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This is a very trivial treatment of Deming and I’m surprised how it makes its way to the top of HN. The arc from Walter Shewhart to W.E. Deming is a bedrock fo

by hbarka 8mo ago

This is a very trivial treatment of Deming and I’m surprised how it makes its way to the top of HN. The arc from Walter Shewhart to W.E. Deming is a bedrock foundation in an Industrial Engineering curriculum. These men paved the manufacturing process quality principles of modern industrialization. Drucker was about management science, truly an apples to oranges comparison.

kranke155 8mo ago
Management Science? Only management science I read so far (with actual measured outputs and ideas) was Peopleware. Everything else was more like philosophy. Has anyone ever measured, long term results from multiple management methods? What I saw when I looked into it was simple - the Toyota Way was the model for a lot of successful companies, including Pixar.
- bsenftner 8mo ago
  Peopleware is extremely old, and if you were to crack open a modern MBA text you'd find statistics and statistical process control type of thinking integrated everywhere, in all the MBA subjects. Management being soft and opinionated ended a long time ago, but then again, "the future is unevenly distributed" so who knows what conceptual envelope you find yourself.
  - bubblewand 8mo ago
    What I’ve seen in the wild is that this is entirely a veneer. It’s important to have numbers. It doesn’t matter if they mean anything. In fact, management is full of numbers that a slightly-clever high school sophomore who’d paid attention in science classes could tell you are totally useless, because they were gathered all wrong. They mean nothing whatsoever. They’re just noise. But nobody wants to hear stuff like “well first we’re going to need a baseline, and if you want it to be any good we’ll probably need two years or so before we can start trying to measure the effects of changes”. They just want something convincing enough that everyone can nod along to a story in a PowerPoint in four months. Two years out? Lol you’ll be measuring something totally different by then anyway. Your boss may be in a different role. You’ve asked something the company is literally incapable of. Meanwhile, last I checked, measuring management effectiveness isn’t something we can do in practice for most roles, except bad ways that only pretend to tell us something useful (see above). Good scientists, excellent and large dataset, just the right sector, just one layer of management under scrutiny, maybe you get lucky and can draw some conclusions, but that’s about it, and it’s rare to see it happen in an actual company. Any companies that do achieve it aren’t sharing their datasets. This kind of thing has been consistent everywhere my wife or I have worked. Similar things reported by many friends. Companies want to pretend to be “scientific” and “data-driven” but instead of applying it to only a couple things where they might do it well (enough data, cheap to gather metrics, clear relevant business outcome) they try it everywhere, but don’t want to spend what it would take to be serious about it, with the result that most of their figures are garbage. This trend has become just another “soft”, as you put it, tool.
    - mr_toad 8mo ago
      > In fact, management is full of numbers that a slightly-clever high school sophomore who’d paid attention in science classes could tell you are totally useless, because they were gathered all wrong. They mean nothing whatsoever. They’re just noise. The whole point of SPC is to separate signal from noise. Pointing out that some change that everyone is obsessing over is well within the expected range is useful, it can head-off knee jerk reactions to phantom issues.
      - kqr 8mo ago
        ...assuming people want to know that the change is in the expected range. That's often not the case. People's careers are built on phantom improvements and being able to say that regular process issues were one-time occurrences.
    - bsenftner 8mo ago
      "In the wild" is everything from wishful moronic overly technical to systems that worked 75 years ago still in place and no one knowing how or why it all continues to work. We've got a huge diversity of understanding, and thanks to a relatively stable society all kinds of inarticulate nonsense has been accepted by people as their reasonings for things that do not and could not work in a million years, but no one is going to tell them. So they continue in their belief. I think I was lucky to land in some seriously scientific groups that had personal grudges against emotional decision making, and they went overboard being analytical.
  - kranke155 8mo ago
    Having numbers and formulas doesn’t make you scientific. It’s prediction power that does that. And a lot of those showed weak or negative prediction power to me.
kqr 8mo ago
Deming was a statistician first, yes, but he also had strong opinions in terms of management science/philosophy. These opinions came from a perspective of systems theory and understanding variation.
an-allen 8mo ago
To be fair, Demming is a trivial systems programming theories.. “optimise wholistically” “local fixes cause global imnalance” None of this works for the system of life and consciousness.

