I pulled on a thread and found a fascinating tapestry.
My professional career started in 1980 as New York was coming out of one of the worst financial times since the Great Depression. The joke was that you couldn’t get a job with IBM, JP Morgan, or Grumman without inheriting it. So, at just nineteen years old, I headed to Texas to get in on the oil boom. I had a duffle bag and my incredibly efficient and reliable 1975 Toyota Corolla.
During my first week in Texas, I found a job in software with Exxon Corporation as a computer programmer. The eighties were a fascinating time to work at Exxon, with a rich culture of leadership and best practices. Although I couldn’t have known it at the time, Exxon’s leadership taught me Dr. Deming’s principles.
In the nineties, I went to work at GE. As I earned my Six Sigma Green Belt, I had no idea what I was doing came directly from Deming’s teachings. GE had its own analytical statistics department; it seemed like my entire job revolved around control charts, another Deming hallmark. The core lessons I learned around cooperation, experimentation, and systems thinking-all rooted in Deming’s teachings-deeply resonated with me as I continued on my career path.
My knowledge of Deming began when I started working with bestselling author and award-winning CTO Gene Kim in 2009 on The DevOps Handbook. Before joining the project, Gene asked me to read The Goal by supply chain management guru Eliyahu Goldratt. After absorbing it, I quickly read his other books The Theory of Constraints, Critical Chain, It’s Not Luck, and Necessary But Not Sufficient. Let’s just say I was all in on Goldratt.
At a DevOps Days conference in 2011, my friend and mentor Ben Rockwood, a pioneer in internet engineering, was running an open discussion on Goldratt. During the course of it, Ben intimated that Goldratt was heavily influenced by someone called William Edwards Deming. I didn’t know who the guy was but wasn’t looking forward to learning more about someone who might shake my faith in Goldratt. But true to his nature, Ben challenged me to at least read Deming’s 14 Points on management.
When I did, I was floored. I realized that almost everything Deming was saying was the foundation for the three major software movements I’d experienced in my life: lean software development, agile development, and DevOps. What amazed me even more was the fact that he wrote his 14 Points in the 1980s, years before these software movements came into being.
Over the next few years, I came to be heavily influenced by “the Prophet of Quality,” as he’s often known. The more I learned about him, the more I wanted to know. It seemed like every little thread I pulled on revealed more and more of just how fascinatingly complex the man’s life and thinking were. During the course of co-authoring Beyond the Phoenix Project with Gene, I stepped up my research on Deming. I wanted to truly understand how he’d found the epiphanies that seemed to be littered along his life’s path. Unfortunately, of the more than two dozen books about Deming, none chronicled that. They were either biographies or explanations about how to apply his principles. None told the journey of how his ideas were developed.
I decided that was the book I needed to write.
During the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, I had that opportunity. Before, I typically traveled about 200,000 miles a year. Without that, I had an extra 50 hours a week of prime productivity time. They say if you really want to know a subject, write a book about it. That’s certainly been true with this one. I only thought I knew about Deming before. But following all the bunny trails in and around his life has given me profound respect for his thinking, accomplishments, and influence. He seems to me like a cross between Albert Einstein and Forrest Gump: seemingly always in the right place at the right time but brilliant enough to change the world around him before moving on. What’s more, the stories about others’ lives surrounding him were wonderfully entertaining and/or insightful. I wanted a book that captured those feelings.
Speaking to the bigger picture, Deming’s direct or indirect influence can be seen in four major nationwide efforts: at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, trying to out-manufacture the Axis powers; in the Japanese Economic Miracle; in the American quality revolution of the 1980s; and in the race to develop and distribute the vaccines for Covid-19.
But we need Deming’s SoPK to face one of the biggest threats to the world today: that of cyberterrorism. The last four chapters deal with understanding the severity of this cyber crisis and how Deming can save us yet again.
I’ve enjoyed the journey of bringing this book to you, and I hope you enjoy this labor of love.
John “Botchagalupe” Willis
Auburn, Alabama
September 2023