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Rereading W. Edwards Deming

I’m not feeling optimistic about the U.S. If there was ever a time for a U.S. turnaround, it’s 2025.

The bed rock of Deming’s method is respect for all the participants; the hot-shot CEO and the assistant janitor both contribute equally to the success of the enterprise. If everyone today took Deming to heart, the decade would turnaround in an instant.

Boeing, a company I respected, even idolized, forty years ago is in shambles. 3M, another company I once admired, is accused of foisting forever-chemicals on us, and now we’re supposed to get rid of our black plastic kitchen utensils because they are poisoning us.

We’re about to inaugurate a president who claims to be a business genius but went bankrupt running New Jersey casinos. He’s such a blunderer at moral corruption, the usual play ground of political types, he’s a convicted felon. Not my idea of success.

This week, I decided it was time to go to the all-time turnaround king, W. Edwards Deming, for advice.

About fifteen years ago, I wrote a book on computing standards called Cloud Standards. I covered ISO/IEC 270001, which is a basis for most IT security plans. Cloud computing services, such as Amazon Web Services, request public audits of their compliance to ISO 270001 aiming to increase their customers’ confidence in their IT security practices. 270001, as do many IT governance schemes, relies heavily on W. Edwards Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle.

Consequently, I became interested in W. Edwards Deming; I read a number of his books and studied his work. In the 1950s, Deming went to Japan to advise industrialists on running their companies while they struggled to recover from WWII. Within fifteen years, Japan went from a bombed out and defeated ruin to the thriving second largest economy on the planet. They attributed their success largely to Deming’s tutelage.

In the 1980s, Ford Motor Corporation had trailed behind General Motors in automobile sales and profitability since the halcyon days of Henry Ford and the Model T. Seeing the success of Honda, Toyota, and Nissan, they brought in Deming. Following his advice, FMC soon took the lead among U.S. automakers in competing against the onslaught of well-designed and precision-built Japanese automobiles.

Maybe it’s time to listen to Deming’s advice. He died in 1996, so we can’t talk to him, but he left behind several books and many papers.

Deming applied statistical analysis to manufacturing and management. You might expect his method would be to measure productivity precisely and design processes around time and motion studies of worker efficiency.

Deming rejected all of that. Instead, he recommended abolishing performance reviews. The originator of Total Quality Management looked on product inspections with disfavor.  

His most popular work, Out Of the Crisis, was published in 1982. He wrote to address the crisis of American industry in the 1980s when Japan produced better cars at lower prices than Detroit and companies like Sony and Hitachi were innovating circles around the nascent Silicon Valley.

Out Of Crisis contains the kernels of his ideas. He demands that both workers and management have a through understanding of all aspects of their business and customers and focus on long term success while ignoring quarterly profits. He uses statistical analysis to distinguish errant processes from accidents. The job of both management and workers is to improve the process by iterating on the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle for continuous improvement.

The bed rock of Deming’s method is respect for all the participants; the hot-shot CEO and the assistant janitor both contribute equally to the success of the enterprise. If everyone today took Deming to heart, the decade would turnaround in an instant.

I wish I could recommend Out Of the Crisis as a book, and I do, but with cautions. Deming’s style is his own. He’s preachy. He works from examples more often than explicit statement of principles and reasoned exposition. Keep in mind that Deming was not a crackpot. He sounds like one, but when businesses followed his advice, they consistently thrived. He was the most effective business consultant of the twentieth century.

He could turn around the twenty-first century. Read him and follow his advice.

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Review of The Maltese Falcon

I am writing this after at least my third reading of The Maltese Falcon. Some critics say the book is Hammett’s best; it’s undoubtedly his best-known and most popular, but I prefer Hammett’s next novel, The Glass Key. TMF sports flamboyant characters and an exciting plot that’s nearly a conspiracy theory. The Glass Key contains more realistic views of corruption and human frailty, which is more to my taste.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed TMF and recommend it. The book is about Samuel Spade, private detective. Raymond Chandler modeled Philip Marlowe on Spade, but Spade has a far different role. Marlowe is clearly an errant underdog knight in Los Angeles. Spade may be a knight, but he’s not an underdog. He declares that San Francisco is his town, and, at points, he’s the town fixer who pulls strings to guide political outcomes. Note also that Spade has a partner, Miles Archer. Marlowe never had a partner and never will. The closest Marlowe had to a partner was his stumbling buddy, Terry Lennox, in the Long Goodbye.

Hammett’s style rings oddly in my ear. Hammett was widely read, but he dropped out of school in his early teens to help support his family. He claimed to have developed his authorial skills writing reports for the Pinkertons. His word choice is dated. His sentences often feel to me like he was pushing himself into a more elevated style than was natural to him. For example, “The boy raised his eyes to Spade’s mouth and spoke in a strained voice of someone in physical pain…” is awkward and abstract for pulp magazine readers. Chandler, on the other hand, writes with the self-assuredness of a well-trained Oxfordian, which he was. Nevertheless, both have an ear for the best in language. Compare the near iambic pentameter a few paragraphs later in TMF: “’Come on,’ he [Spade] said. ‘This will put you in solid with your boss.’”

