https://codewithoutrules.com/2019/05/15/jane-austen-negotiating-guide/ Learning negotiation from Jane Austen by Itamar Turner-Trauring, 15 May 2019

Looking for a job as a software developer can be scary, exhausting, or overwhelming. Where you apply and how you interview impacts whether you’ll get a job offer, and how good it will be, so in some sense the whole job search is a form of negotiation.

So how do you learn to make a good impression, to convince people of your worth, to get picked by the job you want? There are many skills to learn, and in this article I’d like to cover one particular subset.

Let us travel to England, some 200 years in the past, and see what we can learn.

Jane Austen, Game Theorist What does a novelist writing in the early 19th century have to do with getting a programming job?

In his book Jane Austen, Game Theorist, Michael Suk-Young Chwe argues quite convincingly that Austen’s goal in writing her books is to teach strategic thinking: understanding what and why people do what they do, and how to interact with them accordingly, in order to achieve the outcomes you want.

Strategic thinking is a core skill in negotiation: you’re trying to understand what the other side wants (even if they don’t explicitly say it), and to find a way to use that to get what you want. The hiring manager might want someone who both understands their particular technical domain and can help a team grow, whereas you might want a higher salary, or a shorter workweek. Strategic thinking can help you use the one to achieve the other.

Strategic thinking is of course a useful skill for anyone, but why would Jane Austen in particular care about strategic thinking? To answer that we need a little historical context.

The worst job search ever Imagine you could only get one job your whole life, that leaving your job was impossible, and that you’d be married to your boss. This is the “job search” that Austen faced in her own life, and is one the main topics covered in her books.

Austen’s own family, and the people she writes about, were part of a very small and elite minority. Even the poorest of the families Austen writes about have at least one servant, for example.

While the men of the English upper classes, if they were not sufficiently wealthy, could and did work—as lawyers, doctors, officers—their wives and daughters for the most part could not. So if they weren’t married and didn’t have sufficient wealth of their own, upper-class women had very few choices—they could live off money from relations, or take on the social status loss of becoming a governess.

Marriage was therefore the presumed path to social status, economic security, and of course it determined who they would live with for the rest of their lives (divorce was basically impossible).

Finding the right husband was very important. And getting that husband—who had all the legal and social authority—to respect their wishes after marriage was just as important. And of course the women who didn’t marry lived at the mercy of the family members who supported them.

And that’s where strategic thinking comes in: it was a critical skill for women in Austen’s class and circumstances.

Learning from Austen If, as Michael Chwe argues, Austin’s goal with her books is to teach strategic thinking, how can you use them to improve your negotiation skills?

All of Austen’s books are worth reading—excepting the unfortunate Mansfield Park—but for educational purposes Northanger Abbey is a good starting point. Northanger Abbey is the story of Catherine, a naive young woman, and how she becomes less naive and more strategic.

Instead of just reading it as an entertaining novel, you can use it to actively practice your own strategic understanding:

In every social interaction, Catherine has a theory about other people’s motivations, why they’re doing or saying certain things. Notice the assumptions underlying her theory, and then come up with your alternative theory or explanation for other characters’ actions. Then, compare both theories as the plot unfolds and you learn more. Other characters also offer a variety of opportunities to see strategic thinking—or lack of it—in action. Once you’ve gone through the book and experienced the growth of Catherine’s strategic thinking, start practicing those skills in your life.

Why are your coworkers, family, and friends doing what they’re doing? Do they have the same motivations, goals, and expectations that you do? The more you pay attention and compare your assumptions to reality, the more you’ll learn—and the better you’ll do at your next job interview.

Ready to get started? You can get a paper copy from the library, or download a free ebook from Project Gutenberg.

https://svpg.com/product-discovery/

Product Discovery by Marty Cagan | Sep 24, 2007

Have you seen this situation before? Your company gets all excited about a product idea, and as product manager you are asked to define it. You are told that the engineers will be finished with their current project in 4 weeks, so that means take all the time you need, as long as you are ready in 4 weeks.

No problem, you say (after all, sometimes you’re only given days, so 4 weeks sounds great). You’ll even use all the best practices Marty is always ranting about. You’ll start with an opportunity assessment to understand the problem to be solved, then you’ll spend quality time interviewing real users, and identify a preliminary set of requirements, and by the start of the second week you should be able to to work with an interaction designer on a prototype, and in the third week you’ll do user testing with the prototype, and in the fourth week you’ll flesh out the details of the use cases and review the prototype and spec with engineering.

