Profile Photo courtesy of The W. Edwards Deming Institute®.

The Deming System of Profound Knowledge® (SoPK):
The Deming System of Profound Knowledge® (SoPK) is the culmination of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's lifelong efforts to define a comprehensive theory of management that embraces his 14 Points

Dr. Deming’s 14 Points for Management:
Dr. W. Edwards Deming offered 14 key principles for management to follow to significantly improve the effectiveness of a business or organization.

Seven Deadly Diseases of Management:
While the 14 Points for Management can be said to express Dr. Deming's philosophy of transformational management, his Seven Deadly Diseases of Management describe the most serious barriers that management faces to improving effectiveness

PDSA Cycle:
The PDSA Cycle (Plan-Do-Study-Act) is a systematic process for continually gaining valuable learning and knowledge to improve a product, process, or service. Also known as the Deming Wheel.

Red Bead Experiment:
From the early 1980s, Dr. Deming used his infamous Red Bead Experiment to clearly and dramatically illustrate several points about poor management practices, including several of the Seven Deadly Diseases.

The Funnel Experiment:
Dr. Deming devised the Funnel Experiment to describe the adverse effects of changing a process without carefully studying the possible causes of the variation.

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Let's borrow from John Seddon and Beyond Command and Control, the source of the Vanguard Method, who put together a bio on Joseph M. Juran....

Born in 1900 in the State of Iowa, Deming was to embody the description – a prophet unheeded in his own land.

Deming maintained an active work schedule until his death in 1993. He was the inspiration behind Japan’s manufacturing industry revival in the early 1950s.

It was not until 1980 that he received widespread recognition in his home country when NBC TV aired a feature based on his work in Japan, entitled “If Japan can…. why can’t we?”

The Japanese revival has become legendary, and his contribution was, in its early years, based on his teaching of statistical techniques developed as a US Government Statistician and refined in his pre-war association with Walter Shewhart.

But Deming’s unique ability was to see beyond the limits of statistical methods, and this enabled him to describe patterns of broader significance in the ways organisations managed their affairs, particularly concerning the roles of individuals and how they are constrained by the systems within which they work.

Thus, Deming became equally famous for his celebrated Fourteen Points and Seven Deadly Diseases, all of which pertained to entrenched practices that he saw as harmful to the well-being of organisations.