If you are caught up in the apparent success of some companies, I suggest "don't confuse luck with success" (E. Deming)
[1] - Henry R. Neave, "The Organization as a System: Edwards Deming's Principles for Building a Sustainable Business." / "The Deming Dimension. Henry R. Neave"; Per. from English - M.: Alpina Publisher, 2017. Scientific editors: Y. Adler, Y. Rubanik, V. Shper. You can purchase the book from the publisher Alpina Publisher .
Material prepared by: Scientific Director of the AQT Center Sergey P. Grigoryev .
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Below we present an excerpt from W. Edwards Deming's interview with Daniel Gottlieb (Interview; W. Edwards Deming, U.S. Guru to Japanese Industry, Talks To Daniel Gottlieb, January 15, 1984), source: www.washingtonpost.com :
- Obviously, industry, management, inventors have done something right in this country (USA) to turn it into a first-class industrial power. - Daniel Gottlieb
- You think so? If you're successful, does that mean you're doing everything right? Many people think so, but it could just be luck. And if you don't understand this, you may have problems. - Edwards Deming
“Deming writes unequivocally that most successful firms turned out to be so simply by chance, because in their practice they use the worst and most ineffective management methods.
To emphasize this point, Deming sometimes drew a distribution representing the distribution of the output of a stable system as a bell curve.
Figure 1. Distribution of companies by degree of success (unsuccessful and successful)
The horizontal axis in some sense reflects the level of success or failure of the firm. Firms in the right tail of the distribution are praised as highly successful, while those in the left tail are labeled as unsuccessful.
But it could easily turn out that we are dealing here with the same type of distribution as in the experiment with red beads : large numbers on one side of the distribution and small numbers on the other.
In fact, is this experiment fruitful? with red beads copy the methods of those who received few of them, and avoid copying those who received more of them?
Henry R. Neave gives an analogy that Deming used in this regard:
"Copying the methods of successful companies is like putting on the clothes that a successful person wears. It takes more than that to achieve success: only theory can help us imagine what is true and what is false."
The picture on the left shows the clothes of Steve Jobs (Apple).
In each cycle of the Galton board experiment in Video 1 below, all the marbles have an equal chance of ending up in the rightmost pocket (successful marbles), in the leftmost pocket (unsuccessful marbles), or in pockets between these extremes. Is it worth talking about the special differences between the balls that ended up in the far right “successful” pockets?
Video 1. The Galton board experiment demonstrates an example of the random formation in a stable system of a density distribution of values with a shape close to the normal distribution (Gaussian curve).