Rare Photos and Fresh Stories: An Insider's View of Deming's World (Part 2)

Step into a treasure trove of rare stories, photos, and audio clips as Bill Scherkenbach shares his decades with Dr. Deming. From boardrooms to sleigh rides, discover the moments, minds, and memories that shaped modern quality thinking, told by someone who lived it. A powerful blend of insight, humor, and history you won’t want to miss. (You can see the slides from the podcast here.)

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.4 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm continuing my discussion with Bill Scherkenbach, a dedicated protégé of Dr. Deming since 1972. Bill met with Dr. Deming more than a thousand times and later led statistical methods and process improvement at Ford and GM at Deming's recommendation. He authored 'The Deming Route to Quality and Productivity' at Deming's behest and at 79 is still championing his mentor's message. Learn, have fun, and make a difference. Bill, take it away.

 

0:00:41.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, thank you. Thank you, Andrew. It's an honor to be asked back. Many places don't.

 

0:00:48.7 Andrew Stotz: I really enjoyed our first discussion, and particularly towards the end of it, it got a little personal and emotional, and I appreciate that you shared your journey. That was amazing.

 

0:01:00.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Thank you. Thank you. It is personal.

 

0:01:05.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.

 

0:01:05.4 Bill Scherkenbach: But today, along that wavelength, I brought some pictures or photos and letters and audios of my association with Dr. Deming. So, if you might bring them up, we can start the commenting.

 

0:01:27.9 Andrew Stotz: Wonderful. Well, hopefully you see a screen now up.

 

0:01:34.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. Yep.

 

0:01:35.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay. And for the audience, just to let you know, for the listeners, we're going to show these and I'll try to explain a little bit about what we're talking about because you're not going to be able to see the pictures. But the first thing is the title is An Insider's View of Deming. Learn, have fun, make a difference. And we see a great picture on the left-hand side, and then I threw in a picture of a Lincoln Continental, which we're going to talk about later, which is kind of fun. But maybe you can take it from there, Bill.

 

0:02:07.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. Well, we can talk a little bit later on on that, but this is a picture of me and my wife, Mary Ellen, with Dr. Deming having fun. We were at a restaurant in Northville called Elizabeth's, and it's something that he enjoyed to do just about every evening.

 

0:02:31.3 Andrew Stotz: Great. Well, what a kickoff. So let's go to the next one. And you guys all look great in that photo.

 

0:02:38.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. This is a letter that I received from Dr. Deming back in May of '85, auspicious because the letter dated 13 May, that's my birthday. But for those who cannot read it, should I read the letter for you?

 

0:03:05.2 Andrew Stotz: Either you or I can read it for you. You tell me.

 

0:03:08.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Okay. Well, yeah. Why don't you read it?

 

0:03:10.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay. So, the letter is addressed to a particular person. It says, this is written by Dr. Deming, this acknowledges your kind letter of the 29th April. He that depends solely on statistical process control will be out of a job in three years. The record is clear, the record is clean, no exceptions. A whole program of improvement of quality and productivity is necessary, and it requires that top management learn what their job is. No part of the program will by itself suffice. Your letter does not describe your program, hence comment is difficult. I am happy to learn that Bill Scherkenbach will work with you. His achievements are renowned. He is excelled by nobody. I am sure that you will follow his guidance, not only while he is there with you, but from that then on out. I send best wishes and remain yours sincerely, W. Edwards Deming.

 

0:04:19.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. I did spend a week with this organization, and as Deming said, and in many, many cases, the local management or local part of the organization get very enthusiastic, but the top management did not buy in. And so very little happened there, unfortunately.

 

0:04:53.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I missed that the top right-hand corner in handwritten, it says Portland, 20 May 1985. Dear Bill, I neglected to hand this to you in San Francisco, W. E. D.

 

0:05:08.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. We went to, we. Dr. Deming and I were in San Francisco to meet with Shoichiro Toyoda and his wife. It was a social call. Shoichiro was in town. I don't know where his brother Tatsuro was. Tatsuro headed up NUMI, but Shoichiro was head of it all and was in the US. And wanted to just have a dinner with Dr. Deming. I'm embarrassingly cloudy. We met in a hotel and I can't tell you which one, but it was a nice, relaxing dinner. The English was a bit stilted, but Soichiro wanted to have a dinner with Dr. Deming and to express his appreciation. 

 

0:06:31.3 Andrew Stotz: And he was a titan of industry at the time and in 1985 was really making a beachhead and a real expansion into the US market. Why did he want to meet with Dr. Deming? What was the connection there? Maybe for those that don't know.

