It's Deming's Time: Why The Social Web Will Make Flying Cars, Dammit!

I have pondered this blog post for years. Quite literally. Part of the reason I've been afraid to write it is that I desperately hope I'm not wrong. And because this article is about quality, I want it to be perfect. Sigh. Long before we were blessed with some wonderful acronyms such as eCRM, SEO/SEM, and LOLCATS (teeheehee OMG!), another took hold on the business world from sometime in the early-'80s to early '90s--TQM or Total Quality Management. TQM was the brainchild of W. Edwards Deming, a business icon particularly in Japan where he transformed the auto industry from one that manufactured rinky-dink sardine-sized death traps to world class dependable people movers. TQM was the complete optimization of management processes. (The roots of TQM are now alive and well within the "religion" of Six Sigma.)

Mind you that I have no idea why I have become somewhat obsessed in my career with optimization of processes or, more accurately, the reduction of waste. I was a music and political science major, for crying out loud. I have ADD and can't finish a novel. But as I continue in my own observation--and possible contribution to--the complete transformation of consumer experience, marketing and communications, I am left wondering, "What becomes of 'Quality' when the consumer possesses so much power?" Deming was able to transform industries by looking inward to organizations and finding flaws in myriad processes to achieve ultimate product and service quality. But this science was constructed nearly void of real-time consumer input. Or more precisely, without the scaled social reach of consumer opinion and brand experience.

Without a doubt, Deming would be enamored with what is happening as the social web provides real-time consumer influence into how products and services actually work--or don't work. (He died in 1993, the year the web browser was invented.) Brands live and breath now within an ecosystem flush with feedback as to how they are performing, meeting expectations or missing the mark.

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of speaking to a wide array of business professionals, but I must tell you that the product design, developers and managers give me some of the most enthusiastic response to the social web. Marketers, too often, froth that they now have a whole new channel to blahblahblah, but product people get wide-eyed that, in many cases, they are no longer beholden to months or years old consumer research to understand how their hard work is paying off. The real-time economy does not afford stale data.

I believe we are on the very brink of a beautiful new era in quality. Crappy products simply won't be able to take root and flourish. (Ask Toyota --ironically, in Deming's case--about the social web over the past two years.) As a result, a newfangled Total Quality Management that uses consumer feedback as the fuel for continuous improvement is beginning to take place. As product and service designers embrace the social web as the critical source of consumer "truth," I believe it will have a much greater impact on our global economy than anything we marketing and communications people can accomplish. "Social media" may feel a little PlaySkool, comparatively.

The next 20 years are going to be a giant leap forward as a result of brands syncing their processes to the actual experiences of the consumer. Products will begin to behave much more like software, where version updates and incremental improvements are launched as a result of them living in the world. Even the manufacturing processes that create them will need to become more nimble. Emerging trends in nano-technology and hi-def 3D rendering will give manufacturers the ability to "create" environments where their virtually improved products live and behave prior to actually coming off the end of an assembly line or project team. (Deming would go nuts for this.) Once again, these virtual worlds, based in an analytical rooting from consumer feedback, will reduce the amount of waste in traditional manufacturing. When a physical product leaves the line, imagine it being 100 percent perfect in all regards. Perfect in its use of data. Perfect in its response to consumer need. Perfect in its design. Perfect in its use of energy to be manufactured. And perfect is its usefulness.

Oh, I love being this guy. Making these claims. But I believe we're headed to an extraordinary era where the 20th century will just seem to have been a gigantic sucking waste monster of resources and talent, simply as a result of us not knowing whether or not our stuff mattered. And now we can know.

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Andrew Eklund :: Founder & CEO
Ciceron :: Digital Marketing
www.ciceron.com
612.230.3901 :: LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/andreweklund
Professional Twitter: @HeavyThinking
Personal Twitter: @aeklund

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The Big Caveat

Submitted by Jordan Fabyanske (not verified) on Saturday, September 25.

I wholeheartedly agree with Andrew that now, more than ever (and increasingly so), technology is enabling companies to better incorporate inputs and feedbacks from their customers. For context, I must say we have come a long way since Deming's TQM movement toward understanding the holistic and complex systems that comprise 'the firm'. Peter Senge wrote about the importance of systems thinking in his book The Fifth Disclipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization (1990), highlighting the various feedbacks that enable or undermine sustainable long-term growth, not the least of which stem from customers. Deming himself, in the forward to Senge's book, acknowledges the importance of these feedbacks.

Now 20 years later (and following much discussion of the success of Dell's customer centricity, Southwest Airline's unconventional approach to market research, the crowdsourcing revolution in open source software development, and Steven Spear's new look at Toyota's culture of "dynamic discovery"), pretentious management consulting "thought leaders" are now pointing to the Power of Pull as the new frontier for value creation (the Economist published an excellent book review just last month).

But let's just hang on a sec and recognize that every individual I've mentioned here is American, and that fact carries some big implications. Setting the high-tech aside (as Andrew does as well, as he acknowledges the revolution in open source software development) and focusing on manufacturing, retail and consumer goods, many American firms have notoriously lagged behind their Japanese counterparts in their ability to understand the customer and anticpate demand trends. Just look at Toyota's Prius, 7-Eleven Japan's innovative point-of-sale customer feedback system, and Kikkoman Corporation's incredible 407-year survival (making it the oldest company in the world). What's with these Japanese? Could it be that Japanese firms are learning more from their customers than American firms are learning? Could it be that Japanese customers are just plain smarter and have more to say than American customers? Well, on average, they're certainly older, and the aging of their population may make them even wiser still.

Back to the U.S., here we have a population whose fertility rate was stagnant for a while, but is actually increasing again. Now I'm not saying we're going to get dumber (fingers crossed), but let's just acknowledge that crowdsourcing is only productive insofar as the crowd is wise. In part that's what Southwest Airlines figured out (see Blue Ocean Strategy by Kim and Mauborgne) when they started seeking the valuable feedback of point-to-point bus and rail commuters instead of frequent flyers.

What it would really take to realize the flying cars

Submitted by Chris McLaren (not verified) on Friday, September 3.

What would have to happen for Andrew’s claims to become reality? Two things:

Most people have to use social media to communicate their experiences with purchases, most of the time. This is the data companies need to know in real-time how the market is reacting to any given product.
We’re not even close – There are only 272M social media users worldwide*, of a total population of 429M with web access. That’s a 63% penetration rate for the hottest thing in the freaking world of late, and a 4% penetration rate for the overall world population. And of the 272M, just 19% participate in activities such as posting on other people’s blogs or writing product reviews. And their participation is not uniformly spread across all types of products and services. So for this to work, there would have to be a greater incentive (and organization, for that matter) for users to take time to comment on their experiences with purchased products and services in social media, not to mention greater and much more pervasive social media usage penetration overall.
All companies have to leverage social media listening tools – and use them intelligently.
Pretty sure this isn’t happening... yet. But progress in #1 above will inevitably creates progress in #2.

The problem is that for a significant percentage of products and services that could use real-time listening, there simply isn’t enough good data out there yet to consider it a replacement for other forms of research/feedback. But with Facebook adding 200M users in less than a year, it’s not hard to see this changing. So maybe we will see flying cars… maybe.