by hbarka 8mo ago

kranke155 8mo ago

Management Science? Only management science I read so far (with actual measured outputs and ideas) was Peopleware. Everything else was more like philosophy. Has anyone ever measured, long term results from multiple management methods? What I saw when I looked into it was simple - the Toyota Way was the model for a lot of successful companies, including Pixar.

bsenftner 8mo ago
Peopleware is extremely old, and if you were to crack open a modern MBA text you'd find statistics and statistical process control type of thinking integrated everywhere, in all the MBA subjects. Management being soft and opinionated ended a long time ago, but then again, "the future is unevenly distributed" so who knows what conceptual envelope you find yourself.
- bubblewand 8mo ago
  What I’ve seen in the wild is that this is entirely a veneer. It’s important to have numbers. It doesn’t matter if they mean anything. In fact, management is full of numbers that a slightly-clever high school sophomore who’d paid attention in science classes could tell you are totally useless, because they were gathered all wrong. They mean nothing whatsoever. They’re just noise. But nobody wants to hear stuff like “well first we’re going to need a baseline, and if you want it to be any good we’ll probably need two years or so before we can start trying to measure the effects of changes”. They just want something convincing enough that everyone can nod along to a story in a PowerPoint in four months. Two years out? Lol you’ll be measuring something totally different by then anyway. Your boss may be in a different role. You’ve asked something the company is literally incapable of. Meanwhile, last I checked, measuring management effectiveness isn’t something we can do in practice for most roles, except bad ways that only pretend to tell us something useful (see above). Good scientists, excellent and large dataset, just the right sector, just one layer of management under scrutiny, maybe you get lucky and can draw some conclusions, but that’s about it, and it’s rare to see it happen in an actual company. Any companies that do achieve it aren’t sharing their datasets. This kind of thing has been consistent everywhere my wife or I have worked. Similar things reported by many friends. Companies want to pretend to be “scientific” and “data-driven” but instead of applying it to only a couple things where they might do it well (enough data, cheap to gather metrics, clear relevant business outcome) they try it everywhere, but don’t want to spend what it would take to be serious about it, with the result that most of their figures are garbage. This trend has become just another “soft”, as you put it, tool.
  - mr_toad 8mo ago
    > In fact, management is full of numbers that a slightly-clever high school sophomore who’d paid attention in science classes could tell you are totally useless, because they were gathered all wrong. They mean nothing whatsoever. They’re just noise. The whole point of SPC is to separate signal from noise. Pointing out that some change that everyone is obsessing over is well within the expected range is useful, it can head-off knee jerk reactions to phantom issues.
    - kqr 8mo ago
      ...assuming people want to know that the change is in the expected range. That's often not the case. People's careers are built on phantom improvements and being able to say that regular process issues were one-time occurrences.
  - bsenftner 8mo ago
    "In the wild" is everything from wishful moronic overly technical to systems that worked 75 years ago still in place and no one knowing how or why it all continues to work. We've got a huge diversity of understanding, and thanks to a relatively stable society all kinds of inarticulate nonsense has been accepted by people as their reasonings for things that do not and could not work in a million years, but no one is going to tell them. So they continue in their belief. I think I was lucky to land in some seriously scientific groups that had personal grudges against emotional decision making, and they went overboard being analytical.
- kranke155 8mo ago
  Having numbers and formulas doesn’t make you scientific. It’s prediction power that does that. And a lot of those showed weak or negative prediction power to me.

kqr 8mo ago

Deming was a statistician first, yes, but he also had strong opinions in terms of management science/philosophy. These opinions came from a perspective of systems theory and understanding variation.

an-allen 8mo ago

To be fair, Demming is a trivial systems programming theories.. “optimise wholistically” “local fixes cause global imnalance” None of this works for the system of life and consciousness.