Reddit mentions of The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

I'll take a hard left on the reading recommendations because the usual recommendations have been covered.

A lot of people going through these transformations do not understand nor internalize something more fundamental about how they work and misuse their most precious resource of all - time. So I recommend Tom Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators frequently for engineers that seem to get overwhelmed a lot at work. All companies are trying to do a lot more with a lot less than they used to only 9 years ago, and this means it is very, very common for people to be doing the jobs of what used to be 1-3 other people in the 90s or early 2000s. Additionally, look into some of the articles and events from http://www.humanops.com/

You may also want to read books from W Edwards Deming, one of the most commonly cited forefathers of Agile before they even made the term. This book should be a good introduction to improving quality output of products
and perhaps services if an organization is experiencing issues with declining quality of product https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Deming-Leadership-Principles-Business/dp/0071790225/

You may also want to read High Output Management by the late Andy Grove as well as Ben Horowitz's the Hard Thing About Hard Things. These are management books but if you're talking about methodologies and cultural transformations (forget devops for a moment), you're basically doing management consulting IMO rather than engineering consulting. And because there is no company cultural transformation that has succeeded without executive oversight, you should be trying to think more like a manager to succeed here as well. If your clients do not respect and understand the principles of successful technology company managers (I've never heard of anyone trying to do "devops" as a culture that wasn't also coinciding with trying to make a non-technology company more of a technology product company - this also includes software vendors that are fundamentally sales and marketing in core competency and culture), it is difficult to imagine that they will achieve something other than by following average / mediocre managers outside technology.

> the requirement to have statistics that are always higher each week than they were the week before is literally impossible to do. Even very successful staff members are therefore eventually regarded as unsuccessful.

This was among the stupidest things Hubbard every came up with.

The initial idea was fine, and to his credit Hubbard was early in the practice of using statistics. Because yes, it's far better to measure work contributions with dispassionate numbers than emotional responses (like, "You aren't a team player"). And some things can be turned into useful statistics relatively easily, such as sales dollars and number-of-auditing-hours delivered. And "number of hotel rooms cleaned."

But in other cases, the statistic is meaningless. And since in most cases the statistic valued number and not quality, the use of stats did not encourage production. When people are measured on numbers, they deliver numbers without regard to quality. The best example is a public one that we all find unfathomable: hand-written letters that say, "Hi how is it going?" and are sent to people who bought a book 30 years ago. The person who works in Central Files has a stat of "number of letters sent out" and so is motivated to create lots of "letters." It would be far more useful to find a statistic that measures the result you want, such as "number of people who respond to letters," because that might encourage people to do a job so well that recipients write back.

And when your production is measured on your job's statistics, it does not make it valuable to help other people.

The only place where quality is part of the statistic is in auditing, where there's a distinction between "well done auditing hours delivered" and "very well done auditing hours delivered." (IMO the best of his management practices had to do with Auditing and Qual. That's not too surprising because it was the heart of what was delivered, and he actually knew those workflows.)

But the dumbest part of the "management by statistics" theory was the idea that it should be measured on a weekly basis, and the graph should always be "up and to the right." That's patently ridiculous, on an individual level. There are finite number of hours in a week in which anyone can deliver auditing for instance; and "hotel rooms cleaned" has a hard stop when a hotel has a fixed number of rooms.

More importantly, quality results have ebbs and flows. In most professional endeavors, someone can spends 3 weeks or 6 months on a task before it becomes a visible, measurable statistic. There are healthy trends that are more visible when looked at on a monthly or quarterly basis -- but that's not part of Scn stats. And there are yearly trends, such as "lots of sales before Christmas" which, in a week-to-week measure, suggests that every Org's stats will crash in January. But they never looked at "How did we do in December this year compared to previous Decembers" the way that retail businesses did.

And then there's the whole notion of using stats only up to a point, and rather to focus on improving quality. It was quite a head trip when I read the works of W. Edwards Deming and learned about his "red bead rule." If you spent any time on staff working on a stats-based mindset, I highly recommend reading one of Deming's books.

I've long wondered what would have happened if Hubbard discovered Deming. A lot of things might have been quite different.

To offer a different perspective, what made Japan's recovery so amazing is that they had something to offer most other industrialized countries didn't have at the time: quality. Japan has been the world's leader in quality standards ever since the 1950's.

After world war II, Japan was the first country to say "Quality over quantity". They implemented quality management as the basis of their new economy. To achieve this, they hired quality contemporary "guru's" (for lack of a better term). Willam Edwards Deming probably being the most well-known of them.

There have been books written about quality management (and tons of books about Deming alone), so I'm not going to focus on his philosophy here. The main reason for Japan's economic recovery is quality management however. When the entire world was still focusing on mass-production, they started focusing on quality production.

Eventually the new philosophy started to produce results. In the 1970's, people simply began to realize Japanese products were way better in quality, and Western producers realized there was a competitive gap, and Deming's work finally began to receive recognition in the 80's.

Deming's focus wasn't only on product quality, but also on quality management. Continuously upgrading/testing/innovating the product became the new standard.

Other quality leaders were Genuchi Taguchi, Walter Shewart, and Joseph Juran

Some links on quality management:

Main Wikipedia page

Quality Function Deployment

Toyota Production Systm

Kaizen

Books on Quality Management:

Gemba Kaizen

William Edwards Deming

Juran's Quality Control Handbook published in 1951, Japanese scientists liked his work and invited him to implement his system

To summarize, Solow's growth model might provide a basis for the Japanese economic recovery, but the decision to focus on quality for products instead of quantity was way more important. The West only started to catch up in response to that in the 1980's (e.g. Motorola's Six Sigma programme). Yes, the help of the US did give Japan the ability to improve their economy, but their huge economic growth and how well they used that aid was due to