David A. Heiser ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) wrote:
: Demming sounds like Karl Marx. In an ideal enlightened society Demmings
: approach would work. However the ideal enlightened society always comes
: apart because of greed.
If you say that Deming sounds like Karl Marx, it means only one thing:
that you haven't read Deming (and possibly haven't read Marx either).
: In a greedy, unenlightened, violent society, survival requires self
: preservation, gated communities, classification, defining categories (us vs
: them) and ranking of people.
Evaluation of people, yes. But ranking is only one form of evaluation,
and a poor one at that. Deming provides empirical evidence that
evaluation based merely on ranking frequently has *no* predictive value.
Much of Deming's work on evaluation involved developing criteria, based
on his work with statistical process control, for determining when a
person is performing "outside the system" on either the good side or the
bad side. Once again: it is a very common myth that Deming was opposed
to all forms of evaluation of employees. He was not; his writing makes
this entirely clear. His point was that the methods of evaluation most
commonly used in industry were little better than lotteries, and often
wound up accomplishing exactly the opposite of what they were intended to.
Try reading _Out of the Crisis_ and _The New Economics_. You may very
well find yourself disagreeing with some of his assertions, and I'd
welcome a discussion of such disagreements. But, please, only
disagreements with what he actually said, not with cariacatures of what
he said.
