suits because it's just men here today," replied Drucker.

"And we took off our clothes and went skinny-dipping in his pool," recalls Charles Ellis, who was with the group.

Surely, Drucker never fit into the buttoned-down stereotype of a management consultant. He always favored bright colors: a bottle-green shirt, a knit tie, a royal blue jacket with a blue-on-blue shirt, or simply a woolen flannel shirt and tan trousers. Drucker always worked from a home office filled with books and classical records on shelves that groaned under their weight. He never had a secretary and usually handled the fax machine and answered the telephone himself -- he was something of a phone addict, he admitted.

PRIVACY PREVAILS
Yet Drucker also was an intensely private man, revealing little of his personal life, even in his own autobiography, Adventures of a Bystander, the book he told me was his favorite of them all. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Drucker Archives at Claremont Graduate University contain only one personal letter from his wife to him. Doris had clipped two images from a 1950s-era newspaper, one of a handsome man in a plaid robe, fresh from a good night's sleep, another of a couple in love, man and woman staring into each other's eyes, over a late evening snack. She glued each black-and-white image onto a flimsy piece of typing paper and wrote the words: "I love you in the morning when things are kind of frantic. I love you in the evening when things are more romantic." It is undated and unsigned.

It was Doris, in her own unpublished memoir, who told the story of how she once locked Drucker in a London coal cellar to hide him from her disapproving mother. As Doris' mother turned the house upside down in a frantic search for a man she thought was sleeping with her daughter, Peter spent the better part of the night crouched in a cold, dark hole. Doris' mother had long hoped her daughter would someday marry a Rothschild or a German of high social standing. The last thing she wanted was for her to marry a light-in-the-pocket Austrian.

In his later years, as his health weakened, so did Drucker's magnetic pull. Although he maintained a coterie of corporate followers, he increasingly turned his attention to nonprofit leaders, from Frances Hesselbein of the Girl Scouts of the USA to Rick Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. Warren, author of The Purpose-Driven Life, considered Drucker a mentor. "Drucker told me: 'The function of management in a church is to make the church more churchlike, not more businesslike. It's to allow you to do what your mission is,"' Warren said. "Business was just a starting point from which he had this platform to influence leaders of all different kinds."

Still, it was clear Drucker cared deeply about how he would be remembered. He tried in 1990 to discredit and quash an admiring biography of quality guru Deming, whom he seemed to consider a rival. And when Professor O'Toole assessed the influence of Drucker's landmark 1945 study on General Motors, he concluded that the guru not only had had no impact on GM but also became persona non grata at the company for nearly half a century. "I sent it to Peter, and he spent hours going over it with me," recalls O'Toole. "He was a little unhappy with it because he didn't like the conclusion. He felt he had had a big impact at GM. I thought that was either very generous of Peter or else he was kidding himself."

During the same period, Drucker, then 80 years old, penned a severely flawed foreword for a new edition of Alfred Sloan's My Years with General Motors. In one passage, Drucker quotes Sloan as saying that the death of his younger brother Raymond was "the greatest personal tragedy in my life." Raymond, however, died 17 years after Alfred. In another section, Drucker noted that the publication of the book had been delayed because Sloan "refused to publish as long as any of the GM people mentioned in the book was still alive. On the day of the death of the last living person mentioned in the book, Sloan released it for publication," wrote Drucker. In fact, Sloan generously heaped praise on 14 colleagues in the preface of his book, and all were still alive when My Years with General Motors was first published.

Whether the mistakes were a result of sloppiness or his declining intellectual power is not clear. But Drucker was no longer at the top of his game. The dean of the Drucker school, Cornelis de Kluyver, had reason to believe that Drucker's influence was on the wane -- the school was having difficulty attracting big money from potential donors. To gain a $20 million gift for its puny endowment, de Kluyver agreed in 2003 to put another name on the school, that of Masatoshi Ito, the founder of Ito-Yokado Group, owner of 7-Eleven stores in Japan and North America. Students protested, even marching outside the dean's office toting placards decrying the change. An ailing Drucker volunteered to speak directly to the students. "I consider it quite likely that three years after my death my name will be of absolutely no advantage," he told them. "If you can get 10 million bucks by taking my name off, more power to you."

