Dr. Deming: 5 Deadly Disease

The 5 Deadly Diseases highlights critical management mistakes that lead to low quality production. The 5 critical mistakes are:

1. Lack of constancy of purpose

This occurs when the management does not have proper planning to maintain competitiveness in the industry. Such system only concerns with current production and changes the system when the current system no longer works. Thus when changes occurred, the management will have to make hasty changes to accommodate the flow and in the end fail to achieve similar quality standards of the previous production plan. For example, Sarawak Transportation Company (STC) dominated land transportation since its establishment, regardless of the quality they provide, and when purchasing of vehicles were made easy in the turn of millennium, STC was not ready. Once a significant land transport provider, now STC is just a significant part of local history.

2. Emphasis on short term profits

With lack of future planning, it also means the management are more focussed on what they obtain at current time and not the future. This is usually done by new companies in which the management compromise on the quality of materials, workmanship and overall, the end product. Companies from China, Taiwan and Indonesia to name a few are the usual suspects to produce sub-standard products.

3. Evaluation by performance, merit rating or annual review of performance

The third mistake emphasise on evaluation of individual contributions, which will lead to lack of teamwork and harmony. Workers will only concern on their own performance and not the overall achievements of the department or company. Individualistic performance can be seen clearly in modern soccer where players are more concern on goal scoring bonuses rather than the team’s match performance.

4. Mobility of Management

This disease occurs when the management changes too frequently. Changes in management occur when the system fails to deliver stability in profit and quality. New changes bring in new management philosophy and this breaks continuous efforts to improve a system. Thus, long term plans could not be planned and the system will just play around with new short term plans.

5. Running a company on visible figures alone

The fifth disease is co-related to the first four diseases. This occurs when the management is obsessed with number of sales and the profit margin instead of customer satisfaction and product quality. In addition to that, such management plan tends to organize sales or offer lower selling price in order to achieve high sales and significant short term income. In the long run, such method will give lower profit margin (profit/duration) and in the end fail to sustain future business. A budget airline company in Indonesia extends the word ‘budget’ by compromising pilot trainings. The decision resulted in an airline tragedy and the company filed for bankruptcy due to multiple legal actions.