I divide the book into three parts. The key to this division is the “Flitcraft episode” in which Spade tells Bridgid the story of a man from Tacoma who leads an ordinary moderately prosperous life with a wife who enjoys new salad recipes. One day, a heavy beam drops from a construction site and lands next to Flitcraft, barely missing him, and leaving him with a scratch from a flying concrete chip that becomes a permanent scar. Flitcraft immediately vacates his ordinary life. His wife and children are well provided for and he disappears into a life of wandering. After a few years, Flitcraft turns up in Spokane, leading an ordinary and moderately prosperous existence with a wife who looks nothing like his first wife, but enjoys new salad recipes.  The three parts of TMF correspond to Flitcraft’s Tacoma, wandering, and Spokane lives. The pursuit of the Maltese falcon is Spade’s wandering. That phase ends when the pursuers of the falcon exit and the final chapters are Spade’s return from the life interrupted by the falcon. This structure is like a fairy tale in which much of the action is in a dream that intertwines with the waking world.

I leave the book with a question: has Spade’s adventure in fairy land transformed his life and character? Or has Spade’s walk-about with the falcon only revealed what was previously hidden or latent? In Chapter 20, Spade says to Bridgid “Don’t be too sure I’m as crooked as I’m supposed to be.”

Has Hammett told us that Spade has not changed, but we have?

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AlphaSmart

This post is about writing and computing. It only touches on the technical, so I’ve posted it here on Vine Maple Farm, rather than Marv Waschke on Computing, which I reserve for more technical subjects.

I have found AlphaSmart mode to be productive and relaxing, which is a nice addition to anyone’s work repertoire.

What’s old is new again.

I’m typing this on an AlphaSmart 3000, a product designed and built for use in elementary and high school classrooms for keyboard training, a $300 alternative to desktop and laptop computers costing thousands. It’s LED display has only four lines, each forty characters long, about the equivalent of two lines of text on a letter-size page.

Largely replaced by Chromebooks, school systems were surplusing them before pandemic began and the lockdowns and school closures accelerated the trend. Lacking online functionality, AlphaSmarts are useless for remote learning, and they now flood Ebay.

I’ve heard about distraction-free writing devices for at least a decade. Curious but not much attracted because I’ve never had much patience with folks who find the ocean of knowledge on the global computer network a distraction rather than a resource.

Lured by low prices and curiosity, I bought an AlphaSmart 3000 on Ebay about a month ago for less than fifty bucks and I am astounded to say that I love it.

Although I am 74 years old, I’m also a digital native. I wrote my first computer program in 1967 and started using screens in the 1980s. My solution for the last decade has been two displays, one for the job at hand, the other for fact-checking and online reference tools. I’m sticking with that configuration, but the AlphaSmart has added something new.

If you want to edit beyond the simplest changes, forget it.

I used to scribble rough outlines on a pad of paper (the backside of single-sided print docs). I still do. But now, I sprawl in a recliner with the AlphaSmart and my paper notes and type away.

The AlphaSmart is a drafting, not an editing device. Navigating text on an AlphaSmart is difficult. You are stuck with single-space arrows, “home,” “end” and “backspace” keys and that’s it. If you want to edit beyond the simplest changes, forget it. You have to upload to a real computer.

The AlphaSmart is for laying down one sentence after another. Leave the moves, cuts, and tweaks for later. If you can’t correct it easily on the four line display, leave it for later. If you can’t remember something, stick in TK (a signal to an editor that more is To Kome) and move on. For me, this provides two advantages. I can leave my office to give my aching neck, back, and butt a break, and it sets me free for a mode of thinking and composing that I have only experienced previously while writing in longhand, which is followed by transcription to text, which I dislike. I have found AlphaSmart mode to be productive and relaxing, which is a nice addition to anyone’s work repertoire.

Now, I’ll get down to technology. The virtues of the AlphaSmart come from what it isn’t rather than what it is. It’s a keyboard with a simple display and a small memory, probably less than a megabyte. When disconnected from a computer, the user types text, which appears in the display, into memory. Although the device has a processor, it acts only as a simple controller. When an AlphaSmart communicates with a computer, it uses a simple keyboard protocol rather than a file transfer protocol. The user opens a text entry tool, like a text editor or word processor, positions the cursor, and presses “Send” on the AlphaSmart. The computer screen acts as if a fast typist is typing in text.

That’s all the device does.

Because the AlphaSmart is so simple, three AA batteries seem to last forever. It does not heat up and there is no humming fan. It has no moving parts other than the keys and starts in less time than it takes me to remember where I left off. The device was designed to endure rough elementary school students. I’ve already dropped my used AlphaSmart without damage. It’s clearly not new, but it doesn’t look shabby either.

I enjoy a good rampage now and then.

The AlphaSmart is not perfect. The keyboard is the equivalent of a quality laptop keyboard, but it does not have the key throw and satisfying feel of a mechanical keyboard. The space bar has to be struck squarely. The LED screen has no backlight, which adds to battery life, but is inconvenient for adding a sentence or two during the ads while watching TV in dim light.

This morning, I went on a rampage, practically tearing the living room and my office apart because I couldn’t find my AlphaSmart. I had forgotten that I tucked it behind a chair cushion. I don’t usually get attached to gadgets. This is not normal behavior for me. Well, not everyday behavior. I enjoy a good rampage now and then.

A final note: I favor the AlphaSmart 3000. I also have a 2000. It’s keyboard interface doesn’t work with Windows 10 without a somewhat hard to find special adapter, which is a pain. Later models, like the AlphaSmart Neo, are Palm PDAs in an AlphaSmart form factor and, in my opinion, a step beyond the 3000’s charming simplicity.