In April, during our last meeting, I asked Drucker what he had been up to lately. "Not very much," he replied. "I have been putting things in order, slowly. I am reasonably sure that I am not going to write another book. I just don't have the energy. My desk is a mess, and I can't find anything."

I almost felt guilty for having asked the question, so I praised his work, the 38 books, the countless essays and articles, the consulting gigs, his widespread influence on so many of the world's most celebrated leaders. But he was agitated, even dismissive, of much of his accomplishment.

"I did my best work early on -- in the 1950s. Since then it's marginal. O.K.? What else do you have?"

I pressed the nonagenarian for more reflection, more introspection. "Look," he sighed, "I'm totally uninteresting. I'm a writer, and writers don't have interesting lives. My books, my work, yes. That's different."

戴明愛智合作社連絡【5】

戴明愛智合作社連絡（Newsletter for Chinese Deming User Groups）【5】

主旨：應用戴明之愛智系統（Deming's System of Profound Knowledge ）
本刊（原則）暫定為周刊或提早出刊（必須成員間有書信往返 --引文請說明出處 並貼於hc的 個人新聞台 simon university ）
本期執筆：鍾漢清（兼）
發行日；2005/9 月/2日 （颱風過後晴朗天）
本期主題：組織一體之領導
（編輯說明：不同主題，以「 ******」區隔；主題內隔間，採取「----- 」；引他人文章用【】表示）

-----

陳教授 KJ留言：「小建議一點 常言道 名正則言順 我們現代人尤其搞理工的要講究定義 閣下主編者是 " Deming Taiwan Newsletter " 抑或是 "Chinese Deming Community Newsletter" 是一還是二？」

-----hc 答

Chinese Deming User Groups Newsletter

出版；華人戴明學院

106 台北市新生南路3段 88號2F

TEL ：02-23650127； FAX： 02-23650128

E-mail ：hcsimonl@gmail.com

網址： http://www.deming.com.tw >

──────

hc 到美國品質學會（ASQ）網站，才知道台灣品質學會之落後、貧乏。該會戴明哲學討論也很豐富。知道 Frank Gryna教授過逝【他與 Juran合編的書 20-30年前劉振老師譯校過……. 】。...

感謝 Justing（Justing 還送我們許多參考資料。

） 幫忙將美國品質學會之文章A Deming Inspired Management Code of Ethics 　轉成Ｗord檔，以利進一步翻譯處理。其實我認為 Deming為專業統計人員寫的論文更可觀： Principles of professional statistical practice, Annals of Mathematical Statistics, vol.36, 1965: pp.1883-1900

***** 風雨故人來

前高雄華泰電子公司的杜紹堯總經理來訪，相談他許多網路出版的新案子，他說其負責的公司群將致力於專業之出版 ……

--- Edward

鍾老師： 這篇評論文章【華文出版的現狀與發展】及回應挺有趣的。謝謝您分享這份資訊！

***** K.Y. Chung

Dear Hc, 我對這本書有興趣( 日本的製造哲學 )，但我不懂日文，有誰寫出讀書心得否？ 如何用在台灣的製造業？
-----
hc 搜網路，知道大凡英文文獻中談到the Japanese manufacturing philosophy 者，莫非指這些專門名詞Lean Manufacturing Philosophy

total productive maintenance (TPM).

