I’ve written about W. Edwards Deming and the PDCA cycle in two prior installments of Strategy Essentials, but you should know that they were a reaction to ideas from a guy named Peter Drucker. Like last time, I’m going to start off with some quotes.

• Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.
• The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.
• If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.

Now, here’s the weird part: Even though the philosophies from Drucker and Deming are often at odds with each other, they’ve both been adopted by companies that have gone on to success. Drucker’s philosophy was championed by HP and DuPont, Deming’s was embraced by Toyota and Amazon. There’s no one true way.

Drucker’s philosophy is called Management by Objectives or MBO.

From the Wikipedia page:

Management by objectives can be described as a process whereby the superior and subordinate jointly identify common goals, define each individual’s major areas of responsibility in terms of the results expected of him or her, and use these measures as guides for operating the unit and assessing the contribution of each of its members.

This could revolutionize the way STARFLEET operates because it places so much effort on teaming responsibility with results. In the MBO model, it’s all about agreeing on a goal, defining a task, developing a metric to make sure that the task is being completed and an assessment to follow.

About thirty years after Drucker’s philosophy was introduced as a system, George Doran used it to create the SMART criteria for goals and objectives.

• Specific: Target a specific area for improvement.
• Measurable: Quantify an indicator of progress.
• Assignable: Specify who will do it.
• Realistic: State what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
• Time-bound: Specify when the results can be achieved.

In a truly transparent STARFLEET, this information would be available for every position. When it comes to determining whether someone is doing a good job or a bad job, we wouldn’t have to rely entirely on other people’s opinions. We could see it for ourselves.

For example:

Lt. Random volunteered to do a job. Lt. Random met with leadership and negotiated the specific tasks associated with that job, how the completion of those tasks would be measured, and how long it would take. Lt. Random got leadership to engage specific resources to complete the job.

The limited results: Lt. Random was able to do more than they promised. Lt. Random did exactly as they promised. Lt. Random wasn’t able to do what they promised. Leadership provided the resources they agreed to provide to Lt. Random or they didn’t.

This changes everything.

Instead of someone trying to convince you to vote for and/or appoint them with titles they’ve held or by telling you how long they’ve been in STARFLEET, they could produce a list of tasks they have completed or goals they have met or exceeded. On the flip side, they could tell you about what fell short, and how their ideas would modify the tasks or better define the objectives.

We could make better decisions because we would have better information.

Drucker ideas and the SMART criteria require leadership to be considerably more engaged, but I think they could split the difference. If someone had to come up with metrics for every single volunteer position at the international level, they would probably lose their mind. They could eliminate as many of those positions as possible, and then put their energy into the ones that are left. The same strategy can be employed at the departmental and regional level, too.

These ideas also raise the bar on volunteer effort. It won’t be enough to say that you’re interested in a thing and you want to be in charge of information regarding a thing for STARFLEET. You’re going to be expected to detail exactly what you’re willing to do, how long it’s going to take and how that effort will be measured.

Drucker’s ideas are worth considering. So are Deming’s. There are a lot of different ideas when it comes to responsible management and leadership, and many of them are valid. As I mentioned earlier in the series: If there was one true way that worked 100% of the time, everyone would use it and no one would ever go broke.

If I’m trying to convince you of anything, it’s this: We’ve lost so much ground. We need to move away from a leadership model that’s focused on personality and move toward a model that’s focused on the improvement of our product for current and potential customers. I’m not picking a particular side; I’m just presenting proven methods and ideas for doing just that.

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!

I run a profitable small business (technically, a couple of them), but I’ve had to do it the hard way. I’m a high-school dropout with a GED. I’ve never been to college — I don’t have an associates degree, let alone an MBA. I had to do a lot of self-education, and it helped me learn the difference between risk and recklessness. It helped make the difference between failure and disaster.

I’m going to get into some thoughts from W. Edward Deming and Peter Drucker over the next few weeks, digging down into the PDCA cycle and how it affects concepts like kaizen. When we get into that you’ll see why I’ve been extolling the virtues of doing small things right now and insisting on exploration for STARFLEET leadership. Don’t worry, it won’t be a business class. I’m just going to discuss some different business philosophies and how they connect to how STARFLEET is (or could be) managed.

This is a new category for the site that I’m calling Strategy Essentials. It exists for one reason:

Nothing is free. Everything has a price. When it comes to non-profit operations, that price usually isn’t in dollars and cents. It’s in ability, initiative, effort and time.

We know this. We have an awards program to recognize people for their efforts. We know that no one’s getting paid, and the only reason anything works at all is because volunteers step up. Volunteers are our most precious resource, and that resource is not infinite.

We know this. But we’re bad at demonstrating that we understand this. If we understood it, we would focus a lot more effort on making sure that we’re driving that incredible volunteerism effectively. There’s way too much focus on how things are organized, and very little focus on whether or not the organization does what it is meant to do.

It is easy to set up an organization. It’s easy to change it, too. Answering questions about how you would change the organization is fun, but the answers don’t matter because the question is too easy. We need to dig deeper and solve more difficult problems.

How do we provide the maximum amount of value to a diverse audience of Star Trek fans with a minimum of volunteer effort?

That is a question worth answering, so we’re going to dig into a lot of potential answers. Let’s explore together!