 

0:06:55.2 Bill Scherkenbach: He was in town and Deming was nearby in town and just wanted to express his appreciation. I guess, Tatsuro, his brother wasn't there, and Tatsuro headed up NUMI, the partnership between GM and Toyota. But Shoichiro was there and just wanted to express appreciation.

 

0:07:35.1 Andrew Stotz: Great. Okay. So shall we continue on?

 

0:07:40.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. We have a Where is Quality Made? Famous talking from Dr. Deming, and hopefully the audio translates well.

 

0:07:55.3 Andrew Stotz: Yes, we'll see. Let's go.

 

0:07:59.5 Dr. Deming: Where's quality made? Answer is in the top management. The quality of the output of a company cannot be better than the quality directed at the top. The people in the plants and in service organizations can only produce, at best the design of product and service prescribed and designed by the management. Job security and jobs are dependent on management's foresight to design product and service [that] will entice customers and build the market.

 

0:08:31.6 Andrew Stotz: So where did that come from? And tell us more about that.

 

0:08:36.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, I'm not exactly sure which particular seminar or meeting that was, but over the years I have, have, we've made a number of audio recordings and videos of Dr. Deming in his meetings. And so we're looking to get them to the Deming Institute so they can process them and distribute. 

 

0:09:11.8 Andrew Stotz: And why is this so important? He's talking about quality is made at the top where we can see many people think that quality is made by the worker. Do your best. Quality is your responsibility. Tell us more about why you wanted to talk about this.

 

0:09:32.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, it's a common, it's a common, very common mistake. He learned back in 1950, and I think I mentioned it in our first talk, that he gave a number of courses at Stanford during the war and people learned SPC. But when the war was over, over here, because management didn't buy in, nothing really happened. And he learned in his visit in 1950 when he was able, as we said, Mr. Koyanagi was able to get a meeting, a number of seminars done with top management in Japan after the war. And he thought that that, he saw that that actually did make a difference, that management was absolutely key. And in every one of his seminars, he would make, he would make  this point, that quality is made at the top.

 

0:10:54.0 Andrew Stotz: And what was interesting is that, of course, the Japanese senior management, were very receptive. It's many times the case that Deming may have interacted with some senior management at the top of a company, but they weren't receptive or willing to implement what he's talking about.

 

0:11:12.6 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. I think I mentioned last time that you need maybe a significant physical or logical or emotional event. And Ford lost a few billion dollars and was then looking, is there a better way? Japan lost a war, and the tradition over there is to perhaps listen to the conqueror. But MacArthur was very astute, my understanding, that you're not going to go in and replace the emperor and really mix the place up from what their culture is, which is very, very, very astute, in my opinion.

 

0:12:11.4 Andrew Stotz: Okay. So let's continue. And we see a document now up on the screen and a diagram. And maybe you can explain this one.

 

0:12:24.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. This is one of the foils, as he called them, that he wrote on his lantern, which is the overhead projector for all the young people. And making another very, very important point. And that is, he's quoting John Tukey, "the more you know what's wrong with a figure, the more useful it becomes." And he also, at various times, would, would, would talk about George Gallup. And Gallup was his friend. And George Gallup would say that unless you've gone through the slogging of collecting data, you shouldn't be too quickly using data or analyzing data. Because if you go to collect it, you know that some people just aren't there. And this is primarily survey stuff that Gallup was talking about. But Tukey was talking about anything. And Deming, along the way, with his learnings from Shewhart, what I've developed is based on Deming's questions come from theory, created a theory, question, data, action cycle, similar to a PDSA. And so that you need to know what the question was before you can use the data. And Dr. Deming's example was you can't use manganese dioxide for just anything. If it's really, really critical work, then you need to know what's in it that could contaminate it or interact with the other chemicals that you're trying to mix it with. Hugely important in chemistry, hugely important anywhere. And he talked, yes, we do have some audio from Dr. Deming talking about another analogy, on I can't even wash the table unless you tell me what you're going to use it for.

 

0:15:24.0 Andrew Stotz: I remember watching a video of this with him, with Robert Reich, I think it was, being interviewed. And it was such an impactful thing because I always thought you just tell people what to do and they go do it. And so let's listen to the audio. I'm going to play it now. One second.

