The Printer’s Devil

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If you haven’t heard of W. Edwards Deming, don’t feel bad. Although he’s an American, few Americans have heard of him.

But in Japan, he’s the stuff of legend. They even hand out the Deming Prize for quality products, the Japanese business equivalent of combining the Academy Awards, Pulitzer Prize and an old-fashioned banana cream split with two cherries on top.

Up through World War II, Deming’s theories on quality control and management — which stood the standard American style of management on its head — annoyed American industrialists. Because he was right (probably the worst crime of all) he was tolerated but after World War II, when MacArthur the American Shogun of Japan, was trying to get Japan back on its feet, Deming was shipped there, much to the relief of American businessmen.

The Japanese, not realizing he was a castoff, were impressed that they were being honored by an American industrial management guru and took him seriously. Deming suddenly found someone taking him seriously for once.

The rest, as they say, was history.

There was a time when anything produced in Japan was seen as cheap, disposable junk.

However, the Japanese ran with Deming’s weird ideas on quality control and how to treat employees.

Now, Japan and “quality” are synonymous and the Americans, who ignored and belittled Deming, are the ones seen as producing poor quality junk. Japanese companies dominate the world’s economy and American companies are a distant second.

Ironically, after being beaten senseless by the Japanese, American companies got desperate and hired Deming to advise them.

However, they still didn’t like his advice — Ford Motor Company executives when Deming told them that 85 percent of their quality control problems and inability to sell cars was because of the executives themselves. (You might want to re-read my post about stupid and busy publishers and why newspapers are dying. By the way, Deming’s “seven deadly sins” are a classic description of stupid and busy publishers.)

That’s the long version of saying Deming has much to offer small-town managing editors and I’ll refer to him often.

One of my Deming-isms I’ll pass on: If you have a chance to eliminate a chance for error or disaster, take it.

That might seem simple but looking back, it surprises me how often I ignored or overlooked that.

Among other thoughts:

• Avoid “variability.”

For example, I always start my computer the same way every day. I start each computer program in the same sequence every time. I hit the “save” button every two paragraphs or whenever I answer the phone or go to the bathroom.

Then when the computer whacks out or a program bombs, I try to recall if I varied my routine.

Odds are the problem resulted from when I departed from routine.

Or if know because I didn’t vary my routine, it’s a lot easier to track down what caused the problem.

Believe me, it’s saved me a great deal of time and effort trying to troubleshoot the problem by knowing what isn’t the problem.

And if you know there’s a variable that tends to be troublesome you can try to avoid or prevent it from happening again.

• Editors obviously try to avoid mistakes in their newspapers.

Admittedly, reporters make mistakes on occasion. However, if certain types of mistakes occur repeatedly, that’s not a signal to scream at the reporter. It’s far more likely that there’s something in the process that contributing to it.

For example, one publisher of an afternoon paper was frequently appalled because his weekend paper, technically the “showcase,” was filled with more errors than the regular daily.

His first response was to remove the weekend editor’s head.

However, I pointed out that the weekend paper switched to the morning and that the editor was the only one in the newsroom putting out the paper. The editor was hustling to crank out the pages and only gave the pages a cursory look, and there were no extra eyes to proofread the paper.

However, because that entailed spending more money for an extra person, the publisher chose to hammer the editor, who quit. Then the paper would hire and train someone else and the cycle of recriminations and rehiring would begin again.

• Stupid but busy publishers love daily news quota for newsroom. It’s the essence of management — make a thunderous decree and everyone scurries to meet it. Simple and effective.

However, Deming (and I) saved his harshest comments for such management.

The quota will always be met. Speaking from experience, when a paper has a quota, reporters will throw

To paraphrase Deming, quotas cause crappy stories. Why would anyone want to waste their time reading crap even if it’s local crap?