Our Founder, Dr. Domenico Lepore was educated as a physicist and is an innovator in managing organizations systemically. He was invited by Rob Park to a conversation with the Profound book club. Rob mentioned that he first heard about Domenico’s book ‘Deming & Goldratt: The Decalogue’ when Domenico was interviewed in John Willis’s Profound Podcast. Rob said he found that episode mind blowing!
What follows is based on some of Domenico’s comments in the conversation with Rob and a group of tech executives from the Profound book club.
From physics to management
I was hired by the School of Management in Milan (Formaper) in the mid 1990s and tasked with introducing SMEs to something they were unfamiliar with: Quality. I had just left research work in Solid State physics so I had to study it myself first, and this led me to study the work of W. Edwards Deming. Working with SMEs, I saw how they struggled with many things because they were lacking knowledge of certain scientific principles. These were the very principles that Dr. Deming was proposing. I then came across the work of Israeli physicist, Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt. Most people read ‘The Goal’ first but someone gave me the most fundamental book Goldratt wrote. It’s a little booklet called ‘What Is This Thing Called The Theory of Constraints’. This started me on a journey of real understanding of what Dr. Deming was driving at.
Along the way, I realized that, while uttered in a completely different language, Deming and Goldratt (both educated as physicists) were proposing the same principles. So I started my own research into how these two approaches could be put together. I began to see clearly that, together, they could radically improve every aspect of performance of a company. At that time, neither the “Deming camp” nor the “Goldratt camp” were supportive. They did not speak to each other or understand each other. But I persevered and found great support from Oded Cohen, one of Goldratt’s closest colleagues, and we published the method to integrate these two great bodies of work in the book ‘Deming and Goldratt: The Decalogue’ in 1999.
Developing and testing a method for managing organizations systemically
Over a ten-year period, with my team in Milan, we had the opportunity to implement, test and improve the Decalogue method in sectors ranging from healthcare to steel foundries and everything in between. That’s because northern Italy is very rich in entrepreneurship.
It became natural at a certain point to move the teachings of Deming and Goldratt to a different plane where they had never been really tested, and that is organizational design. And so in order to do that, we did a lot of experimentation in the field. We found many companies available to test what at that time was a scientific speculation. We wrote five books about it, and now we have also developed a piece of software (Ess3ntial) to support our viewpoint on how organizations should be designed. And so now, especially for the last 10 years, we are truly committed to bringing to organizations a genuinely systems-science based approach that leverages both the power of variation and the algorithm Dr. Goldratt developed to manage projects.
To achieve this required a deep understanding of the method and the necessary math. We did a top to bottom review of the mathematics behind Critical Chain, and we integrated it with the Deming approach to statistics. We came up with the right algorithm that serves the purpose of exemplifying how an organization can transition from conventional silos – which is my view is the lethal enemy of any real improvement – to a more genuinely operational way of managing an organization, systemically.
Thinking for action
However, the fact that you understand how things should work doesn’t mean that you’re able to do it, because there are a series of barriers. The most arduous barrier is the cognition process. This is the process by which you manage to learn and metabolize and transform into action what you have learned. So I’m particularly grateful to you for this invitation to address your book club because it’s a wonderful thing. Books have shaped my entire life. It’s the kind of upbringing that I received from home and I carried on throughout my life. Unfortunately, not everyone, especially in North America, connects books with taking action. For many people, books remain in the realm of intellectual fascination and careers and personal development. Books, instead, are the foundation for any learning. They represent the difference between education and training that Deming stressed all his life. Training for Deming is a one-off of thing and education, instead, is something that you know can be continuously improved. So my goal in speaking to a book club is to be a bit of a bull in a china shop and say “Wake up! Let’s learn from books to change things.”
To find out more about ten guided steps to a systemic leap ahead for your company, contact Angela Montgomery at: intelligentmanagement@sechel.ws
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Intelligent Management works with decision makers with the authority and responsibility to make meaningful change to optimize your company for the digital age. We have helped dozens of organizations to adopt a systemic approach to manage complexity and radically improve performance and growth for over 25 years through our Decalogue management methodology. The Network of Projects organization design we developed is supported by our Ess3ntial software for multi-project finite scheduling based on the Critical Chain algorithm.
See our latest books: The Human Constraint from Routledge; From Silos to Networks: A New Kind of Science for Management from Springer; Moving the Chains: An Operational Solution for Embracing Complexity in the Digital Age by our Founder Dr. Domenico Lepore, and ‘Quality, Involvement, Flow: The Systemic Organization’ from CRC Press, New York by Dr. Domenico Lepore, Dr. Angela Montgomery and Dr. Giovanni Siepe.
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