"changes for the better" (Kaizen),

f "Just-In-Time" (JIT),

Total Quality Management (TQM)

等等

至於各大公司的獨特想法和制定，我在 Simon University 網頁談過Toshiba/Cannon………

生產力中心、中衛等處有資料可參考。

******

KY ：我以前也看過用英文唱的平劇 ，酷斃了的英文布袋戲 !!!(快暈倒...) ，
誰想的...!!! http://fm.cdpa.nsysu.edu.tw/fun/fun02/FM043_newyork.wmv

（ hc案：這文建會資助的，不知多少人聽得懂？）

-----

戴老師送：這是一個四歲的德國小女生 Joy Gruttman 所唱的「小鱷魚Snappy 」(Schnappi, das kleine Krokodil) 。歌詞內容是描述一條小鱷魚，嘗試張開口咬牠爸比的大腿。

這可愛的兒歌已經登上德國流行榜榜首，成為歷年來打入流行榜十大的最年輕的歌手。

http://blog.sina.com.tw/archive.php?blog_id=8416&md=entry&id=7082

*******

HC 一次錯誤之 Case Study

5 月底，我將開給台灣Dupont 的「 SPC研討會」發票給他們，並附 2戶頭A 與 B，希望他們匯入。其實，我應該給 A與C 戶，因為B 在永和，我幾乎未使用，

所以我一直等不到該款項，就請他們幫忙。一查（彼此通話對照），原來 2個月前就入帳。

------

一次補修

我有兩雙球鞋都脫膠。我知道工廠使用南寶品樹脂再加熱來封合。（ Nike為達環保承認，必須使用黏著力較弱的）。

你猜，我如何解決這問題 …….

-----

周前，紐約時報報導 GM（現代）等等公司的許多RECALL 事件……

日本則弄 Honda 偷偷試驗開發新車之醜聞……

*****

觀察美國 The Deming Institute 的聚會可以知道分成年會

譬如說， October 19-21, 2005 在West Lafayette, Indiana
主題為：
How to Create Unethical, Ineffective Organizations That Go Out of Business
(Many Organizations Do It, But Do You Know How You Do It?)

另外身份是統計學家作為改善之諮商。

我們都放掉他 1980之前的主要業務是法律方面的：

the Symposium on Deming's Analytic Papers in NYC on Monday, 26th September, 2005.

【 Although many people know Dr. Deming mainly for his work in management, he is better known in the statistical and legal communities for his analytic work, especially sampling theory and practice. He was known to handle 50 or more legal cases in a year. The Institute is co-sponsoring a one-day symposium that will focus only on his statistical work. 】

這些案件之資料都收入美國國會圖書館。 The Deming Institute有獎助金鼓勵研究者。

-------

最近紐約時報轉型之議題又扯出 90年代初，董事長找 Deming當顧問之故事。他建議由現在在美國紐約 Fordham大學主持戴明學者 MBA的學生負責。

我最感興趣的是紐約時報集團如此無法管理， D 應付得了嗎？

******

我參訪中央研究院統計研究所之網站。該所現任所長為實驗設計理論專家。不過我發現隨著趙民德先生轉成兼任研究員（不知道這是否意味退休），該所與產業界的關係似乎變成天外遠。

------

今天台灣蘋果日報的 headline case 之台灣相關人員，我都有二手接觸資料，他們都是抽樣專家， …..

我最驚訝的是中共統計局的副座（五人）之「學歷」，只是學士。

反觀台灣改名的前主計長 …….

「關鍵決策年Deming 1950」--FORTUNE 雙周刊

簡注FORTUNE 雙周刊的「關鍵決策年Deming 1950」

下文為近期FORTUNE 雙周刊 Wikipedia article "Fortune (magazine)".(established 1930)，為慶祝其創立75周年的主題 KEY DECISIONS，其中選過去150年，西方的20件改變歷史之事件（20 That Made History），其中之一為
”Deming 1950年”-- Deming博士講學日本。

此篇行文有點「輕浮」。有興趣的讀者請參考W. E. Deming『轉危為安』（Out of the Crisis）之附錄。

我作了兩處字眼小注，用【】表示。

FORTUNE 75 KEY DECISIONS
20 That Made History
Many of these epic decisions were breathtakingly smart. Some were appallingly stupid. But all of them shaped the modern world of business.

