Deming Points

In his book, “Out of the Crisis”, Dr. Deming outlines his 14 points for management. Deming’s points revolved around his invention of total quality management and were his recipe for reducing variation within manufacturing. In my own personal work experience, in the brokerage business, I have found that point 11 of Deming’s points is very evident. He advocated for eliminating management by objectives, meaning that production targets often encouraged the delivery of poor-quality goods.

At my former employer, management put themselves under intense pressure to expand their trading business through any means necessary and set particularly high standards. Their goal was to add one hundred customers for the fiscal year in 2012. They hired extra sales agents that traveled to various trust banks throughout the Midwest and Southern portion of the United States with the goal of selling access to their trading technology which customers could use to access various exchanges. Management was also able to capitalize on a deal that allowed them to partner with a technology vendor and purchase brokerage accounts on a California based trading platform.

Although my firm was able to meet the goal, they had vastly overreached and were unable to properly support all the new customers they had added. Aside from a support standpoint, the technology overhaul to link to the various customer types was often costly and time consuming. Various customers were also subject to significant time periods were they were plagued by bugs and glitches while working with the various new platforms.

Overall, management would have been better off if they focused on less customers and generated more trading business from them. With the new vast array of customers, equal attention could not be paid to all of them and thus they did not generate the returns one would have expected. In the end, some were unhappy with the service provided and the relationships were spoiled for an indefinite period....