Welcome to the next installment of Strategy Essentials! There’s one thing I want to mention right at the top, because I think it’s important:

There is no specific way to manage a business that ensures complete success. If there were, everyone would use it and no one would ever go broke.

So, think of the Strategy Essentials series as a buffet of ideas. It isn’t necessary to eat everything. Even I don’t agree with everything I’m going to write about. I’m here to show you some things that I’ve seen with the hope that you will find something that you would like to put on your plate. In an earlier essay I talked about the importance of self-education for STARFLEET leadership, and this is an effort to break that idea open a little more for everyone.

In the first installment I mentioned W. Edwards Deming. He wrote a book called Out of the Crisis in 1982, and it’s one of Time Magazine’s 25 Most Influential Business Management Books. Deming and Taiichi Ohno were instrumental in bringing quality measurement and improvement techniques to Japanese manufacturing in the 1960s. It was essentially the beta-version for what’s now known as The Toyota Way.

Here are some quotes from Deming:

Much like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, Deming used the preface of Out of the Crisis to put together 14 Points for Management. They were written primarily with for-profit manufacturing in mind, but the philosophy of these ideas can pay off in a big way. It’s not a checklist, it’s a reduction of what would eventually be called The System of Profound Knowledge. I’m not making that up. It’s literally a trademark for the Deming Institute. They really call it that. Here are the points:

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.

2. Adopt the new philosophy.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.

11. Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.

12. Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

There’s a lot to think about, and if you’re interested in diving deeper into those points, there’s an expanded and annotated version over at the Deming Institute.

Deming’s ideas aren’t just the core of The Toyota Way, they’re essentially Management: The Original Series. Camping World CEO and investor Marcus Lemonis renders a lot of this down into elements of his investment philosophy of People, Process and Product. The ideas about using processes to eliminate defects and organizational commitment are parts of what drive a strategy called Six Sigma.

Okay, but how can this work for STARFLEET?

Here’s a quick idea based on number 13: Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement.

STARFLEET is always looking for people to work on the database, and pulling from our existing ranks can only yield so much effort. Even if we pull the outsource handle and spend money on bringing it up-to-date, we could invest in our volunteers and encourage them to check out free sites like Codecademy to learn SQL and PHP. It could help cut follow-up costs and build additional features later.

That’s one idea for STARFLEET based on the material. I hope that this essay will inspire ideas of your own!