1950: Deming charts Japan’s remarkable course

下一原文網頁已失效 只當歷史http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fortune75/articles/0,15114,1071184-9,00.html

Sometimes big decisions are made to the blare of banner headlines. And sometimes they are made quietly, with no more drama than a puff of air. At a dinner party in Tokyo in the summer of 1950, 21 of Japan’s most influential corporate leaders, who accounted for some 80% of the country’s industrial capacity, made the latter kind of decision. What they did was listen—specifically to W. Edwards Deming, an obscure American statistician who had never met a payroll and had been to Japan only once before. Deming was nonetheless certain that he knew how to solve postwar Japan’s economic problems. "You can send quality out and get food back," he told his skeptical audience.

【Blare- A loud, strident noise. 2. Flamboyance.

v. intr. - 高聲鳴叫, 大叫 v. tr. - 嘟嘟地發出, 高聲發出
n. - 嘟嘟聲, 耀眼的光, 響而刺耳的聲音

日本語 (Japanese) v. - 鳴り響く n. - うるさい音

Banner . - 旗幟, 通欄頭號標題：a newspaper headline that runs across the full page
Synonym: streamer】

The pursuit of quality, Deming said, was the key to higher productivity, bigger profits, more jobs, and therefore a richer society. Quality, he lectured, did not begin by finding defects at the end of the production line. It had to be pursued along every link of the supply chain, with the active cooperation of everyone from suppliers to the humblest worker on the factory floor. If Japanese companies followed his 14 points, Deming promised his dinner companions and other managers in a series of lectures that summer, their goods would be world-class in five years. The notion seemed ridiculous. At the time, the term "Made in Japan" was such a joke that some factory owners set up operations in the village of Usa so that they could mark their products "Made in USA." But Japan’s poohbahs didn’t have any better ideas, so they decided to take up Deming’s challenge.

【注意；Usa為日本村鎮名，可以用來表示「Usa製」（Made in Usa），與「美國製」（Made in USA）混淆。

poohbah or Poohbah ：這是1885年W. S. Gilbert著名的輕歌劇作品The Mikado（英文中表示「日本天皇」a former title of the emperor of Japan used chiefly in the English language.。此劇為想像中之日本皇朝下之故事）中之「（洋洋得意的、身兼數職的）要人、顯貴」。As president, state warden, and security chief, the leader described in Gilbert and Sullivan's “The Mikado” is a poohbah poohbah or Poohbah or Pooh-Bah

BBC：Do It Like Deming/ 2005年7月 2005.07

5日

BBC Radio 4 的DEMING 節目如何由你錄音，再傳給我（我不懂得什麼叫 mp3及如何用它），或許我可以練習騰譯之 ….

感謝Justing，他錄BBC的28分鐘關於Dr.  Deming 節目（Thanks you very much. I enjoyed very nuch.Now I face the issues of how to translate it efficiently...HC），我自己再聽一次，並轉寄給Dr Myron Tribus.

Dear Myron,

Attached is the BBC Radio 4 program for your reference.

Please do help us to find the text if possible.

I enjoyed it very much although as you said most of the message is common sense.

Best Wishes,

hanching chung

-----

I did not hear the BBC program to which you refer. I hope that what I said was worthwhile! I do not recall what I said at the time. If you send me a brief extract, I may be able to find the speech and will gladly send it to you with permission to translate, if you wish.

Myron

2005年七月，尋智專業顧問何哲文先生寄文和一些王晃三老師之作品。戴久永和林公孚先生賜文。17日 越南林志郎先生昨天來訪，計畫越南兩天一夜 六小時課。20日參加中華民國品質學會（CSQ）「研究發展委員會第15次會議」。

○ 本刊專欄徐歷昌先生訪問中國。問Bill Scherkenbach 美國戴明協會刊頭之一引言，他答說不知道也。引言似乎經常/每日更換，2006/7/28登的引言(Quote from W. Edwards Deming )是： A rule should suit the purpose

○ 陳寬仁老師來信：「7/26 我應晃三邀為口試委員 去中原評審碩士班應屆畢業生五名，順便在院長室拍下他退休前打包現場照片 以及圖書館正門照片一張，也許你能利用？」

○ 27日晚參加在品質學會由來新陽會友報告的「ISO 10002:2004 抱怨處理」。一直在追憶反省我在大企業中當主管時怎樣處理它，….