 

0:15:42.6 Dr. Deming: You could teach me how to wash a table. Teach you how to rub, scrub, use brushes, rags. I'd be pretty good at it. But you know, I could not wash this table, suppose you told me my job is to wash this table. I have no idea what you mean. There's no meaning to that. You must tell me what you're going to use the table for. I want to see a flow diagram, work moving. Here I am. My job is to wash this table. I do not understand what you mean. Wash this table. There's no meaning to that. I must know what you're going to use the table for, the next stage. What will happen to the table, next stage, in the flow diagram? You want to put books on it? Well, it's clean enough for that now. To wash the table, I just go through it from just here, make a look at it. If I work a little, good enough. If I clean enough to eat off of it, well, it's good enough now. Or use it for an operating table? Oh, totally different now. Totally different. Now I scrub it with scalding water, top, bottom, legs, several times. I scrub the floor underneath and for some radius. If I don't know the next stage, I cannot wash the table.

 

0:17:28.8 Andrew Stotz: Tell us your thoughts on that.

 

0:17:31.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Yep. Well, again, my theory, question, data, action cycle, if you're asking a question, you, you, if you can, and there are some confidential considerations, but if you can, you need to tell the people who are trying to answer the question what you're going to do with it. And so if you want the table washed, tell them you're going to just eat off of it or assemble microchips on it. If you, so that's the responsibility of the manager or anyone who is asking the question. So if you want to improve your questions, you got to go back up and think of, well, what's my underlying theory for the question? If this, then that, that prompts a question and the circle continues. And if you, the only reason to collect data is to take action. Both Eastern and Western philosophers absolutely have said that for centuries.

 

0:18:55.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. What's interesting, I didn't hear him say it in any other cases when he was talking about the next stage. I did hear him say before, like, what's it going to be used for? But you could hear when he's talking about the next stage, it's saying to me, that's saying the responsibility of management is looking at the overall system and communicating that and managing that, not trying to, you know, just give some blind instruction to one group, one team, one person without thinking about how it all interacts.

 

0:19:29.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. Absolutely. But in the local aspect of, well, some question answers are not so local, but it's what the question asker's responsibility to let the people know what they're going to use the data for.

 

0:19:51.9 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Great lesson. All right. So now I've got a interesting picture up on the screen here. We have Dr. Deming and there's John Turkey, Tukey how do you say his last name?

 

0:20:05.6 Bill Scherkenbach: John Tukey, T-U-K-E-Y, yep. George Box and Sir David Cox. Anyone in the statistics arena knows them. We also had Stu Hunter and I believe John Hunter was there. They're not in the picture. I took the picture. But we were at Meadowbrook, which is, which is, on the old Dodge estate where Oakland University is near Detroit. And had a, we called the meeting to discuss the importance and the various perspectives of enumerative and analytic. Now, each of these men, Box, Tukey, and Cox, and all of them, all of us in the university, quite honestly, were brought up with enumerative methods. And so your standard distributional stuff and T-tests and whatever. And Deming and Tukey realized the importance of being able to not just take action on the sample, but the cause system, the system that caused the sample, or the process term, in process terms. So yeah, John Tukey was strangely enough, well, not strangely enough, but came up with a graphical method to look at data called the box and whiskers plot, with George Box standing next to him, but it's not that George didn't shave. But Tukey, very, very well known for graphical methods.

 

0:22:24.2 Bill Scherkenbach: George, well known for experimental methods. One of the Box, Hunter and Hunter book on statistical design of experiments is legendary. And Sir David Cox, logistic regression, which is hugely, strangely, well, not strangely enough, but huge nowadays, very important in AI, in how you would be looking to teach or have your model learn what it is that you would like them to learn to look for. So each of these gentlemen, very, very much a pinnacle of the statistical career. We were very, in a large company like Ford, we were very lucky to be able to make big meetings like this, or meetings with very influential people happen.

 

0:23:38.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. That's got to be amazing because I think when most of us listen to Dr. Deming and all that, we get a lot of what he says. But I would say that the statistical aspect and his depth of statistical knowledge is what many people, you know, it's hard for many Deming followers to deeply connect with that. And I think even myself, having, you know, read everything, listened to him, learned as much as I can, the best that I probably come up with is the idea that once I started understanding variation, one of the things I started realizing is that it's everywhere and it's in everything. And I didn't understand...