These are all great practices. But what happens isn’t usually so great. During your initial user discussions you find that users aren’t as excited about the idea as your management was, and/or you struggle to come up with a prototype that users can figure out, and/or the users aren’t excited about the ideas in the prototype when they test it. But the time is up, the engineers are ready, and the result is that during the next three to six months, engineering proceeds to build that same unusable and unexciting product that you saw in your prototype, and you ship, and then your management is of course disappointed in the results.

The problem isn’t the reliability of the software, so the engineering team isn’t to blame – after all, they just built what you asked them to – so everyone knows it’s your fault as product manager.

You know that it doesn’t help to talk to users, create prototypes, and test with users, if you don’t adjust your course based on what you learn.

This notion of requirements and design as a sequential, predictable and scheduled phase in a product development process is so ingrained in our industry that it’s often one of the most difficult habits for product organizations to break.

But they do need to get past this. Product organizations need to come to terms with the fact that the product invention process is fundamentally a creative process. It is more art than science.

I prefer to think of this phase as “product discovery” more than “requirements and design.” I think this nomenclature emphasizes two all-important points:

First, you need to discover whether there are real users out there that want this product. In other words, you need to identify your market and validate the opportunity with your customers.

Second, you need to discover a product solution to this problem that is usable, useful, and feasible. In other words, you need to design your product and validate it with your customers and your engineering team.

Sometimes this product discovery is straight-forward. Other times it is extremely difficult. In my experience, it’s not so hard to discover and validate the market opportunity, but often it’s very challenging to discover the solution. Even with the help of great designers and great engineers, some problems are just truly hard (at least many of the ones worth pursuing).

The pharmaceutical drug industry provides an extreme example. The market discovery is usually not very hard; no shortage of good problems worth solving (like saving your life, extending your life, or improving the quality of your life). The hard part of course is discovering a product solution. Drug companies go into this “discovery” phase fully aware that there’s no guarantee they’ll come up with anything, or how long it may take. As an industry, they have to come to terms with this element of uncertainty (and this risk is priced into their products).

Yet with software, even though we all know it is very hard, and we know that the majority of software releases fail to meet their objectives, we still insist on scheduling the discovery phase like we’re planning the construction of a house.

Management especially struggles with this notion of product discovery. I think there are two underlying reasons for this:

First, the discovery process just isn’t predictable. Management fears you may spend months and end up with nothing to show for it. At least if they go ahead and build they can say that they shipped something. It’s the same reason why many managers are uncomfortable with Scrum. They want to know how many 30-day sprints it will take before they’re done.

Second, the perceived constrained resource in just about every software product organization is the engineers, and the thought that an engineering team might be sitting around with nothing to do but play Foosball just drives management nuts.

Ironically, it is precisely this reasoning that leads directly to wasted engineering resources.

Realize that almost every company does this discovery process I’ve described here, instead of using one prototyper for a few weeks, they use the full engineering team for full release cycles to build the software that is then QA’ed and deployed into production systems. This is why it typically takes so many companies three or more releases over one to two years to get something usable and useful. They are using the engineering organization to build a very, very expensive prototype, and they use their live customers as unwitting test subjects.

This is also why so many startups fail. Most startups simply don’t have the funding to go two years before they gain traction. So they hire their engineers, take their best shot, and see what happens.

So with startups as well as large companies I try to get them to focus their energies on this much faster product discovery process, and once they discover the solution that works – one that is usable, useful and feasible – then it’s all about the engineering. Until that point, they don’t have to hire so many engineers right away, the engineers they have can and should actively participate in the product discovery process, and to a degree the engineers can prepare the infrastructure while this discovery is going on.

You can help your management to understand the nature of the product discovery process. If you consistently emphasize your obligation to ensure that what engineering builds must be useful and usable, and enlist their efforts to discover a successful solution, you’ll start to move their focus to this most critical stage of the product development process.

https://www.businessinsider.com/goldstar-ceo-jim-mccarthy-groupon-2011-11

How This Guy Launched A Multi-Million Dollar Startup Without Any VC Money

Entrepreneurship isn’t solely about selling things. It’s also about creating something useful that people need, and executing it to its full potential. That was what Gary Levitt did when he founded his startup Mad Mimi, a bootstrapped email marketing startup that he says now hauls in between $4-8 million in revenue each year.

But it was a strange, long road to get there. Born and raised in South Africa, Levitt was a pro skateboarder and musician before becoming an entrepreneur. He went to Boston when he was 19 to study bass guitar, where he would stay to play jazz for the next five years. His first foray into business reflected that background.

Levitt started a commercial music company in the late ’90s, writing jingles. That was when the power of email changed his life, giving him the foundation for the multi-million dollar company he would later found.

“When I was promoting my music company, I wanted to send an email out because that was sort of a cheap way to get people around you to know about you,” Levitt says. “And me coming from an arts background, I struggled to try to create this email, and eventually I hacked it together using DreamWeaver and whatever available software there was to me.”

