Not necessarily limited "intellect", but rather limited background knowledge.

Deming requires quite a bit of knowledge and understanding in failure/success modes. The core tenet of Deming is that every output is a result of some process and, therefore, output is controlled by controlling* the process itself. Look at your process and tackle failure modes in this priority list.

Drucker, on the other hand, puts the process under the fog of war and basically says deploy pressure on process outputs and let the process adjust itself. It requires much less understanding behind the processes to make sense.

* - Process control in Deming is mostly about variability.

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baxtr 3 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

What’s the most basic way to get into the works of Deming?

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bryanrasmussen 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So following Drucker would be the cause of a lot of "every metric becomes a target" in management?

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asplake 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Obviously the truth is messier than that, and it's worth noting that Drucker later recognised the toxicity of Management by Objectives and disavowed it. Quite a bit of OKR literature is devoted to avoiding it becoming its progenitor, MBO.

Worth adding that Deming (after Shewhart) recognised two kinds of variation: special cause (specific the work item in question) and common cause (an artifact of the process). That knowledge work involves a lot more of the former than does manufacturing does not excuse inattention to the latter.

	▲	ChrisMarshallNY 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Drucker later recognised the toxicity of Management by Objectives and disavowed it. Reminds me of a seminal treatise for Waterfall by Royce[0], where he basically says it’s fraught with issues, but can be coerced into something semi-usable. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. I think that paper is used as the template for all Waterfall work. [0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.5555/41765.41801