Obviously, if a quality issue is detected in manufacturing, there may be some steps that engineering could take to improve the manufacturing process and make things stable enough to obtain meaningful statistics. This is part of the Deming feedback process, and part of the System Engineering Life Cycle.
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The inevitable result of this is however the devaluation of the future. Eg if the statement was true, it'd be the R&D workers responsibility to hand in their resignation ( or their managers layoffs) if their product won't get paying customers within the same fiscal year
So no, that statement of yours is not actually true. It should not be entirely ignored, but it should not become a leading cause unless you want to run the company in the ground.
Totally depends on the scale. For pizza-sized times with a neighbourhood pizza shop sized impact, sure. Large scale projects without controls & feedback loops in place will fall apart; see: Scaling teams: https://archive.is/FQKJH
If you'd follow some medium to large scale projects (like Go / Chromium), the value of processes & quality control, even if it may seem at the expense of velocity, becomes clear.
The great insight of Deming's methods is that you can (mostly) identify the difference between common and special causes mathematically, and that you should not attempt to fix common causes directly - it's a waste of time, because all real-life processes have random variation.
Instead, what you want to do is identify your mean and standard deviation, plot the distribution, and try to clean it up. Rather than poking around at the weird edges of the distribution, can we adjust the mean left or right to get more output closer to what we want? Can we reduce the overall standard deviation - not any one outlier - by changing something fundamental about the process?
As part of that, you might find out that your process is actually not in control at all, and most of your problems are "special" causes. This means you're overdriving your process. For example, software developers working super long hours to meet a deadline might produce bursts of high producitivity followed by indeterminate periods of collapse (or they quit and the whole thing shuts down, or whatever). Running them at a reasonable rate might give worse short-term results, but more predictable results over time, and predictable results are where quality comes from.
Distributed systems is also a way to be throughly humbled by complexity: https://fly.io/blog/corrosion/
Hence, every action of a company needs to be measured against the upcoming quarterly results.
OKRs et al are great at that.
Who cares about quality/sustainabily. We just want the stock go wheeeeee and get our bonuses.
US companies are generally a better bet though, because despite the handicap of being run by Americans, they are hosted in a country that generally believes in freedom and rule of law which means they have an unfair advantage even if they do a sub-par job of making the most of what they have.
Exceptions abound in the details.
Now check most Western companies: since the 70 / 80, everything is about reducing headcount. Lay-offs, outsourcing, offshoring, now the concept of spending your whole working life at the same company feels like a fever dream. So why would an employee try to improve things for the company when they know there is no future for them there? Better improve their own career and future prospect. So yeah, things like Kaizen are doomed to fail until things change.
- large factory of British workers + British management: strife, strikes, disaster, bankruptcy (British Leyland)
- small factory of British workers + British management: success, on a small scale (lots of the F1 industry, McLaren etc; also true of non-car manufacturing)
- large factory of British workers with overseas management: success (Nissan Sunderland, BMW era Mini, etc)
Tory governance and fiscal policies had all the responsibility for Leyland, Hillman and more importantly Rover.
For Rover in particular, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Venture_Holdings stands out. Similar to Maplin and Toys R Us, an example of taking the onwer-management taking a large amount of cash out of a business that was declining.
It's not.
There was a time when millionaires were considered 'rich'. Now that's just a retiree, in most housing markets, who's paid off a house. Or even a townhome... and in some places, a condo!
It doesn't matter "whether it should" cost that much, that's irrelevant for my example. The point is, being a millionaire isn't a big deal. It's common. It doesn't mean wealthy.
Likewise when a company is large, and has infrastructure all over the world, and is worth much of a T, a B is nothing. Cash reserves in the billions is really not all that much, just fiscal prudence.
An alternate is that "banks should get free money, by forcing all companies to borrow money for capital projects". Because if you tax companies for "wealth", then they'll just spend all that capital on loan payments.
I feel people have such weird ideas about taxation. People see "oh no, someone has free money!" then get excited and want to tax. What? The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.
Losing track of that last bit, is when people stop asking "should we tax" and instead say "they have money, so tax"
But I think the author of the comment you were replying to had a different goal in mind. I think their goal was "prevent corporations from getting too big".
We can and should debate whether that is a goal we should be trying to achieve, but if it is then progressive taxation for companies might be a way to achieve it.
> One of the virtues of OKRs is that they are straightforward for managers to apply.
Where Deming reads like a science paper, Drucker reads like an installation guide.
Deming requires quite a bit of knowledge and understanding in failure/success modes. The core tenet of Deming is that every output is a result of some process and, therefore, output is controlled by controlling* the process itself. Look at your process and tackle failure modes in this priority list.
Drucker, on the other hand, puts the process under the fog of war and basically says deploy pressure on process outputs and let the process adjust itself. It requires much less understanding behind the processes to make sense.
* - Process control in Deming is mostly about variability.
Worth adding that Deming (after Shewhart) recognised two kinds of variation: special cause (specific the work item in question) and common cause (an artifact of the process). That knowledge work involves a lot more of the former than does manufacturing does not excuse inattention to the latter.
Reminds me of a seminal treatise for Waterfall by Royce[0], where he basically says it’s fraught with issues, but can be coerced into something semi-usable. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. I think that paper is used as the template for all Waterfall work.
Fiat money is not the problem, the financialization of economy is actually a common by-product of aging great monetary powers. The US chose to become a monetary power in 1945, rejecting Keynes' Bancor proposal.
Then in 1971, it found it couldn't keep it working, due to the very reasons Keynes explained to them at Bretton Woods. Arrighi argues this has happened 4 times already.
So Fiat money and the financialization of life is just an outcome of something else - that being a monetary superpower is just not sustainable.