One of those emails made its way to the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2000, and it earned him a big time gig. He would create original music for the show for the next six years.

Then, Levitt decided to switch paths. No more music. There may be something to that whole email thing, he thought, so he began to put together the first pieces of what would become Mad Mimi.

“It took about three or four months of me messing around to spend my dev budget of around $13,000,” he says. “It really wasn’t enough to get anywhere, and I started again with another budget – cobbled together from friends and family – of $100,000, which bought me a year of life and a bunch of debt.”

Money wasn’t the only struggle. Levitt had no technical experience whatsoever, and needed to find help. He bought stacks of books to help him learn everything he could about the business, tech and design of email marketing.

But it would take more than just books to make Mad Mimi a reality.

Levitt scoured the web for strong, visionary coders. “I went through 86 of the most authoritative developers,” he says. “I went through each one, researched them, sent them a personal email and told them a little about the project. Between 30 and 40 of them responded, and one of these people was Dave Hoover.”

Hoover, once a family therapist that got into coding to escape the profession, worked for software development firm Obtiva. He thought that Levitt’s project had major potential.

“He was really hungry for the gig and thought that it would help build up this new company he was working for,” says Levitt. “He just gave me really good energy. So yeah, I thought, Dave is the man.”

Levitt’s instincts were correct, and the two of them built Mad Mimi from the ground up.

“It was basically me handling all the design, branding and customer service, while Dave would do the whole back end side,” says Levitt.

But as with any startup, there were struggles. Things were still rough after raising the money, starting the company and getting Hoover on board, as Levitt worked tirelessly on his new website.

“I was living in a one-bedroom apartment with a family of four. I actually used to work from a coffee shop,” says Levitt. “But eventually a couple people find out [about the company], and another few find out, and it just started growing.”

Hoover’s company happened to grow too. Obtiva was acquired by daily deals behemoth Groupon in August, and Hoover is now a senior engineer there.

As for Mad Mimi, Levitt says that the company has grown to 20 employees, and the service has around 90,000 users, sending out about 30 million emails each day. Its clients range from big brands like Air Canada and Squidoo to local mom-and-pops stores. He stresses that the business is “highly profitable,” and that he hasn’t accepted any VC money. His crew has been working for the past two years on a new version, which Levitt plans to finally unveil this month.

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How’d it manage to be so successful? Levitt attributes it to Mad Mimi’s relationship with its customers and product design.

“We’ve never done any marketing,” says Levitt. “One of our main ways of growth is shocking people into evangelism. I just pumped every little bit of energy into customer service. When a customer writes in a question, we suggest improvements, redesign their theme, and do all these cool things they wouldn’t expect. And they get wowed, adding this virality that spreads on Twitter and Facebook.”

Pretty savvy for someone that doesn’t have a business background.

“As an artist, as a musician, I try to make the best possible music,” says Levitt. “I don’t do something in order to get something back. I don’t think about how I’m going to sell it – typical starving artist strategy, huh? But I just use all that to produce an impeccably executed product.”

So far, it’s working.

http://www.disambiguity.com/designbycommunity/

design by committee vs design by community (things we learned from the Drupal.org project) February 19, 2009Leisa Reichelt Recently I presented a casestudy of things that we learned about designing with a community, the Drupal community, at the Interaction09 Conference in Vancouver. (I’m still trying to get my slides down to a reasonable size to post on Slideshare!) It was a short presentation so I thought I’d take some time to flesh out some of the ‘things we learned’ here for anyone who is interested. It certainly was an interesting, challenging and fairly unique project, and we’ll be doing more like this in the future, perhaps you will be too! This is the first post in a series of our learnings.

Often when I talk to other designers about the Drupal.org redesign project they can’t stop themselves from shuddering at the thought of having so many people involved in their design process.

It’s an understandable reaction – after all, how many of us have suffered design by committee, which is really it’s own special circle of hell, in which a group of somewhere between 3-12 (usually) stakeholders with various levels of authority (actual or effective) provide copious and detailed feedback to your designs – feedback that often conflicts either with itself, or with the objectives of the project, or just with the principles of good design. Usually these people are the people who are responsible for paying your salary or invoice. They can’t be ignored. As Whitney Hess tweeted and then blogged, they have itches that need to be scratched.

So, it seems logical that having thousands of people involved in the design process should be even worse right? Design by committee on steroids? Well, you might think so but, happily, you’d be wrong. It’s really a whole different beast with it’s own challenges and opportunities and – I’m happy to report – there is much more good than bad about design by community and it’s an approach that I’d encourage you to consider. (Unlike design by committee, which should be avoided at all costs.)

