MeasurementBlog

To get back into the real sharing activity and intent of this blog to share my experiences with visitors, I plan to begin a series of short stories about my measurement experiences in both a small and large organizations over my multiple careers in R& D, Instrument Marketing and web publishing.

In my multifaceted careers I have worked with and in very large, large, small and tiny organizations and seen firsthand some of the activities in the W. E. Deming mode that inspired me. The Dilbert cases were there, too; they were the ones that convinced me some managers were pure idiots, or acted that way, no matter how intelligent they were.

In case you are unfamiliar with the name W. E. Deming, his full name is W. Edwards Deming and his traditions and teaching about a better management (and measurement) world are carried on at the Deming Institute, and elsewhere. His legacy in well known among Quality Assurance people and in Japan the annual prizes for top quality management are given each year in his name.

Deming, an American born in Iowa and raised in Wyoming, earned a PhD from Yale University in mathematical physics in 1925. He understood statistics and statistical quality measurements. He was sent to Japan after World War II to help teach Japanese managers how to organize to produce quality goods and rebuild their manufacturing organizations.

He did his job far better than expected and has been honored every year since 1951 by the presentation of awards that carry his name.

Of course, in America, we have copied the Japanese a little and our National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) has been presenting awards similar to those awarded in Japan, but named after Malcolm Baldrige, since about 1988.

In the NIST webpages, the introductory portion about the USA award reads in part:

Malcolm Baldrige was Secretary of Commerce from 1981 until his death in a rodeo accident in July 1987. Baldrige was a proponent of quality management as a key to this country’s prosperity and long-term strength. He took a personal interest in the quality improvement act that was eventually named after him and helped draft one of the early versions. In recognition of his contributions, Congress named the award in his honor.

The Deming Prize is Japan’s national quality award for industry. It was established in 1951 by the Japanese Union of Scientists and engineers. It took the USA more than 36 years to catch up in awards and it appears as if it make take even longer to catch up in reality, at least in some areas like automobile manufacturing.

Hmmmm! I wonder why? Are our business managers really idiots?

That’s where we get to Dilbert. Dilbert is a cartoon creation by Scott Adams.

His contention is that we American managers act like idiots a lot because we do things like promote unqualified or unprepared people to management positions since they can’t do anything else well. We then live with the consequences of having mostly idiots in charge, he says!

Dilbert pokes lots of fun at the comic situations that result in American business as workers deal with silly management methods and practices and even sillier ideas.

(I submit that the Deming Prize and Baldrige Award histories also support the contention that we do even worse in electing many of our political leaders. Didn’t we win World War II decisively? Is it possible that the Age of MBAs has had an unexpected impact?-More hmmmms-)

You may have noticed that a link to the Dilbert website has been added at the top right of the page. Perhaps that will help me stay a bit better on focus to recall those precious moments of success, failure and humor in the act of measuring things, or trying to do so.

I can be an idiot at times, too, and lose track of Priority One.

Can’t we all?

TEMPERATURES.COM, INC. publishes information about measurement devices and measurement on its websites. The sites have articles, directories and news to foster competent measurements & analysis in industry & science. Sites are free. Submissions by visitors are encouraged and reviewed. Sites as of August 2007 are: lehos tecHeadlines, measureNEWS, About Temperature Sensors, TempSensor Directories, TempSensorNEWS, Measurement Databases, (MeasurementBlog.com)MeasurementMedia.com and MeasurementDevices.com