 

0:24:27.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, I still have the cartoon of a popcorn maker that was very surprised when he said, "They all popped at once." And his popcorn stand has blown up. So yeah, variation is everywhere, a lot or a little. And the thing is that you need to be able to take appropriate action. Sometime, I can remember, I can remember Bob Stemple asking me, "What did I think of the Shainin methods, Dorian Shainin, and technical approach?" And I wrote back to him and I said, "It's no better or worse than any of the other methods we don't use here at GM." The point is, all of these methods are better than Bop-A-Mole. And one of the things, well, one of the things that concerns me is that in these tool areas, and Deming's counsel to me long ago was he remembers the fights that the technical people, the statisticians in the quality profession, would have over which one is a tenth of a percent better or more effective doing this and that. And they would publicly argue, and Deming said, "Stop. It confuses management because they don't have a clue and they're staying away from all forms of quality." So, you, and I don't know the solution in this day and age where everyone is connected. But all of these methods have their strengths and weaknesses, but you have to have the savvy to figure out which one to use to help you improve. All of, each of these four were great teachers, and I have a comment from Dr. Deming on that.

 

0:27:11.7 Andrew Stotz: And just in wrapping this up, it's like, I think one of the things that you realize when you see this one and what you're talking about, what I realize is what a powerhouse Dr. Deming was in the area of statistics. And in some ways, it's kind of like seeing a rock star that you love to listen to and that rock star is great. And then one day on a Sunday, you go to the church and you see he's a reverend and a very solemn man who is a very, very devout devotee of Christianity and something. In some ways, that's the way I feel when I look at this, like, wow, just the roots of the depth of that is so fascinating.

 

0:28:03.2 Bill Scherkenbach: As you mentioned that, I'm thinking back, we were in Iowa and one of the professors there, and I forget his name, but you're right. Deming was held in awe and he was riding in the backseat. I'm driving and this professor is beside me and Dr. Deming said something and I said, how do you know? And the guy thought the world was going to come to an end that I dared ask the master, how did he know? Well, it, it, it ended up fine.

 

0:28:52.9 Andrew Stotz: That was the question he was trying to teach you to ask.

 

0:28:55.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. You don't accept it at face value.

 

0:29:02.2 Andrew Stotz: So we got this other slide now. It says, what do you mean by a good teacher? Maybe you want to set this up and then I'll play the audio.

 

0:29:10.7 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. This was one of his favorite stories when he studied under Ronald Fisher, who is the big godfather of statistics, well, relatively modern stuff. So, Fisher was there at University College, as Deming will describe, and Deming wanted to know, and this is where a number of you will have recognized, he wanted to know what great minds were thinking about.

 

0:29:56.7 Andrew Stotz: All right. I'm going to play the clip right now.

 

0:30:00.2 Dr. Deming: What do you mean by a good teacher? I taught with a man, head of the department. The whole 150 students spellbound, teaching him what is wrong. And they loved it. What do you mean by a good teacher? Holding students spellbound around him. What do you mean teaching them something? I've had a number of great teachers. One was Professor Ronald Picker, University of London, University College I should say, part of the University of London. In London, 1936, no teaching could be worse. A lovable man, if you tried to work with him, could not read his writing, could stand in the way of it, room was dark and cold, he couldn't help the cold, maybe he could have put some light in the room, make mistakes, Professor Paul Ryder in the front row always helped him out. He'd come in with a piece of paper in his hand the ink not yet dry, talk about it. Wonder why the room was full of people from all over the world. I was one of them. Made a long trip, at my own expense, to learn, and we learned. We learned what that great mind was thinking about, what to him were great or important problems today.

 

0:31:45.9 Dr. Deming: And we saw the methods that he used for solutions. We saw what this great mind was thinking about. His influence will be known the world over for a long, long time. He would rated zero by most people that rate teachers. Another teacher that I had was Ernest Crown at Yale, very poor teacher. We'd get together afterwards, some of us, and try to figure out what he was teaching us. He was not even charismatic the way Ronald Fisher was, but we learned. We learned what that great mind was thinking about, what he thought was the problem. We learned about perturbation. His work on lunar theory will be a classic for generations. We learned. Worst teacher there could be, but we learned.

 

0:32:49.0 Andrew Stotz: Wow. Tell us more about that.

 

0:32:53.6 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, he also had a similar story because, from great teachers at NYU, and that's where I first met him and learned from him. He was my teacher, but NYU had a, they had nominations for great teachers. And Deming was able to convince, and I forget who was the, Ernest Kurnow was the dean, and he convinced the dean to wait 10 years before you survey any of the students. And the question was, did any teacher you have really make a difference in your life? And he was able to get that done or get that process agreed to, and it was for the better because in, and I don't want to... I mean, every generation has said this new generation is going to hell in a handbasket, I mean, that for forever. That's nothing new. But what's popular, it's great to be entertained, and as he said, teaching what is wrong. And so did someone make a difference in your life? And not surprisingly, Deming was one of the people selected as a great teacher from NYU Graduate Business School.