簡記BBC的廣播：Do It Like Deming

之前，接到美國Deming Electronic Network 預報此廣播節目。

我聽完之後，才收到英國周日Times 的消息：

July 03, 2005

Business on the box

In Business. BBC Radio 4. Tonight, 9.30pm. Peter Day looks at W Edwards Deming, the quality guru whose analysis transformed Japanese business after the second world war.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2095-1678226,00.html

BBC的網頁版面說明：

The cult of quality is now taken for granted in business.

It was inspired by a single American guru, the late W Edwards Deming, whose ideas shocked the world when they were first picked up in Japan in the 1950s.

But there's more to Deming than merely the pursuit of quality. And many of his other ideas still have the power to transform the way people work... and the way companies operate.

That's what his disciples say, anyway.

Peter Day finds out more.

Guests

Norman Speirs

European Director, Management Wisdom

Hazel Cannon

Leader of the Deming Forum

Jane Seddon

Process Management International

Debbie Ray

Good Samaritan Hospital Dayton, Ohio

Myron Tribus

former professor MIT and Dartmouth Universities in America

David Wormald
Managing Director, Raflatac

Nick Baxter

Chief Executive and Founder of Cornerstone International

61.228.74.179 -- 2005-07-04 05:44:52 --

Homepage： http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/news/inbusiness/index.shtml

*****

我將它貼在SIMON University，並將它以’reply to all’ 方式傳給justing /kevin和品質知識社群(QKC) 的人，其中只有「國立勤益技術學院 林文燦」將他名片傳給我。

晚上請燕和justing錄音【BBC Radio 4的DEMING 節目如何由你錄音，再傳給我（我不懂得什麼叫mp3及如何用它），或許我可以練習騰譯之….】，心想也許我可以做義工，將它翻譯出來。

恰巧又和Myron Tribus通信。他搬到Florida，天氣很好，每天都可游泳。

Dear Myron,

Yesterday I listened to BBC Radio 4. Your voice in the Do It Like Deming is still sound quite young and vital.

This message was noticed by DEN and my Google Alerts ( by the Sunday Times).
I passed the information to about 35 persons in Taiwan.

For this kind of program for general public, I am thinking about translating it into Chinese and post it in the web or blog. I am wondering the transcript of the radio program is available or not. If available, it helps to accelerate the translations and better quality assurance.

Best Wishes,

Hanching Chung
**

The Willingness to Work for Solutionsby Newt Gingrich

有心求解最重要The Willingness to Work for Solutions

80年代末、90年代初，美國國會議長Newt Gingrich 幾乎不可一世。他向戴明博士學習：家教約30小時。約1997年，他也有「醜聞」，被美國人民唾棄。真妙，他這兩年又再一次掘起，勢如破竹，連敵對的民主黨都佩服。

我沒太多功夫去研究他。不過，他剛剛在NPR（美國公共收音廣播網）發表他的信仰、人生觀。

我將末段意思列出當大家參考。

The Willingness to Work for Solutions

by Newt Gingrich

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4717148

All Things Considered, June 27, 2005 · I believe that the world is inherently a very dangerous place, and that things that are now very good can go bad very quickly.

I stood recently at Checkpoint Charlie and I saw where the Berlin Wall had once been, where millions had lived in slavery only 20 years ago and I realized that it could happen again. I've stood at Auschwitz, where millions were massacred. Then I read about in Darfur, where hundreds of thousands are dying in the Sudan.

I watch the bombings in Baghdad and I know they could be happening in Atlanta or in Washington. I look at civilizations that have collapsed: Rome, Greece, China, the Aztecs, the Mayas. And then I look around at our pretensions and our beliefs -- that we are somehow permanent -- and I am reminded that it is the quality of leaders, the courage of a people, the ability to solve problems that enables us to continue for one more year, and then one more year, until our children and our grandchildren have had this freedom, this safety, this health and this prosperity.

