Shanthi Ayyadurai - well said!

More than that, it is management's responsibility to recognize _when quality is or isn't controllable._ Half the point of the process used here is that it's a process that _inherently_ produces a bunch of waste--comparable to, say, production of computer processors. Barring a major technological breakthrough (and a new process stemming from it!), the _only_ thing management can do is pay for a QC department--the workers don't actually have a hand in how much usable product there is under the current process. To this day, unfortunately, managers continue to believe that all quality failures are failures of the worker, and not the process or the management--which is doubly frustrating in fields where management often fails at their own end of things, such as in game development, where upper management and publishers regularly over-promise, fail to account for unknown factors or potential issues when building a schedule, and then use crunch time to try and make up for their own planning failures.

Imagine if this man was reborn in today's world in america again with no power... man would be furious at you all... tried to explain in such a dumbed down way he thought it would be possible for anybody to follow..... but man tried everyone laughs like its a comedy show.... and if reborn today would be shamed nobody uses his simply solutions to complex problems.......

And what is luck? Nothing but variation, after all. And that's what this is all about.

Agreed. Performance Management and Performance Related Pay are an attribute of the de-skilling of Managers. There’s a myth that Management is generic regardless of whether it of a brick works, a bank, a burger franchise, a public service or an aircraft building plant.

Dan Car Your comment really got me thinking.

in italy too...maybe everywhere

More than that, processes should allow for situations where worker skill is not the sole factor. The process described here is _inherently_ lossy and prone to "manufacturing errors"--nothing in the spec allows for workers to control how many red beads they produce. There are ways _this_ process could be improved, but sometimes a manufacturing process is just lossy, and there's nothing to be done about it--processor/microchip production comes to mind. Sometimes, pushing workers harder makes it _WORSE!_ While I worked at an Amazon warehouse, there was a process for feeding flat/lightweight packages into an automated sorting system, which--because of its design--could only have a couple hundred such items in it at any given time, and each item could take several seconds to process--and when an item failed to process, it looped _THREE TIMES_ before getting kicked out into the manual sorting area, taking up precious space all the while. Management, of course, promptly demanded at least 1500 small packages be processed by each worker per hour. As workers started moving faster to keep up, they started making mistakes--after all, who has time to inspect the package anymore? So packages with torn labels started landing on the cross-belt, each of which--of course--looped three times, meaning that they took up precious belt space three times as long. This made it harder to keep up with our requirements, because when the belt's full, NOBODY can move packages, which makes our packages-per-hour ratings drop. So workers started moving faster to keep up--and started making MORE mistakes, because now we weren't even checking to make sure the label was facing up for the scanner--which led to MORE downtime--which led to MORE rushing--which led to MORE mistakes! If management simply hadn't made the demand in the first place, they would've had the performance they wanted (or 90% of it). Instead, performance _dropped,_ because Amazon management assumed that the problem was worker skill and not A) equipment issues or B) not being able to work faster without cutting corners.

why waste your time. pretty much Deming's own advice.

Instead, the ignorant masses follow the lunacy of a psychologist - the farce of Six Sigma.

At the University of Wisconsin School of Business, they talked about Deming in almost every one of my classes.

@@sydneydoc 6σ originally came from Deming, Shewart and Juran. The application of Science and especially Psychology, kickstarted the second, third, and fourth Industrial Revolutions.

@@SM_zzz Bullshit. Six Sigma was created by self confessed con man Harry. Mr Juran esq spent his life counting defects before he joined the SS con men. Professor Deming's teachings are the OPPOSITE of the SS crap.

Lack of input from the workers isn't the culprit, it's lack of input from management.

A Dunkard's walk : how randomness rules our lives.

Great comment Gary I just downloaded “A drunkards walk” audio book, hugely fascinating and Im only an hour in. Thanks!

Gary Lewis - how about Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness or The Black Swan?

Do you know why this is not in HD? Do you know how a video can be in HD???

Make different concentration and test it yourself.

Firstly having management understand what Quality means. These days Quality has been lost in the fad of Six Sigma Stupidity.

Do all experriments need to match precisely the circumstance? Based on your question it sounds like you're in a leadership position and you don't want to build the systems to allow your employees to remove the red beads. You're too focused on the color of the beads instead of what you can learn from this experiment

Real life horror story.