 

0:35:15.4 Andrew Stotz: So that's your review after 50 years after the course, huh?

 

0:35:21.6 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah.

 

0:35:24.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And so the point is that, let's separate popularity from original thinking. And also he highlighted the idea that some teachers may not come across very organized, very polished. They may need assistance to help them clarify what they're trying to get across. But just because they're kind of a mess in that way, doesn't mean they're not thinking very deeply. In fact, it may be a sign that they're thinking very deeply about it.

 

0:36:01.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. Now, again, remember, and I know it's a broad brush, but Deming was eminently logical. Crosby would have loved it. Wine and cheese parties showed Juran more physical. And so I think Deming's preferences there, the key to his statement is teaching what was wrong. Some people get excited in class for a variety of reasons, but the key is what are you teaching? The method depends on the ability of the teacher to connect to the students and actually teach. So it gets you back to physical, logical, and emotional. But for Deming, Fisher struck a chord with him.

 

0:37:09.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think for the listener, the viewer, think about some teacher that really made an impact on you. And it could be that there was a teacher that was able to connect with you emotionally.

 

0:37:25.2 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely.

 

0:37:26.7 Andrew Stotz: So there's different ways. But I think of Dr. Deming wasn't a teacher of mine in university, but at the age of 24 to learn from him was definitely a teacher that left me with the most to think about. And I would say there was one other teacher, a guy named Greg Florence that was at Long Beach City College who taught me argumentation and debate. And he also really encouraged me to join the debate team, which I really couldn't because I didn't have time because I didn't have money and I had to work. But he really saw something in me, and now I love to teach debate and helping young people construct arguments. And so for all of us, I think this idea of what do you mean by a good teacher is a great discussion. So, love it. Love it. Well, we got another picture now. Speaking of teaching, the City University of New York is in the backdrop. Maybe you can set this one up.

 

0:38:27.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. This was a one-day, maybe one and a half with some pre-work, but essentially a one-day meeting in New York that was able to gather some of the top educators in the US, the head of the schools in California. There were some folks from Chicago. We had, as I mentioned, Albert Shanker, who was head of the American Federation of Teachers, was sitting right beside me. Other teacher organizations and education organizations. And we got together for a very meaningful thing. We got together to try and determine what is the aim of education in America. And it turned out that everyone was looking for their mic time, and we couldn't even agree on an aim for education in America. And if you can't agree on an aim, your system is everyone doing their best, and it's all, there's not too much progress, except locally or suboptimally.

 

0:40:02.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. That's a good illustration of the concept of best efforts. Dr. Deming often talked about best efforts. And here you're saying, without an aim, everybody's going to just go in their own direction. And it reminds me of a story I tell people in relation to management, which was that I had a really great boss many years ago in the field of finance research in the stock market. He was very brilliant, and he hired really good analysts. I was surrounded by the best. But he never once really brought us together to say, this is our aim. And so what ended up happening was that each person did their best, which was very good as an individual, but as a group, we never were able to really make an impact. And I explain that to my students nowadays, that I believe it's because he didn't set an aim and bring us together for that.

 

0:41:09.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Now, one of the, I mean, one of the things Deming very predictably talked about, as I recall, is the grades and gold stars, which were part of his forces of destruction. And the education is the way we approach education here was part of that, even before people get to get beat further down by corporate and other organizational stuff. And the grading and gold stars, I don't know how much that was, that criticism was appreciated. But everyone had a chance to talk. And in my opinion, not too many people listened.

 

0:42:09.3 Andrew Stotz: Now, the next one is titled Mongolian Rat. What the heck, Bill?

 

0:42:17.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, this is part of teaching what good teaching would be. You've got to listen. It's one of my favorite stories of his.

 

0:42:30.3 Andrew Stotz: Well, let's roll the tape.

 

0:42:33.3 Speaker 3: I met a professor in New York. I had a dinner one time in New York with a surgeon, professor of surgery, he gave out some marbles. Had 21 students in the class. He told them describe the surgical procedure on the jaw, in which a certain breed of Mongolian rat was very helpful. The rat would eat the flesh right down the bone, cleaner than a surgeon could do it. Very important rat. Described it in detail. Students listened intently. On examination, one of the questions was to describe the surgical procedure by use of the Mongolian rat. Twenty of the students gave him back the same marbles that he doled out. Described it as exactly the same word that he had described it. He flunked them all. All the 20. One of them said, my dear professor, I've searched the literature, I've inquired around in hospitals and other teachers. I could find no trace of any such procedure. I think that you were loading us. He passed. The others had to take a new examination. They gave him back the same marbles he doled out to them. He wanted to think.

