The Germ theory of Management

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

The Germ theory of Management

*Myron Tribus Director Exergy, Inc. and Director, American Quality and Productivity Institute

Introduction

In a recent review of The Deming Theory of Management, William B. Gartner and  M. James Naughton wrote 1: “Medicine has been 'successfully' practised without the knowledge of germs

In  a pre-germ theory paradigm, some patients got better, some got worse and some  stayed the same; in each case, some rationale could be used to explain the  outcome..”

They can only apply  what they know and believe

As professionals they find it  difficult to stray too far from the common knowledge and understanding. They are  under pressure to follow „accepted practice‟.

The doctors had a theory of how malaria was spread. They called it „malaria‟ to  emphasize that it was the bad air, the unhealthy vapors in the night, that caused the  disease. Their theory of medicine caused them to look in the wrong places for  wrong answers to the solutions to their most pressing problems.

Today our managers do the same. When they are up against tough international  competition, they look to changes in economic policy, in tax structure, in trade policy  - everywhere except in their own understanding of what makes a company  competitive. They question everything except their own theory of management.

Changing People’s Beliefs in not Easy

Try to imagine that it is now the year 1869. Pasteur has only recently demonstrated  that fermentation is caused by organisms which are carried in the air. Only a few  months ago Lister tried out the first antiseptic, carbolic acid, and found that it  worked to prevent inflammation and pus after surgery.

120 years ago the spread of medical information was much slower than today.  Imagine you are a young researcher in a medical school in the USA. The Civil War  has just finished and you are trying to develop your own career after army service.

you have been invited to speak before a group of distinguished physicians,  many of them having come to fame for their heroic service as surgeons during the  American Civil War. What you now understand from your readings if that these  famous physicians are actually killing their patients

Do you think you could convince them?

Suppose, instead of being the speaker, you are a member of the audience. You are  one of the good doctors who have earned respect and prestige in your village

What do you think will happen to your  practice if this kind of word gets bandied about? How would you be likely to greet  this messenger?

This is not 1870 - it is 1989. You are not doctors. You are all respected professionals.  For most of you, managing is part of your professional responsibility. You approach  managing according to what you have been taught and what you have learned  during your careers.

You are no different than I was when I was an executive in industry a little over a  dozen years ago. You don‟t get to a position of responsibility if you are  continuously in doubt about the validity of what you believe. And you certainly  don‟t get there if you broadcast your doubts about what you know and can do.

There is a new theory of management, as different from what most of you  now believe as the germ theory was from what the doctors believed. For reasons  which will become clear shortly, I call this different approach the „germ theory of  management‟.

Not everything the doctors did was wrong: just most things

*The earliest doctors did the best they could with what  they knew at the time. So do you. * What the doctors were taught was not good enough. Somethings they did were  downright dangerous and harmful. They learned. So can you.

The changes are already being adopted  in different lands and in different companies. The results of these changes are  healthier organizations, more vital and more alive

This is not some new fad which you shall be free to follow or not as you please.  What I am talking about is your survival

The Required Changes in Management are Profound

As I said at the start of this talk, in 1865 Pasteur was sent to the South of France to  investigate what was killing the silkworms in the silk industry of France. There he  isolated the bacilli of two distinct diseases and developed a method to prevent  contagion. Lord Lister applied the same ideas in medicine in the same year

In the 1920‟s Walter Shewhart at the Bell Laboratories was given an assignment to  see what to do to increase the reliability of telephone amplifiers used to strengthen  the signal in long distance communication. These amplifiers were required to be  about a mile apart and were to be part of a transmission system in which the cables  were underground.

The amplifiers contained vacuum tubes which were known to have an  uncertain life. Shewhart‟s assignment was to find out what could be done to  guarantee the life of the amplifiers

The problem is that not all vacuum tubes can be made the same. There are  small variations in chemical composition of materials

If the process of assembly is  sufficiently out of control, it is almost certain that some of the vacuum tubes will  have very short lives. The tubes are victims of the virus of variability

Shewhart‟s investigations lead to the concepts of statistical quality control and in  terms of our analogy, his work, like Pasteur‟s, has laid the foundations for the „germ  theory of management‟.

Few people understand what uncontrolled variability does to the cost of doing  business. Fewer still understand what can be done about it and what is the  management‟s role.

Just as Lister understood the broader significance of Pasteur‟s work in the field of  medicine, so it was that Dr W Edwards Deming understood the significance of  Shewhart‟s work to the general theory of management.

If you remove the sources of variability from any process, you make it more  predictable and therefore more controllable

The key idea is the elimination of the virus of variability. The key lies in the  improvement of process capability. This idea was taught widely during World War  II and was important to the successful development of America‟s mighty war  machine.

By 1956, a few people in the Bell System understood this idea well enough to write  in the introduction to the Western Electric Statistical Quality Handbook the  following comment: “… it is possible to make process capability studies in connection with any type  of engineering operation, inspection or management problem.

Germs are invisible. That‟s what makes them so dangerous and so difficult to track  down. You know about their presence only because of the symptoms. The same is true of the viruses of variability. They are invisible. You have to know where to  look and how to look. Just as the doctor often has to use special instruments and  may even have to culture a sample, so must the manager learn to take data and  analyze it in a special way. Dr Deming says it takes „profound knowledge‟ to  understand.

Variability - the Virus of Systems

The first thing that Doctors had to learn was that germs, although invisible, could be  transmitted by various means from one patient to another. They had to believe that  these germs mattered