The main reason for the different experience is scale. Surprisingly, scale is your friend.

When you’re dealing with feedback from hundreds of people you don’t need to address every single issue raised. You’d be mad if you did and have no time for getting the design work done. Rather, what you’re looking for three things:

emergent trends: what are the issues that multiple people are mentioning or agreeing/disagreeing with. If half a dozen people mention it, it’s probably worth looking at. unexpected comments: every now and then you’ll see something that takes you by surprise. (This doesn’t include comments like ‘your design sucks’ which you will get no matter how wonderful your design is – you have to learn to not be surprised by these!). When you get that ‘surprise’ feeling (you know the one) – pay attention, even if just one person mentions it. obvious pickups: – with a few thousand fresh sets of eyes, obvious mistakes, things you’ve just left off or misspelled for example, will get picked up quickly. Acknowledge those as quickly as you can so that they don’t turn into big (and often dramatic) conversations. The absolute best way to a respond to an issue is in your design, rather than in responding to comments on a blog, messageboard, flickr posting, tweet or wherever you’re gathering your feedback (and I’d encourage you to keep it fairly messy and don’t just do it in one place – more on that in a later post!). You should stay in touch with the conversation and respond when appropriate (again, that’s a whole other post!), but the ratio of your responses to comments should be at least 1:10, if not closer to 1:50

This is quite a departure for most of us who are used to consolidated feedback lists and having to respond to every piece of feedback we receive, to begin with it almost feels a little naughty (at least, it did for me!) – but it is a really necessary approach if you want to maintain your integrity and not reliquish your responsibilities as the designer.

Remember – just because you’re working with a community doesn’t make this a democratic process. Design should never be democratic. We’re not voting on interface elements here, we’re working with a community to let them help us the best way they can – by telling us about their community and their product, in this case the drupal.org website and what they use it for, and drupal itself of course. Communities aren’t designers – they can give you a lot of GREAT information to help you design well for them, but that’s the crux of the issue – you need to find ways to work with them so you can get from them what they do and know best, and so you can do what you do best – design great experiences.

A big part of your role on a project like this is facilitation and communication, but don’t let those roles waylay you from your most important responsibility, which is to do good design.

It’s a terrifying but exhilarating experience, this community design caper. If you have an appropriate project, I’d really encourage you to give it a try. I’ll be sharing more of what we learned soon!

Quality management is a topic that is close to any business owner and manager’s heart. Whatever business we undertake, we want to do it well – and if we can be the best, outdoing all our competitors, so much the better. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a respected academic, engineer, business consultant, and author also felt that quality was the key to success. He suggested what is today known as Deming’s 14 points. 质量管理这个话题非常符合企业主和管理者的心意，无论我们从事什么行业，我们都希望做好 - 如果我们能变得更好，击败所有的竞争，那就最好不过了。 爱华德·戴明博士，一个受人尊敬的学者，工程师，商业咨询师，作家，也认为质量是成功的关键。他提出了如今我们熟知的“戴明14要点”。

Deming’s 14 Points for Total Quality Management (TQM) Dr. Deming is credited with having a profound influence on Japan’s rise to economic prominence after the Second World War, and he is still remembered through the Deming Prize for Total Quality Management. So what were these fourteen points? Let’s take a closer look at each one of them. 戴明关于全面质量管理（TQM）的14点 戴明被认为是对日本二战后经济崛起有重要影响的人，也因全面质量管理中的戴明奖被人们记得。 那么，什么是14要点呢？我们来逐一的看下。

1. “Constancy of Purpose” towards Product and Service Improvement Deming believed that remaining competitive in the market required “constancy of purpose” towards quality. He saw this, not as a short-term commitment or a luxury, but as a long-term philosophy that would ensure business survival. When considering Deming’s 14 points, it’s important to remember that this one is about planning for long-term delivery of quality.
2. 对产品和服务改进有“恒定的目的” 戴明相信，为了在市场中保持竞争力，需要设定一个恒定的质量目标，它不是一个短期的承诺，而是一个长期的理念，能保证商业的生存。 当考虑戴明14要点时，很重要的一点就是记得这是关于长期交付的质量规划。

Reactive, short-term solutions can only have a short-term effect. According to Deming, a more farsighted approach is needed. Doing the same things better is all very well, but Deming believed that businesses should also innovate, conduct research, and continually improve product design. 应对式的，短期的解决方案只有短期效果。戴明认为，还需要更具远见的方法。 把同一件事情做的更好虽然不错，但戴明相信商业也应该有创新，研究和持续的产品完善设计。