 

0:43:55.0 Andrew Stotz: Marbles. I haven't heard that expression. Tell us a little bit more about what you want us to take from this.

 

0:44:02.6 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, I think it's pretty self-explanatory. His comment on education that teachers are handing out marbles and pieces of information, not necessarily knowledge, and the testing, you're expected to give them back what the teacher said instead of how can you process it and put it in the context of other things, as well as, I mean, maybe not in the early grades, but in the later ones, you need to be able to look at various perspectives to see who has this opinion and that opinion. And unfortunately, today, that discourse is nicely shut down.

 

0:45:07.3 Andrew Stotz: At first, when I heard him saying marbles, I thought he was kind of using marbles as a way of kind of saying pulling their legs, but now I understand that he was trying to say that he's giving something and then the students give it back.

 

0:45:24.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

 

0:45:26.0 Andrew Stotz: Okay. Mongolian rats.

 

0:45:31.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Yep. So we go from learning to having fun, and here's a picture of our statistical methods office at Ford.

 

0:45:48.1 Andrew Stotz: And you're sitting in a sleigh? Is that what's happening there?

 

0:45:50.0 Bill Scherkenbach: We're sitting in a sleigh, yes, at Greenfield Village, which is where the Henry Ford Museum is, and it happened to snow, so we've got the, we've got the horse-drawn sleigh, and I was listening to your first interview of me, and I want to deeply apologize. It's Harry Artinian, and so from the left, you've got Ed Baker and Bill Craft and Pete Jessup, Harry Artinian, Narendra Sheth, Dr. Deming, Debbie Rawlings, Ann Evans, my secretary, uh ooooh, and the gentleman who worked with Jim Bakken, and then me. So, we were working and decided to have a good lunch.

 

0:46:58.5 Andrew Stotz: And it's a horse-drawn sleigh. And I wasn't sure if you were pulling our leg here because you said, I'm second from the far right. First from the far right, to me, looks like the horse.

 

0:47:09.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. That's the horse's ass. Yep.

 

0:47:14.6 Andrew Stotz: That's a big one.

 

0:47:16.1 Bill Scherkenbach: It is what it is.

 

0:47:18.7 Andrew Stotz: Yep. Okay. Next one. Who's Sylvester?

 

0:47:22.3 Bill Scherkenbach: Sylvester is my son's cat. And this is one of the times Dr. Deming was in my home. And he sat down in my office at my home. And Sylvester saw a good lap and he jumped up on it and took it. And as I said, I couldn't tell who was purring louder. They both were content.

 

0:47:52.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. That looks beautiful.

 

0:47:55.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. It was very, very peaceful. Another fun thing, after a long day of work at Ford, we would go to Luigi's restaurant in Dearborn. I think there was a Dearborn Marriott, a big hotel. I don't know if it's there now. But that's Larry Moore, director of quality, next to Dr. Deming and me. I had a mustache back then.

 

0:48:30.4 Andrew Stotz: Yes. And we all loved soft serve ice cream.

 

0:48:34.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Soft serve ice cream. Yep.

 

0:48:38.0 Andrew Stotz: Yep. All right. Star-Spangled Banner.

 

0:48:40.9 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Now we're at one of my earlier houses in Northville. And Dr. Deming had written a new tune for the Star-Spangled Banner because it was an old English drinking song, Anna, the what? The Anacrocronistic Society. And he thought it was just too bawdy. I mean, you're an unsingable, except if you're drinking. So he rewrote the music for the Star-Spangled Banner. I have a copy of it here. But he, my son Matthew, my oldest son Matthew, we had just gotten one of those first Macs from Apple, Macintosh. And it had a very elementary music thing. So he put the notes that Deming had handwritten. And we put it in there and it played the tune. And so Deming was playing on our piano the Star-Spangled Banner.

 

0:50:04.7 Andrew Stotz: So he had a musical talent.

 

0:50:10.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Oh, yeah. He was a very serious study of, a student of music. Very much so. He wrote a complete Mass. He was a high church Episcopalian. And he wrote a complete Mass of the Holy Spirit with all parts. So, very much a student of music.

 

0:50:41.8 Andrew Stotz: And how did his religious beliefs, like Episcopalian, as you mentioned, how did that come across? Was he a person who talked about that? Was he a person that didn't talk about that? Like, how did that come across?

 

0:50:59.2 Bill Scherkenbach: It was more of a private thing. But then again, on every one of his books, he would begin a chapter with some quotation from different books. And many of them were from the Bible. I can remember one time in London, I'm Catholic, and so we were celebrating the St. Peter and Paul that Sunday. But he was in London and he was at St. Paul's and they weren't giving Peter any traction. But he looked up and he said, yep, you're right. It was both of those saint days.