I learned this belief from my stepfather, a career soldier who served America in the second World War, in Korea and in Vietnam. When I was a child, we lived in France -- a France that was still suffering from World War II bomb damage; a France that still had amputees from the first World War and special seats on the subway for those who had been wounded in the first and second World Wars; a France that was fighting a war in Algiers; a France that had 100 percent inflation.

We went to the battlefield of Verdun, the greatest battle of the first World War. We stayed with a friend of my father's who had been drafted, sent to the Philippines, served in the Bataan Death March and spoke of three and a half years in a Japanese prison camp.

And suddenly, as a young man, I realized this is all real: The gap between our civilization, our prosperity, our freedoms and all of those things is the quality of our leaders, the courage of our people, the willingness to face facts and the willingness to work for solutions -- solutions to energy, solutions to the environment, solutions to the economy, solutions to education and solutions to national security. We have real challenges, we have a wonderful country. We need to keep it, and to keep it we're going to have to learn these kinds of lessons.

那時我還年輕，卻能頓時體會到：所有這些，都是真的: 在我們的文明、我們的繁榮、我們的自由，它們與上述所有這些衰敗之間之所以會有差距，乃繫於我們的領導者的品質，我們人民的勇氣，願意面對種種該正視的事實，以及願意努力尋求解答—不管在尋求能源方面的解決辦法、環境的解法、經濟困局的解法、教育體系的解法，以及國家安全上的解法。我們的許多挑戰，無疑都是真實的，然而吾國也很了不起。我們需要讓它萬世繁榮，而要做得到這，我們必須學會這些不同的教訓。

Hanching Seminars and Consulting Company Profile

Attachment:

Hanching Seminars and Consulting Company Profile

Company Name: Hanching Seminars and Consulting Company

Office Address: 2F,.No. 88, Sec. 3, Shin-Shen South Road, Taipei, Taiwan, Post code 10673

Training Center: 6F, No. 5, Alley 1, Shin-Ming Road, Shin Peitou, Taipei, Taiwan

Website: http://www.deming.com.tw ,

email: hcsimonl@gmail.com

Office Tel. 886 2 2362 5776, 886 2 23650127

Fax 886 2 2365 0128, 886 2 2921 1643

Training Center: Tel/Fax 886 2 8946100

Board of Directors: Representative Director: Hanching Chung*

Directors: Y. Y. Liu

Scott Tsai

Dr. Samual Wang

Hans Chung

*Hanching Chung got a master degree in Operational Research and Statistics (1978) from Univ. Essex, U. K.. Heis an industrial engineer by training.

For last 20 years, he served as a manager for various MNCs, such as Philips, ERSO-ITRI, Motorola, AMP and DuPont in Industrial engineering, Quality and Reliability Assurance, Engineering, Product Development (major achievements in Single-in-line Memory Modules system for DuPont Electronics), Sales and Marketing, Market Development in Greater China (major achievement in setting operational arms in China, acquired AT&T connector system in Kansas.)

He is a member of Society for Information Display, IEEE, CSQ (ex-director), CIEI and a director of Foundation for Community University Alliance in Taiwan.

Purpose Statement of our values, visions and missions:

To bring various knowledge systems to the Chinese-speaking people and help their communities, societies and organizations to learn the new economics and quality/effectiveness thinking and practices.

In the ways of

Researching, developing , applying and distributing the works of worldwide first rate thinkers in economics, management and arts,

Cooperating with various consulting companies worldwide to bring their products and service to greater China region.

Helping various schools, universities and communities to bring the life to their organizations.

So that

We can stay in the business as one of leading service companies for helping the transformations of industries, government, and education to learn the new economics.

Main core business areas

-Consulting and traing in lean manufacturing systems and strategic management of technology.

-Consulting and training in the Deming's Profound Knowledge System, organizational effectiveness and learning, quality and knowledge management, H. A. Simon's Science of Design.

-Publishing and maintaining a data bases service in management.

