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Category: Government

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Paradigm Shifting

Last night, I attended an online class led by Steve Thomason of St. Mark’s cathedral in Seattle. He mentioned Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts as a tool for understanding the forty-seventh presidency.

Simply mentioning “paradigm shift” brought me back to my first university classes in the late 1960s. A reading was Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most discussed and cited books of the twentieth century.

Up until that class reading, I understood science as a steady progression of discoveries starting from formulating a hypothesis, then confirming or disproving the hypothesis with experiments that eventually led to established scientific law; science forever changing as knowledge accumulates, but a gradual incremental process.

Oh how naive that farm boy was.

Kuhn ended that neat scenario. Instead of a steady progression, he amazed me with a series of revolutions from Aristotle to Galileo, on to Newton and Einstein. Each revolution came as an abrupt change following a period of a growing doubt that the reigning paradigm could answer or explain increasingly pressing issues.

I liked the notion of paradigms so much that twenty years later I jumped on the bandwagon to name one the first software products I designed and developed. We called it “Paradigm Trouble Ticketing.”

A paradigm shift is shifty. (Sorry. I can’t help myself.) During a shift, the obvious and important is in flux, making paradigm spotting difficult while the shift occurs and seldom plain until the dust has settled.

This morning, I decided play the fool and declare my choice for the 2025 paradigm shift.

G. K. Chesterton, an incorrigible polemicist who I think often thought clearly, wrote in 1928:

“The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.”

I am afraid that America’s “unconscious democracy” is the paradigm that is going by the wayside, destroyed by the 2024 election. I fear that the assumption of equality that sustained the United States for the previous century has been rejected and replaced by faith in oligarchy, government by the wealthy.

We saw it in the conclave of billionaires at the inauguration, we read it in the executive order to abolish the directive against racial discrimination in federal hiring.

But paradigms don’t only move away from old assumptions. They also move to something new. I don’t know what the new paradigm will be, but I have my eyes open. I hope I will not be blinded.

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Business Success: P.T. Barnum v. Trump

The other day, I wrote about W. Edwards Deming on business success. Today, I thought of another great American businessman. I’ll bet many of my readers think of P.T. Barnum as the great huckster, the progenitor of Donald Trump, which Barnum probably was. The two characters use similar tactics, but Barnum’s enterprises were roaring business successes that changed the nation. Trump is such a business bungler, he bankrupted New Jersey casinos. 

Daniel Boorstin, the renowned American social historian and Librarian of Congress, dubbed Barnum as “a genius at making pseudo-events,” in his book The Image. Trump, who announced digital trading cards with comic depictions of himself last August, also makes pseudo-events.

There’s no evidence that Barnum ever said “never give a sucker an even break,” or “there’s a sucker born every second,” but he was a master at using gimmicks and distortions to get attention. Boorstin reports that Barnum sent a man out to ostentatiously move single bricks stationed around his American Museum in Manhattan (now the American Museum of Natural History) to draw a crowd which would follow him inside every hour attempting to discover what the man was doing and also paying the entrance fee. The stunt paid for itself and greatly increased the notoriety of the museum.

The brick stunt was harmless, but Barnum also generated empty publicity– pseudo-events if you like Boorstin’s term—around racism and people with physical oddities such as dwarfism. In this, Barnum was cruel, but perhaps not perceived as cruel during the 1830-1880 period when Barnum was active. To his credit, Barnum successfully ran for public office on anti-slavery and fair treatment for former slaves.

Barnum readily admitted that some of his stunts were outright fakes, or humbugs as he called them, and the public seemed to accept his chicanery as good-natured entertainment.  His museums captured the public favor. He raised the stature of the theater, which became acceptable middle and upper class entertainment through his guidance and publicity. He brought the famed Swedish opera singer, Jenny Lind, to the U. S. on a popular tour that was immensely profitable for both Barnum and Lind. And, of course, the Barnum Bailey Circus was a crowd-pleasing success.

Both Trump and Barnum published books on how to succeed in rough and tumble business. Barnum had no ghost writer; he wrote The Art of Money Getting himself. Unlike Trump, who has reviled factual news platforms, Barnum wrote:

Always take a trustworthy newspaper, and thus keep thoroughly posted in regard to the transactions of the world. He who is without a newspaper is cut off from his species. In these days of telegraphs and steam, many important inventions and improvements in every branch of trade are being made, and he who don’t consult the newspapers will soon find himself and his business left out in the cold.

This brings up an important point that may help folks who do not look forward to the 47th presidency. Follow Barnum’s advice and seek verifiable facts. They influence business (and life) far more than false “alternate facts.” People who act on false information are cut off from their species and make poor decisions, both in life and business. Barnum knew that.

Notice, like Boorstin, that pseudo-events, only generate publicity. Pay attention to events, not pseudo-events; your life will be easier.

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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.