Most importantly of all, he reminds businesses that the results of their activities are for the benefit of the customer, and therefore, the customer’s needs should come first when making business decisions. After all, without customers, no business can survive. 最重要的一点，他提醒商业活动的结果是为了客户的利益。因此，在做商业决策时，客户的需要应放在第一位。毕竟，没有客户，商业就无法生存。

Since customer needs change over time, it’s up to businesses to prepare for new challenges, and whatever we do, the goal of continually doing it better should be foremost in our minds. 因为客户需求随着时间在变，这要求商业要做好新挑战的准备，无论我们做什么，持续改进的目标永远要放在心里。

1. Adopt a New Philosophy Producing quality requires much more than lip-service. The constancy of purpose must be supported by a buy-in to quality that runs right through the organization. Achieving this requires more than traditional management. It requires leadership. That means that staff should be inspired to support quality rather than needing to be forced to do so.
2. 采用新哲学 产品质量不是嘴上说说的。恒久的目标必须在组织中通过质量内建来支持。达到这一点需要比传统的管理做得更多。 它需要领导力。 意味着员工应该主动来支持质量，而不是被迫着去做。

In other words, Deming’s 14 points support building a culture of quality with a commitment from every person in your business. At the time, Deming predicted that moving from a traditional management focus to a leadership focus would be a change in the way we do business. That was back in 1982. Today, we see the truth of his prediction taking shape in the business world. 换句话说，戴明的14要点支持创建一种人人都对质量有承诺的文化。 到那时，戴明预测我们做商业的方式将会从聚焦传统管理切换到聚焦领导力。 这是1982年的预测。今天，我们看到了他预测正在商业社会中成形。

Just as we have a vision for the future of our businesses, we should have a vision for the quality we want to deliver. Once this is in place, we can strategize so that we can realize our vision. Reactive changes made because of competitive pressure don’t necessarily result in improvements that put the customer first. Deming encourages us to treat quality management as a strategic priority that leads to the fulfillment of customer needs. 正如我们对未来的商业有愿景一样，我们对交付也要有一个质量愿景。 一旦有了愿景，我们就能做战略规划来实现愿景。因为竞争压力做的应对式变化不会导致客户第一的改善。 戴明鼓励我们把质量管理当成满足用户需求的战略优先级来处理，

Deming suggested practical interventions including proper training for staff, full management support when help is needed, proper supervision, and planning for management continuity. 戴明建议做些实际的干预包括对员工合适的培训，全力的管理支持，合适的监督，持续性管理规划

1. Build Quality In – You Can’t Inspect it In Deming wasn’t impressed by the idea of after-the-fact quality control. He encouraged businesses to stop depending on inspections to get quality. He pointed out that inspections can miss defects, that they are costly, and that they don’t improve quality because all they can do is find poor quality.
2. 质量内建 - 不能依赖检查 戴明没有被事后质量控制所打动。 他鼓励商业停止依靠检查来获取质量的方法。他指出检查导致缺陷遗留，检查是昂贵的，检查并不能改善质量，因为它所能做的知识发现质量的低下。

Instead, he recommended building quality into every process a business undertakes. Finding faults may prevent harm to a business, but it’s not good enough. Instead, we should track them down and change processes so that similar faults can’t happen ever again. 相反，它推荐在商业的每个流程中构建质量。 发现错误可能会阻止对商业的伤害，但这还不够好，我们应该追踪问题根源并且改变流程，这样相似的缺陷不会再次发生。

Those of us who aren’t fond of math might balk at Deming’s insistence on using statistical controls on processes and not only physical ones, but numbers don’t lie. If you aren’t that keen on learning how to generate valid statistics, don’t worry. Smart software can do the number-crunching for you; Tallyfy’s built-in analytics are an example of this. 不喜欢数学的人对于戴明坚持用统计方法控制流程的方法畏缩不前。但是数字不会骗人。 如果你不喜欢学习如何生成合理的统计，不用担心。 聪明的软件可以帮你做。 Tallyfy的内建分析工具就是一个例子。

What are you aiming for will all this? We can sum it up by saying that improving processes to eliminate errors is far better and less costly than trying to correct errors after they have already occurred. 所有这一切的目的是什么？我们可以总结为：相比等错误发生后再修复，改善流程来消除错误会更好，也更省钱。

1. Use Single Suppliers for Any Item How often have you heard that a supplier is to blame for poor quality? Perhaps you’ve experienced it yourself. You found a cheaper supplier only to find that the quality or reliability of the materials or services you received was lacking. You can blame your suppliers all you like, but at the end of the day, it’s your business’s reputation that suffers.
2. 任何零件采用单个供应商 多久会听到供应商因为质量差被抱怨？ 可能你自己就在经历这些。 你找到一个便宜的供应商只是找到了原料的质量和可靠性都缺乏的。 你尽可以责骂你的供应商，但最终，你的商业信誉会受损。