-New Initiatives and Ventures Consulting

Affiliates:

Oriel Consulting (USA)

WWS Consulting (USA)

Peter Scholtes Seminars and Consulting (USA)

Lean Thinking Enterprise (UK )

Representative of Business Intelligent Center of SRI International

Achievements:

-Since 1996, we published more than 11 book titles and 50 monthly newsletter in management studies, including major works by late Dr. W. E. Deming (Out of the Crisis), Dr. J.M. Juran( Managerial Breakthrough), Dr. B. Joiner (The Fourth Generation Management; Fundamental Principles of The Fourth Generation Management ), Peter Scholtes (The Leader Handbook), W. W. Scherkenbach's ( Deming's Road to Continual Improvement and The Deming's Route to Quality and Productivity) and Nobel Prize winner in Economics (1978) Herbert . A. Simon's (Administrative Behavior. The Science of the Artificial. Models of My Life) .(please visit our website for details).

- As a chief consultant of Nike Operating System (NOS) for the major suppliers.

-We established Taiwan Deming User Groups and annual conferences.

-We donate a foundation for Community University for Taipei county.

-We provide consulting and training service to more than 50 leading organizations in semiconductor, information technologies, textiles, petrochemical and healthcare segments.

-We served various schools, universities, community administrative organizations.

-We established a Free Deming University on line monthly on line magazine (with international contributors) since April, 1998.

- We are establishing a Taiwanese Organizational Learning Forum and was invited to Beijing to set up an executive educational program.

2005/3/31關於品質界的兩則記事

2005/3/31關於品質界的兩則記事



午1500 戴久永教授來取一本書（戴明修煉I）。談品質教科書中沒有任何基本的techniques東西，多談些bsc、6x、等等。我說這可以寫篇論文，探討企管教育中的品質、流程、服務業等方面之空砲彈。這可以對比Deming-based MBA之想法。他提到教科書的翻譯每頁250元。我希望他 調查Dr. Juran的真正法學 title是什麼，因為這是困擾台灣學界的資格問題（有所謂法學博士並非我們所想的）。
我說他四年之後再退休，也可以來玩一下論文集。他說他是一匹野狼，沒group。
他近幾年少寫文章，我說可惜。要保持點力道到最後一口氣。

*****

朋友/前輩：

下述林先生引的這篇文章，並不完全（應該參考『同道：從fellowship談起；與王晃三教授同道同光』一文）。-- 我想，「個人新聞台simon university」或參觀一下。譬如說，在QRDC過去7次會議期間，我在它存約數百篇「作品集」。

現在我簡單地談你們下周要談的兩大主題：「本委員會任務應如何聚焦？」和「我們期望產出何種成果？」

首先，我們如果過去一開始開始，就懂得做會議等所根本的目的書（purpose statement），就方便得多。

它的方式大約：
「本委員會應如何運作？要做那些？」和「我們期望產出的成果」
【To Do… I the ways of…So That…】


If we did it formally…可惜…..
現在要談「本委員會任務應如何聚焦？」和「我們期望產出何種成果？」
可不就容易多……
----
不過，……..我們可以補充，請林先生和王主委整理一下，大家再重新出發。
這是從supply端看，我們似乎也應該要求學會csq，問他們的要求 夢想—這是Demand端。
*****
我過去最覺得最失望的是，csq 言行的落差很大。

現代組織面臨的最大衝擊是：資訊/知識的民主化、分散和加速累積。所以csq 似乎應往「知識和經驗的交流和累積平台」之方向走。

所以，我們花些時間討論所謂的「品質知識社群」*……

也許這些還不夠深入，要深入談。我相信這只是「一端」，一己之見。


*或許可參考：索羅維基（James Surowiecki）『群眾的智慧-如何讓個人、團隊、企業與社會變得更聰明』楊玉齡譯，遠流出版公司，2005。
原書：
Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies, and Nations
『衆知 - 何故多数は少数より賢明なのか？そして集団的知恵が如何にビジネス、経済、社会、国家を形成するか？』