Reddit mentions of The Deming Management Method

> Maybe someone here can link to the HCO that goes into detail because I can't find it at the moment. Basically it says that if you have good stats, you're more or less immune to any accusation. If you have low stats and accuse someone with high stats, you can be subject to investigation yourself. They will FIND something you're guilty of for having audacity to accuse someone with high stats.

This is a bit of a misstatement, but I haven't taken the time to look up the policies either.

The basic idea -- the sensible core of it -- is that we should judge workers on their production. If you create quality products on an ongoing basis, you should be more valuable to the organization than people who don't generate as many widgets. And certainly that's how old-school traditional salespeople work: with quotas, bonuses for exceeding them, and an invitation to "explore new career opportunities" if you don't successfully produce what you're paid to produce.

At best, much of that relies on the understanding of what a quality product is, which touches on ethics (such as a salesperson not selling to a customer who cannot afford the widget) and quality control (ensuring this particular widget meets standards). And certainly it obviates the likelihood of someone moving up in an organization based on internal politics rather than being good at his job.

There are huge problems with management by statistics in general, however, most of which were explored in great depth by Deming in the 50s and have been well-discussed by others since then. The easiest of the objections is that few work tasks are as cause-and-effect as a sales job, with a binary got/lost the sale. But there are oh so many others.

For example, in Scn policy, nothing accounts for your statistic being blocked by others. An auditor can't deliver hours-of-auditing if the sales people don't sign anyone up to buy the services. There's nobody to whom to deliver the auditing -- yet your stats are down, through no fault of your own. Plus, Hubbard set up the orgs to work on a week-by-week basis, in which ever-increasing production was demanded despite limited resources (such as hours in the day). Nothing was put into place to compare month-to-month, year over year (April 2018 vs April 2017), or seasonality (more sales at Christmastime than in January).

It didn't work like the typical carrot-and-stick, either, because the carrots were puny (a half day off!) and the sticks were painful (go into the RPF).

Theoretically, someone whose stats are in Power is "untouchable." In practice, that was never the case. Mr FZaP knew someone who was thrown in the RPF despite being in Power (and productive by whatever measure you used, he said).

Not the least of which is you can be in Power by having a couple of really good weeks at work, and then (for no fault of your own) "meh" results the next few weeks. Few people stay in a condition of Power for all that long.

In other words, if everything was done sanely, the concept isn't a bad one. It's really hard to criticize the star performer at work, or at least to get away with criticizing him. And in real life, most of the time the people who do their jobs well are easy to admire. Not everyone is quietly doing something unethical, like Weinstein, and getting away with it.

But IMHO the whole thing is based on a lot of bad management practices put together by a guy who had never before run a large complex organization.