Deming points out that the relationship between a business and its suppliers should be a mutually beneficial one. The business should be willing to pay more for quality. When this happens, the supplier can meet the business’s needs because it has the resources to do so. Nobody is trying to drive prices down while still expecting the best for less. 戴明指出商业和供应商之间应该互惠互利的。 商业应用愿意为质量付出更多。 这样的话，供应商能满足商业需要，因为有足够的资源来做。 没人能够在价格下降的同时仍期望有更好。

Instead, Deming suggests that businesses should build long-term relationships with suppliers. Focus on one supplier for each input, and there is greater motivation for the supplier to meet your business’s needs and even go the extra mile. 相反，戴明建议商业应该和供应商建立长期的关系。 每个输入聚焦于一个供应商。供应商也有更多的动力来满足商业的需要，甚至付出的更多。

You can also expect greater consistency. Perhaps there will still be variations in supply that you need to deal with, but the more suppliers you work with, the more variation there will be and the harder it will be to manage quality. 你也期望更好的一致性。 可能在供应方面你任然要处理更多的变化，变化越多，你管理质量也越困难。

Suppliers can become part of your never-ending drive towards improvement, but to do so, there must be a stable relationship characterized by trust. 供应商可以变成你持续改进的一部分，但要这样做的话，必须有相互信任的稳定关系。

1. Improve Processes Constantly. Improve Them Forever In this point, Deming encourages businesses to continuously analyze and improve the way they perform processes. He points out that by improving productivity and training its staff so that they’re able to deliver their best, a business also improves its profits.
2. 持续改善流程。永远完善它们。 这点上， 戴明鼓励商业持续的分析和改进操作流程的方式。 他指出通过改善生产力和培训员工，它们能够交付的更好，商业也能改善利润。

For many busy managers and business owners, this may seem like a daunting prospect. Just when you thought everything was perfect, it turns out that something could be done better. The temptation to adopt a short-term fix is great. But Deming points out that we can fix flaws in our business processes permanently. Once we’ve done that, we can move on to the next process improvement secure in the knowledge that the last issue we uncovered won’t be a problem ever again. 对很多的管理者和商业主来说，前景有点堪忧。当你想着一切都完美的时候，结果发现有些事还能做的更好。 采取短期的修复是个很大的诱惑。但是戴明指出我们可永久的修复流程中的缺陷。 一旦这样做了，我们可以移步到下一个流程改进环节确保发现的上个问题不会再次发生。

Back in the eighties, it would probably have been very difficult for businesses, especially small ones, to constantly keep tabs on every process. Today, Business Process Management software makes your task a whole lot easier. And when you need to tweak a process, doing so is as simple as editing the business process you set up. The workflow automatically adjusts to the change. 回顾80年代， 可能对商业来说十分的困难，特别是小商业，持续的聚焦于每个流程。 如今，商业流程管理软件让你的工作变得容易。 当你需要调整流程，就和你编辑你创建的流程一样简单。 工作流自动调整变化。

1. Use On-The-Job Training As business people, we’re inclined to view training as being costly. Apart from the expense of sending people on courses, there’s the productive time lost while they return. And unless you choose the training carefully, you aren’t necessarily going to get tangible results from it.
2. 在工作中培训 作为商业人，我们倾向于视培训为成本。 除了培训本身的成本，还有生产力的丢失。除非你仔细的选择课程，你不会得到实际的结果。

Deming’s 14 points return to the training theme on several occasions, but his emphasis is on-the-job training. The aim of training should be quality improvement, and that means reducing variation and getting consistent, predictable results. 戴明的14个要点多次提到了培训主题， 但他的重点是在工作中培训。 培训的目的是质量改善， 那意味着减少变化，获得一致的，可预测的结果。

You also don’t want all the knowledge of a process, or even part of it, to rest with only one or two people. If you do so, your business is at risk. Deming encourages knowledge-sharing, and he exhorts managers to let their staff see how they fit into a process rather than just giving them work to do. 你也不希望流程的所有知识，或者甚至是部分，只有一两个人知道，这会使你的商业面临风险。 戴明鼓励知识分享，他告诫管理者要让员工知道他们是如何变成流程的一部分，而不是仅仅给他们工作做。

In practice, there are several ways we can do this, beginning with the employee onboarding process. If people know where they fit into a team, and how the team’s results depend on their work, they are far more likely to care about the results they achieve. 实践中，有几种方式可以做，从员工入职开始，如何人们知道如何融入团队，团队的结果如何依赖他们的工作，他们更会关心他们达成的结果。

