Deming's 14 Points for Management - Adopted Specifically for Business Development Departments

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

In his book, "Out of the Crisis", Dr. Deming shows 14 steps toward an improved management.

It is always hard to initiate improvements in organisations. It is hard because in order to initiate positive change, management must admit that there is space for improvement. Sadly, so many managers are so egotistical that they believe that the status quo is the absolute best they can achieve, so any initiative for improvement is nipped in the bud.

1. Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to keep providing jobs. As you improve your products and services, you also must constantly improve your ways of finding new clients and customers for your merchandise. It is absolutely useless to spend the king's ransom developing the best toilet seat, telephone or dental service, if you can't find people who have all three ingredients of the MAD factor, that is, people with Money, Authority, Desire, then you are flogging what we can call in plain English, a dead horse.

2. Adopt the new philosophy. The philosophy of the smart elephant hunter. We are in a new economic age. People don't need your stuff per se. They are solving their problems without your products and services. So, good old-fashioned peddling, like cold-calling and knocking on doors are no longer enough. You have to become a watering hole to attract elephants instead of chasing them.

Imagine the good elephant hunter. He baits the trap and waits. He is not stupid to exhaust himself in pursuing the beasts. He baits and waits. Good business developers make prospects come to them. Who comes to you has a force of emptiness of a problem, and you have a force of fullness of a solution. Attacking emptiness with fullness is always a great idea. Business development management must wake up to the reality that old-fashioned pursuit-driven superstar-based selling is dead.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for constant inspection and policing by management. The world is moving rather fast, and there is no time for waiting for managers to inspect every little step of the business development process. So, unless you are an idiot who habitually hires minimum-wage kids, you have to assume that you have capable people working for you and they are in tune with your company's vision.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Business development is a crucial part of any business. People who are good at it are pretty expensive. Don't even think of hiring a minimum-wage school kids. You need expertise. It is just plan pragmatism that if you pay peanuts you will get only monkeys. That is fine if you only have a monkey business, but if you are serious about your business and where it is going, you had better take business development seriously.

5. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production and service. You must constantly improve quality of your merchandise and the systems and processes producing it. This helps you to increase your margins, while reducing your production costs. Make sure your business development is systemised to the hilt, so you can reduce manual labour grunt work by delegating it to automatic systems. This way you can achieve higher sales, but since you can achieve it without legions of staff, your margins go up significantly.

7. Adopt and institute leadership. The aim of management should be to coach people and help them to perform at their best. Make sure management doesn't become a police force within your company or department. Business development is a highly creative work, and you cannot evaluate people based on so-called deliverables. You can't improve productivity by pushing people to create a new sales page for your website in ten minutes. If you want to make it good, it is more likely ten days. Rome wasn't created in one day, but it burnt down in one. A rushed sales page or email autoresponder sequence can easily bring your business to its knees.

8. Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively for the company because they want it to succeed. It is your job, as a manager, to create a conducive and caring environment with the right "energy" in which people can naturally tap into their highest potential and do their best day in day out. It is human nature that people want to do their best. It is almost always the working environment and manager's apathy which holds people back from performing tat their best. The average employee attrition in North America is around 21%, and some 65% of those who leave their employers are actually chased away by their incompetent managers. Saying that the average North American manager is incompetent is an understatement of biblical proportions.

9. Break down barriers between staff areas or departments. All business development people, that is, people in marketing, sales and customer service must work as one cohesive team, and must be compensated the same way. If you have a salary-based marketing and customer service team and a commission-based sales team, then you can say good bye to team work. People will have their own personal agendas to maximise their own personal compensation. People must feel that if the team is successful, everyone wins, and everyone gets a fair share of the pie. However, if sales are low, then each of the team members has to tighten his/her belt.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Note that nothing worthwhile can be achieved with this retarded "zero tolerance" approach. A soccer team can win in spite of receiving some goals too. An army can win a battle in spite of losing some men. It is part of business. So, instead of exhorting and prodding your people to work harder and aim at zero defects, you had better look into your systems, since biggest chunk of your problems are system-related, so there is not a dickybird your people can do about it. You can't order people to view movies faster unless you increase the play speed of the projector.

11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management. Get rid of all silly sales quotas and number of contacts to be made. Work standards don't come from chasing quotas. Passionate, enthusiastic and driven people do their best. So, replace the numbers with leadership and become an exemplar of peak performance. Become worth of being followed. Let leadership rule the land and eliminate stupid management fads like, "management by objectives."

12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship--eliminate the annual rating or merit system. Business development is intangible like practising law or accounting. You can't compensate people with hourly rates as if they were physical labourers. If you use hourly wages, your people will quickly learn how to engage in creative naval-gazing in your office while achieving precisely dick. Although almost 100 years ago Frederick Winslow Taylor (The Principles of Scientific Management - 1911) successfully destroyed the pride of workmanship and reduced it to repetitive manual labour grunt work and drudgery, lunacy is never too late to unlearn. Business development is not the same as shovelling manure from one pile to the other.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone. You can't expect people to take courses on a 100% random basis. You have to co-ordinate and synchronise their ongoing education, making certain that they are on a path of becoming masters in the skills their positions call for. Also make sure, that every person has his/her path set out and documented in a professional mastery education plan. This is your investment in your future via your people.

Yes, they may leave your company and you may lose your investment, but if your treat them right, they are prone and proud to stay. You can have the best tools and the fastest computers available, but unless your people have all the necessary skills, you are toast. Look at Formula 1 racing. The cars are basically all the same. Whether a car comes in first or last is up to the driver. Organisations are the same. People are the only differentiating factor companies have these days. Everything else comes form the same few suppliers and they are available to each of your competitors.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation of your business is everybody's job. You can't live your life as a worm crawling around, but you may want to transform your business into a butterfly flying to its heart's content. It must be everyone's interest to improve your business' margins. And everyone must benefit from it. Imagine if you will. You have a bucket of snow-white paint and you drop one drop of black in the bucket. The damage is done. If you are lucky, you can reduce the shade of grey to fairly light, but your paint will never be white again. How many drops of black paint do you have in your organisation? How do you plan to turn your organisation at least light grey again?

And remember! Don't sell harder. Market smarter. Both you, your employees, your clients and prospects will find it more enjoyable, profitable and attractive.

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