In Their Own Words
Interviews with members of The Deming Institute community, including industry leaders, practitioners, educators, Deming family members and others who share their stories of transformation and success through the innovative management and quality theories of Dr. W. Edwards Deming.
Episodes
What if your cheapest supplier is secretly your riskiest? Balaji Reddie unpacks Deming's Points 4, 5, and 6 with Andrew Stotz by exploring Deming's thinking on suppliers, continual improvement, and training. Why do strong relationships matter more than short-term savings? Why should problems be welcomed? Do people perform differently when they understand the purpose behind their work? Balaji uses stories to offer a practical look a...
"Once you see it, you can't unsee it."
What starts as a teacher's search to reduce conflict can become a lifelong journey in leadership and transformation.
In this episode, Jake Rodgers shares how discovering Dr. Deming's philosophy changed the way he thinks about teaching, leadership, parenting, and work. From fifth-grade classrooms to leading The W. Edwards Deming Institute, Jake reflects on the lessons, challenges, and breakthro...
Why do good strategic plans so often fail to produce different results?
John Dues joins Andrew Stotz to explore a simple idea: organizations do not run on strategic plans. They run on the routines leaders and teams follow every day. From meetings and priorities to problem solving and learning, those routines form the management system that shapes results.
Listen to a practical conversation about strategy, leadersh...
What happens when an organization gets so focused on results that it forgets why it exists? Andrew Stotz and Balaji Reddie dig into the first of Deming's 14 Points, constancy of purpose, using stories like Harvard's answer to Deming's challenge to define a business and Indian manufacturers who pivoted to build PPE during the pandemic. This conversation may change how you think about success, profit, and the real aim of a business.
...
In this episode, Andrew Stotz continues his conversation with Balaji Reddie as they explore two essential elements of Dr. Deming's System of Profound Knowledge: the Theory of Knowledge and Psychology.
Through the memorable story of a young boy trying to understand how his father's scooter starts, Balaji illustrates...
In this episode, John Dues argues that the leaders who make the greatest impact are the ones who create the fastest learning cycles.
John and Andrew Stotz explore why small tests often outperform large initiatives, how PDSA builds real organizational knowledge, and why improvement is a learning process, not...
What if better management starts with seeing connections that were there all along? In this conversation, Balaji Reddie and Andrew Stotz unpack one of the most powerful and overlooked ideas in management: that everything is connected.
"I'm not here to teach you anything new. I'm here to make you see things that you normally would not see." — Dr. W. Edwards Deming
In this episode, Deming educator Balaji Reddie reveals the practices that are hiding in plain sight within most organizations. Practices that feel normal. That get celebrated. And that quietly undermine eve...
What does great leadership actually look like? Can you make a difference even if you're in the middle of the hierarchy?
"If you think you're too small, you've not spent the night under a bedsheet with a mosquito."
In this episode, educator and Deming practitioner Balaji Reddie explains why W. Edwards Deming was far more practical ...
Why do more pressure, more meetings, and more accountability so often produce the same outcomes? John Dues and Andrew Stotz explore Deming's overlooked insight that results are created by systems — not effort alone. Learn why reacting to variation often makes performance worse, how leaders unintentionally create noise through "tampering," and what it takes to build improvement that actually lasts.
What if the problem isn't your strategy, your people, or your tools, but the lens you're looking through? In this first conversation with Andrew Stotz, quality educator Balaji Reddie explains why so many organizations chase Deming's 14 Points and prizes but miss the philosophy underneath. He also gets into what changes once you start seeing your organization as one connected system. There are a few surprises along the way, like why...
What if your sales problem isn't your people — but the system they're stuck in? Mike Carr spent years doing what everyone told him to do: commissions, quotas, performance plans. Every new hire came with the quiet assumption they'd be gone in a few months. He even optimized onboarding to make firing faster.
Then he did the math: it was costing ~$75,000 every time. He called it "Burning the Porsche."
His fri...
How do you run an offsite that actually changes performance — not just conversations? In this episode, Travis Timmons and Kelly Allan share with Andrew Stotz what happened during the Fitness Matters off-site. They discuss how a Deming-inspired approach helped their team tackle a critical business aim, align around system improvement, and turn employee engagement into measurable competitive advantage.
TRANSCRIPT
What do you do when a new data point drops—and all eyes turn to you? In this episode, John Dues and Andrew Stotz explore the leadership discipline required when performance data changes. Instead of reacting to a single data point, they unpack how Deming thinking (understanding variation, avoiding tampering, and pausing to interpret patterns) can protect trust, stability, and improvement. A practical conver...
How do you design a team off-site that actually improves your organization? In this episode, Travis Timmons breaks down the mechanics of a Deming-styled off-site team meeting—from starting months early and setting a clear aim to using pre-work, fishbone diagrams, and PDSAs to drive real chan...
In this episode, Bill Scherkenbach, one of W. Edwards Deming's closest protégés, and host Andrew Stotz discuss why leadership decisions shape outcomes far more than frontline effort. Bill draws on decades of firsthand experience with Deming and with businesses across industries. Through vivid stories and practical insights, the conversation challenges leaders and learners alike to rethink responsibility, decision-making, and what i...
What happens when an entire company learns to see its work as a system? In this episode, Travis Timmons reveals how his team uses Deming-inspired pre-work, collaboration, and the Red Bead Experiment to make their offsite energizing and impactful. It's a practical, engaging look at how clarity and shared purpose can transform improvement efforts and build a happy workplace.
TRANSCRIPT
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