 

0:51:58.3 Andrew Stotz: All right. Next one, Drive Out Fear.

 

0:52:01.8 Bill Scherkenbach: Oh, yeah. This was Professor Arnold. And we were having lunch in the Ford dining room, one of the Ford dining rooms. And Dr. Deming wasn't too happy of what Professor Arnold was talking about. And Professor Arnold didn't look too happy either. So, I framed the picture and put Drive Out Fear underneath it and hung it in my office. And Deming came and looked at it and smiled.

 

0:52:46.5 Andrew Stotz: And what was the background on Professor Arnold? And in this case, did they have opposing views or was it a particular thing or what was it that was...

 

0:52:58.4 Bill Scherkenbach: I don't remember the particular conversation, but Professor Arnold was head of the statistics department at Oakland University. And Ford had an agreement with Oakland University that we established a master's degree in statistics, according to Dr. Deming's viewpoint on enumerative and analytic. And no, he was very, very capable gentleman. I mean, one of the things Dr. Deming mentioned to me is if the two of us agreed all the time, one of us is redundant. So there were always discussions. This is just a snapshot in time.

 

0:53:52.3 Andrew Stotz: I love that quote, that one of us is redundant. That's powerful, powerful.

 

0:53:59.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. Yep. This is another having fun after learning in... There were a number of restaurants we went to. He particularly liked Elizabeth's,

 

0:54:16.1 Andrew Stotz: And how was their relationship? How did he treat your lovely wife?

 

0:54:22.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Oh, I mean, very lovingly. I mean, I don't know how to describe it, but one of the family.

 

0:54:36.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. He seemed from my observation, like a true gentleman.

 

0:54:42.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Absolutely. Absolutely.

 

0:54:46.0 Andrew Stotz: Well, here we come to the Lincoln that we started off with. This is a great picture too.

 

0:54:51.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. That's a picture I had. It wasn't a Hasselblad, but it was a two and a quarter frame. And I had black and white film in it, but this is one of a number of pictures I took of him at the Cosmos Club. I think it was a very good picture. And in any event, it was blending learning and having fun.

 

0:55:19.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And the Cosmos Club was near his house?

 

0:55:22.5 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. Well, it was depending on who drove. I mean, it was just, it was down a few blocks and then a number of blocks on Massachusetts Avenue. I enjoyed the drive from his house because you'd pass the Naval Observatory, which for years was the home of the chief of naval operations here. But a few decades, a few, I don't know how long ago, the vice president pulled rank on him. And so the Naval Observatory, beautiful, beautiful old house. So, the vice president lives there now. And a lot of people think Massachusetts Avenue in that area is Embassy Row. So you're passing a number of embassies on the way. And the Cosmos Club, anyone can look up. I mean, it's by invitation, members only, and Nobel laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners and a very distinguished membership, let's say.

 

0:56:39.3 Andrew Stotz: Here was another one, Making a Difference with Don Peterson.

 

0:56:43.0 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Yep. We're, we're, this is one of the meetings we had with Don. And it wasn't this meeting, but we were in one of them. Okay. You have it on the right there. That we periodically would have, Dr. Deming and I would have breakfast with Jim Bakken in what was known as the Penthouse at Ford. There are 12 floors, and then there was the 13th and 14th, which were private quarters, essentially. And so we were having breakfast one morning and finishing breakfast, and I'm walking a little bit ahead, and I run ahead and press the elevator button to go down one floor, and the door opens, and there's Henry Ford II in cowboy belt buckle and boots, no hat. He's going to a board meeting, he says, and Jim shied away, said, "Oh, I'm sorry, Mr. Ford." He said, "Shut up, Jim, get in here." And so we got in the elevator, and it was the small elevator. And so we're back to back, belly to belly, and Jim introduces Dr. Deming to Mr. Ford, and Ford said, "I've heard of you, Dr. Deming. God, we really need your help." And Deming had the presence of saying, "I heard of you too, Mr. Ford." It was the longest one-floor elevator ride I've ever had in my life.

 

0:58:49.1 Andrew Stotz: That's fascinating. All right. Next one, talking with workers.

 

0:58:54.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Yep. Yep. He made it a point. And this is a fine line, because you want to be able to have workers say, how, how, are they able to take pride in their work? And are there any problems and all of that? But you don't want to be in a position of then going to management and telling them because of fear in the organization. So, Dr. Deming was very good at listening and getting people to talk about their jobs and their ability to take joy and, well, pride in their work. So we had many, many meetings, different places. And this next one is with the Ford Batavia plant, I think.

