The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

5A System Must Be Managed

(People Are Part of the System)

Deming said that an organization needs to operate as a system. The system includes the company, its customers, and its suppliers. And the system must be managed. He often added with emphasis that people are part of the system—as if it were a revelation. Many managers find it far simpler to deal with machinery, budgets, and financial issues than to deal with people, he believed. Deming held that knowing how to manage people is the single most important part of management, and the part that management is most ill-equipped to deal with.

To help management better understand what was required, Deming wrote numerous papers and gave many speeches detailing specific actions management could take ...