It's funny that you bring up CMMI in the discussion. CMM(I) is nearly the antithesis of Deming's approaches toward quality management. What's really interesting

It's funny that you bring up CMMI in the discussion. CMM(I) is nearly the antithesis of Deming's approaches toward quality management. What's really interesting is that Deming's approaches were adopted by Toyota decades ago to historically great effect (sadly with few other large examples of named successes in the business world) while Taylorist approaches (including CMMI) a handful of other Japanese daibatsu and especially US companies back to the 19th century. These companies have had vastly different growth trajectories over time, but when it comes to quality most consumers in surveys will associate Toyota with it over Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and Fujitsu (I believe all of these companies are full-blown CMMI 2.0+ adherents and champions). Similarly in the US, what has Six Sigma really done for companies that have adopted it? GE is hardly known for anything in the public eye resembling technical chops, for example, and most studies show that companies that adopt Six Sigma more than 70%+ of the time lag the S&P 500 upon adoption with no long-term recovery afterward either (perhaps Six Sigma adoption is not a cause but a simple correlation with poor performance similar to private equity oftentimes getting a bad rap in the public eye). When even the US military - one of the world's foremost investors in management and leadership research - has largely abandoned command and control (the military equivalent of Taylorism) we really need to ask whether structures that enforce a management/worker caste vs. one that empowers those closest to a problem are effective beyond any meaningful scale.