 

1:00:01.2 Andrew Stotz: Yep.

 

1:00:02.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Yeah. We're riding on the tractors and having a good time.

 

1:00:11.3 Andrew Stotz: Who's driving?

 

1:00:14.2 Bill Scherkenbach: The plant manager, Ron Kaseya, was driving.

 

1:00:16.9 Andrew Stotz: Okay.

 

1:00:17.9 Bill Scherkenbach: And so I absolutely do not recall what we were laughing at, but we were having a good time. And the Batavia transaxle plant, a number of people will recognize as where Ford, it really made the point that doing better than spec is really what the job is. And it's a very powerful video that's been out there and people would recognize it as well, because we were producing the exact same transaxle in Mazda. And Mazda was influenced a lot of by Genichi Taguchi and looked to reduce variation around the nominal and not just be happy that we made spec. And John Betty, who was head up of powertrain operations and then went to the Department of Defense as assistant secretary of defense for procurement, I think, because of the quality expertise. Betty is in the front of the video saying he's absolutely convinced that this is a superior way to look at manufacturing, to look at the management of any process. You want to get your customers to brag, not just not complain.

 

1:02:10.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Courage.

 

1:02:11.8 Bill Scherkenbach: And all of this takes courage. And especially in his seminars in London say, the Brits had the advantage. You guys can take courage every day. We can't get that in the US anymore. Or it's very rare to be able to buy it here.

 

1:02:36.3 Andrew Stotz: For the listeners, there's a logo of the John Courage beer, premium beer.

 

1:02:45.7 Bill Scherkenbach: Yes. Yes. It's an amber pills.

 

1:02:49.8 Andrew Stotz: Okay.

 

1:02:52.4 Bill Scherkenbach: And last but not least, well, not last, but we're looking for, and I ran across this quote from Yogi Berra, and it's very applicable right now. And Yogi Berra said, I never said... Well, what did he say?

 

1:03:19.2 Andrew Stotz: Never said most of the things I said.

 

1:03:21.4 Bill Scherkenbach: Most of the things I could have said. I never said most of the things I said. Yeah. And every day online, I see people saying Dr. Deming said this, and he said that. And if he did, I've never heard him say it. And not that I've heard him say everything. But if he did say something like, if it's not measurable, you can't manage it. He would have followed it with, that's not right. The unknown and unknowable. And so you've got a lot of people misunderstanding what Dr. Deming said. And you've got to go with, I never said most of the things that I said.

 

1:04:24.0 Andrew Stotz: Well, that's the great thing about this discussion is that we're getting it from the horse's mouth, someone that was there listening and being a part of it.

 

1:04:32.1 Bill Scherkenbach: Well, I'm glad you saw the other end of the horse.

 

1:04:37.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. So, I'm going to close out this by just sharing a little personal connection. And that is, I'm showing a picture of me in my 1963 suicide door Lincoln Continental, which I owned for 10 years in beautiful Bangkok, Thailand. And much like being kind of wild taking a ride to the Cosmos Club with Dr. Deming driving his Lincoln Continental, you could imagine how odd it looked seeing this American guy driving this 1963 Lincoln Continental on the streets of Bangkok. But I just thought I would share that just to have some fun. So, yeah.

 

1:05:14.3 Bill Scherkenbach: That's beautiful. Absolutely. Yeah. I didn't think the streets were that wide.

 

1:05:22.1 Andrew Stotz: It gets stuck in traffic, that's for sure. But wow, there's so many things that we covered. I mean, I just really, really enjoyed that trip down memory lane. Is there anything you want to share to wrap it up?

 

1:05:36.1 Bill Scherkenbach: No. As I said, our last conversation, we've just scratched the surface. There's so much, so much more to talk about and preserve, I think.

 

1:05:48.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. Well, I really enjoyed it.

 

1:05:52.1 Bill Scherkenbach: I have done my best.

 

1:05:53.6 Andrew Stotz: Yes, you have. You have. I've enjoyed it, and I'm sure the listeners and the viewers will enjoy it too. So, on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I just want to thank you for taking the time to pull that together and to walk us through it. And for listeners out there, remember to go to Deming.org to continue your journey. And of course, go to LinkedIn to find Bill and reach out and share your interpretations of what we went through. And maybe you have a story that you'd like to share also. So, this is your host, Andrew Stotz, and I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming. And that is, “people are entitled to joy in work."