The concept of training extends to management. Although you don’t need to know all the details of how to do every job, you do need to understand what people do, and what obstacles to quality your team members face. Armed with this knowledge, you can work to eliminate obstacles to quality. 培训的理念同样扩展到管理，尽管你不必知道你工作的全部细节，你需要了解人们在做什么，你的团队面临怎样的质量阻碍，有了这些知识，你可以一起消除质量障碍。

1. Use Leadership Skill According to Deming, managers and supervisors should focus on leadership rather than the traditional management style that calls for tight supervision and a very formal organizational structure.
2. 运用领导力技巧 戴明认为，管理者和主管们应该关注领导力而不是传统的管理风格，要求严格的监督，和十分正式的组织结构。

Instead, Deming encourages understanding, collaboration, and a coaching approach to management. You will always need a certain level of supervision in a business, but working to help people deliver their best is more effective than taking punitive action when you don’t see the results you wanted. 想法，戴明鼓励理解，合作和教导式的管理。 商业中你总是需要一定层级的主管，和人们一起工作，尽最大努力交付比惩戒式管理要有效的多。

A well-lead team will do more than just keep their heads down and work. They become part of your quality management team. They ask for help, make suggestions, and point out stumbling-blocks you may not have noticed. 一个领导有方的团队比只会埋头工作的团队做的更多。 他们变成了质量管理团队的一部分。他们请求帮助，给出建议，指出你可能没注意的绊脚石。

Setting and meeting targets and quotas is all very well, but is your team meeting its potential? As a leader, you empower them to do so. You don’t just talk and expect others to “do,” you listen, you understand, and you act. You create an environment in which people can realize their potential. You motivate them to want to do their best, and they deliver their best. 设置并达到目标和指标都很好，但是你的团队激发了它的潜力了吗？作为一个领导者，你强化他们这样去做。你不能知识说说然后让别人去做，你倾听，你理解，你行动。 你创建一个环境，人们能够认识到他们的潜力，你激励他们做到最好，他们也把交付做到最好。

1. Drive out Fear Were you ever a junior employee who was scared of the boss? Perhaps you had a teacher at school who terrified you. Could you deliver your best under these conditions?

There were probably times when you had questions you were too afraid to ask and opinions you kept to yourself. And the more that boss or teacher reacted to your mistakes, the more mistakes you made. Then you’d try to cover up those mistakes, hoping against hope that they wouldn’t be picked up. That’s what fear does. Fear is not conducive to quality.

You, your managers, and your supervisors need to share an understanding of the need to drive out fear. Your employees should feel free to report problems, own up to their mistakes without being asked about them first, and know that you’re there to make things better without resorting to punitive measures.

As a manager, always address the problem, not the person. Work with employees to find solutions, and share your quality goals so that they know what you’re trying to achieve. Remember, some of your best quality and process improvement suggestions come from the coalface – but if you don’t have open lines of communication, you’re never going to hear those suggestions.

1. Break Down the Barriers Between Departments When people work as a team, they can achieve more than they would on their own. Although your company will have departments, they can’t work in isolation. If product designers never work with production, and if production doesn’t work with sales, your organization is never going to reach its potential.

True, your designer isn’t about to become a salesperson, but without input from the product’s designer, your salesperson won’t be able to sell effectively.

What are the product’s special features? How do they meet customer needs? And since your sales team is in direct contact with customers all day, every day, shouldn’t product designers talk to the sales team before they even begin work on a new product design?

Meanwhile, the production also needs to be part of the loop. Does the production team foresee any problems in producing the new design? By working together, departments can spot possible problems and eliminate them before they ever occur.

Deming recommends that departments recognize, communicate with, and serve the departments that are the “clients” of their work as well as keeping end-users of products or services in mind.

1. Ditch Slogans and Communicate With Individuals Slogans sound so nifty, but do they have any real effect? “We put the customer first” is a typical example. It sounds great, but what is its practical meaning? How does it apply to every worker in your internal value chain?

How about “Let’s try harder”? If you’re already doing your level best, you aren’t going to be happy about being told to make some mysterious change to the way you work.

Deming is alive to the resentments that generalized catch-phrases and exhortations to ever better performance can cause. He points out that any productivity or quality problems you face won’t be fixed with a slogan. Instead, you need to look into business process improvement. If your processes work well, then your business is already delivering good quality and working productively.

We also can’t expect generalized goals to become personal ones. Deming recommends setting individualized goals for every person, and along with the new goals, there needs to be a roadmap that shows them how to achieve them.

