One of my Father’s Day presents this year was The Essential Deming, an anthology of Deming’s shorter writings. I thoroughly enjoyed Deming’s Out of the Crisis and was looking to read more from him.
Reading this book, I was surprised to discover that Deming was opposed to workers training workers, which he considered a faulty practice. The most effective way to become an expert is through the apprenticeship model, where a novice works alongside an expert and directly observes how the expert does their work. That Deming would reject this model, and would believe that an outsider could more effectively train a worker than someone who actually does the day-to-day work is, frankly, bizarre.
Deming also asserted that the most effective teachers at a university were the professors that were the best researchers. This also seemed to me to be an extremely odd claim, and one I’m extremely skeptical of.
Deming had a deep understanding of systems thinking, and the importance of holistic, expert judgment (he used the term leadership) over chasing metrics, and that shines through in this book. However, while Deming seemed to recognize the value of expertise, he did not seem to have a good understanding of how people acquire it.
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