The Essential Deming

Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

By: W. Edwards Deming, Joyce Orsini - editor

Narrated by: Douglas Martin

Length: 9 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

The name W. Edwards Deming is synonymous with the most insightful views, ideas, and commentary on management and quality control. Referred to as "the high prophet of quality" by the New York Times, Deming was instrumental in the spectacular rise of Japanese industry after World War II and influenced many of the world's most innovative managers in the ensuing decades. His original ideas led directly to the creation of relationships with suppliers and a plethora of quality initiatives.

Now, with The Essential Deming, Fordham University professor and Deming expert Joyce Orsini draws on a wealth of previously unavailable material to present the legendary thinker's most important management principles in one indispensable volume.

The book is filled with articles, papers, lectures, and notes touching on a wide range of topics, but which focus on Deming's overriding message: Quality and operations are all about systems, not individual performance; the system has to be designed so that the worker can perform well.

The Essential Deming reveals Deming's unique insight about:

• How poor management infects an entire organization
• The critical importance of management on producing quality products and services
• Improving management in any company
• The effective management of people—the manager's single most important task
• How to educate workers into critical thinkers
• Ways to preserve statistical integrity while dealing with real-world problems

Fully authorized by the Deming estate and published in cooperation with The W. Edwards Deming Institute, The Essential Deming is the first book to distill Deming's life's worth of thinking and writing into a single source. Orsini provides expert commentary throughout, delivering a powerful, practical guide to superior management. With The Essential Deming, you have the rationale, insight, and best practices you need to transform your organization.

©2013 The W. Edwards Deming Institute (P)2021 Upfront Books

Wonderful Insights into Dr. Deming Teachings

Wonderful Insights into Dr. Deming Teachings That are not found in his main 2 publications: Out
Of the Crisis and The New Economics. For anyone without the patience to read them, this would also give you those ideas, basically in the form of case studies that the author has pulled out of numerous letters and other material written by Dr. Deming, himself.

If you’ve looked in to how to apply specific points to your organization, you already know that the path forward isn’t that clear. This book helps bridge the gap between the accumulated knowledge of a man that lived 93 years and practical steps to take now. That said, the pace that the narrator reads these letters from Deming leaves a lot of these gaps unbridged. Deming was a bit of a rambler. He has so much to say, and he knows his time is short and you sense his desperation to help. That in itself can’t be changed now (writing this almost 30 years after his passing). Frequently in listening to this, I find myself begging the narrator to learn how effective pausing can help even the most abstract topics sink in. Adding your own punctuation is A NECESSITY for voice actors, especially when the text rambles. In other words, following the same style as the original author, loses you.

3/4 of the way through the book, I finally turned down the speed to .8. That just makes everything slower, which good readers and listeners know isn’t the point. Knowing when to pause is determined, not by the words on the page alone, but by the thoughts these words are trying to convey. Otherwise, you are just passing along information. If Profound Knowlege is the goal, more is needed. As a case study, I’d actually be interested in what constraints the narrator was under trying to get this project done. As we know, most of the issues that come up when quality suffers and the fault of management. That could explain what happened here.

Even with the pacing of this narration and the problems that come from this, I think the information is important enough for you to buy this audiobook. When the student is ready, the teacher appears. In this case, Dr. Deming is long gone, but I am grateful that his message is preserved in this audiobook and thank for the author who gathered all of these letters as well as the narrator for helping to preserve it.

Statisticians take on business

Dr. Deming has a way with numbers , this book gives a dense not so organized look into his 14 improvements and 7 demise of a business. Found it interesting thru his experience , but very statistical after the core of the book is over with.

Painfully repetitive

Almost cancelled my audio book subscription over this book. They stretched 30 minutes of material into a full length book by repeating the same thing over and over and over and over again

Nothing new here. Get New Economics instead

There's absolutely no new insights in this version
I realised this when I was already halfway through. I couldn't exchange this back because of it. Not worth a listen. Get the New Economics instead.