Simply put, reducing defects means finding out where they occur and how the process allows them to occur. Increasing productivity means identifying obstacles to productivity and removing them. Use tools like Fishbone Diagrams to help you get down to root causes before you suggest solutions.

1. Quotas are Incompatible With Quality in Production It’s true that you need to have some numerical targets, but for too many companies, setting a quota becomes a replacement for good leadership. In Deming’s opinion, high production targets make quality suffer. For instance, if you are production line worker and you get paid per piece, you will finish as many pieces as possible. You are working as fast as you can, but are you working as well as you can?

Again, Deming urges us to focus on processes. A well-designed process should deliver the results we want. If it doesn’t, then the process needs attention. He reminds us that good leadership will encourage people to feel proud of their work. They already want to perform well. It’s up to management to create an environment in which they can do so.

Do numbers go out the window? They do not. But instead of measuring the people who do the work with quotas, the numbers should be used to evaluate the process.

Some thinkers point out that numbers can serve as a motivating factor, particularly in sales environments, but Management by Objectives should be approached with caution. When you set a numerical target, are you encouraging people to take shortcuts that will affect quality? What behavior would you prefer to motivate? Remember, what you measure is what you get.

Finally, if you want to set a numerical goal, be very sure you know how your business can reach it. Without a plan and a method, numbers are meaningless.

1. Remove Barriers that Prevent Teams From Feeling Proud of Their Work Deming believed that taking pride in one’s work is essential to quality and process improvement. You’ve probably experienced this yourself. When you love what you do, you do it better, and you feel good about the results. But if people are constantly criticising you and comparing you to others, you stop enjoying what you previously loved.

It’s natural that some workers will acquire skills faster than others, and it’s natural that they will get better results than their counterparts. While it’s great to recognize achievements, the rest of the team should never feel judged or be made to feel that they are valued less than others are. Deming says that the quality system will ultimately get everyone working according to the same standard.

Process problems also cause workplace frustration. You’re expected to deliver X output, but to do so, you need Y input, and Z tools would help you to get your job done more easily. If you don’t have the right inputs and the right tools, delivering X becomes a daily nightmare. Are you to blame? No, the process needs fixing so that you have the tools and inputs you need.

Let’s take the analogy further. You’ve been struggling with your job for the last year because the process you’re working in is flawed. When it comes to your performance appraisal, the numbers show that your work is barely acceptable. How much do you love what you do right now? Meanwhile, a colleague who constantly makes mistakes gets praised because the numbers look good.

Deming makes a tough call on managers. As a leader, your job is to help other people do their jobs by creating systems that work. If someone falls outside of the system, you have to correct that, but if they’re working inside the system, you need to work with them to figure out where the system fails.

1. Encourage Education and Self-Improvement While Deming talks about on-the-job training first, he also advocates personal growth through continued education. When people are learning things that are relevant to their jobs or your business, their skills improve, and they are better able to face the challenges your business faces in the present and the future.

Just as exercise makes a body more agile, education helps us to improve our thinking processes. It’s up to you what kind of educational programs you’re willing to sponsor in full, but if your employees want to improve themselves in other areas, it’s great if you can find ways to support them. Remember, your business isn’t always going to stay the same, and the new skills your employees gain could prove helpful in the longer-term.

The better the quality of the skills-sets your business has its disposal, says Deming, the better the overall product and service quality you can deliver.

1. Make Transformation Everybody’s Job Dr. Deming points out that if you want to improve quality or productivity, you need to look to your systems rather than your people. But when it comes to finding solutions, he advocates getting as much input as possible from the people who carry out the process.

He suggests using business process notation such as a flowchart to capture processes as they are. Next, we can ask people to help us think about how we can change processes to improve the quality of their outputs. And since each step in a process impacts on subsequent ones, preparing for transformation becomes everybody’s job.

Finally, when the time comes to implement change, your team is ready to make it happen. Perhaps members will spot a few extras that could work better, and they won’t be afraid to share their observations. You now have the beginnings of a culture of excellence where improvement is ongoing, and the sky’s the limit!

Putting Deming’s 14 Points Into Action Deming doesn’t go into detail about how to effect change, but his philosophies have had a profound influence on the world of business. From a practical perspective, using Deming’s 14 points as an overarching philosophy will result in change – and it will be a change for the better.

With modern workflow software like Tallyfy at our fingertips, implementing the process changes that stem from adopting Deming’s thinking becomes easier. There’s no need for staff to remember every change and every tweak when they receive full instructions for process tasks through Tallyfy. And when you and your team decides that this or that detail could work more efficiently, making the change part of the way you always work is as simple as changing, removing, or adjusting a process step.

Deming’s 14 points move from theory to practice with Tallyfy’s help, and continuous improvement becomes a reality.