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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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Podcasting "Qualia"

This week on my podcast, I read “Qualia,” my May, 2021 Locus Magazine column about quantitative bias, epidemiology, antitrust and drug policy. It’s a timely piece, given the six historic antitrust laws that passed the House Judiciary Committee last week:

https://doctorow.medium.com/moral-hazard-and-monopoly-42e30eb159a8

The pandemic delivered some hard lessons about quantitative bias — that’s when you pay attention to the parts of a problem that you can do math on, not because they’re the most important, but because you know how to do math.

The most obvious lesson comes from the failure of exposure notification apps, which were supposed to take the place of “shoe-leather” contact tracing, wherein a public health workers establish personal rapport with infected people to help identify others who might be at risk.

Contact tracing is a human process, built on trust: trust enough to talk about the intimate details of your life, trust enough to take advice on how to get tested and whether you should self-isolate.

That’s not what apps do.

Exposure notification apps measure whether a Bluetooth device you registered was close to another Bluetooth device for a “clinically significant” period of time.

That’s it.

They don’t measure qualitative aspects, like whether you were close to an infected person because you were in the same traffic jam in adjacent, sealed automobiles — or whether you were both at the Ft Lauderdale eyeball-licking championship.

And they certainly don’t create the personal rapport that’s needed to understand each person’s idiosyncratic health circumstances and complications — whether they need child care, or are at risk of losing their under-the-table jobs if they self-isolate.

We didn’t want to commit the resources to do contact tracing at scale, we didn’t know how to automate it — but we did know how to automate exposure notification, so we incinerated the qualitative elements and declared the dubious quantitative residue to be sufficient.

It’s the quant’s version of searching for your car keys under the lamp-post because it’s too dark where you dropped them.

It’s not just foolish, it’s also deceptive — quantizing qualitative elements is a subjective exercise that produces numbers that seem objective.

This is where antitrust law comes in. Prior to the neoliberal revolution of the Reagan years, antitrust concerned itself with “harmful dominance,” with regulators asking whether mergers and commercial practices were bad for the world.

Obviously, “bad for the world” is hard to measure. Regulators evaluated claims from all corners: both political scientists worried about the outsized lobbying power of large companies and workers worried about monopolies’ outsized power over wages and conditions got a say.

So did environmentalists, urban planners, and yes, economists, too.

The Chicago School — hard-right conservative economists with cult-like status among Reagan and big business simps — insisted that all this qualitative stuff had to go.

They argued that consideration of qualitative elements left too much up to judges, so two similar companies engaged in similar conduct might get different verdicts out of the antitrust system. This, they said, make a mockery of the notion of “equal treatment before the law.”

Instead, the Chicago Boys — led by Robert Bork, a Nixonite criminal and a sort of court sorcerer to Reagan — demanded that qualitative measures be left behind in favor of a purely quantitative analysis of whether a monopoly hurt “consumer welfare.”

The way you’d measure “consumer welfare” was by checking to see whether a monopoly was making prices go up — if not, the monopoly was deemed “efficient” and thus socially beneficial. Prices are numbers, numbers can be measured.

But that’s not how it worked in practice. When two companies wanted to merge, they could hire a Chicago fixer to construct a mathematical model that “proved” that they resulting megafirm would not raise prices.

No one could argue with this, because Chicago School consultants had a monopoly over building and interpreting these models — the same way court magicians laid exclusive claim to the ability to slaughter an animal and read the future in its guts.

And if the prices did go up? Well, the same Chicago model-makers would be paid to produce a new model to prove that the price-rises were not the result of monopoly, but rather, rising energy costs or higher wages or the moon being in Venus.

Even by their own lights, “consumer welfare” was a failure. Monopolies drive prices up. Amazon Prime is a tool to drive up prices in every store, not just Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/01/you-are-here/#prime-facie

Apple’s App Store monopoly drives up app prices:

https://www.engadget.com/2019-05-13-supreme-court-apple-app-store-price-fixing-lawsuit.html

Luxxotica bought every eyewear brand and every eyewear retailer and the world’s largest optical lens manufacturer and drove prices up 1000%:

https://www.latimes.com/business/lazarus/la-fi-lazarus-glasses-lenscrafters-luxottica-monopoly-20190305-story.html

The highly concentrated pharma industry raises prices every single year:

https://patientsforaffordabledrugs.org/2021/01/14/2021-price-hikes-pr/

What’s more, there’s a straight line from “consumer welfare” to price-fixing.

Think about publishing. A decade ago, the Big Six publishers were embroiled in a bid to force Amazon to raise ebook prices, which led to fines and settlements for harming “consumer welfare.”

Today, the Big Six publishers are the Big Four, because Random House, the largest publisher in the world, gobbled up Penguin and Simon & Schuster. When RH, S&S and Penguin were three companies, it was illegal for them to collude on pricing.

But after their mergers, the three former CEOs — now presidents of divisions within an unimaginably giant company — can meet in a board room and plan exactly the same price-fixing strategy, and that isn’t illegal under “consumer welfare” antitrust — it’s “efficient.”

The Chicago School’s “consumer welfare” was only ever a front for “shareholder welfare,” the ability of large firms to avoid “wasteful competition” and extract an ever-larger share of the take for shareholders at the expense of customers, workers and the public.

The entire business of “consumer welfare” is a fraud, starting with Robert Bork’s insistence that a close reading of the US’s four major antitrust laws will reveal that they were never intended to be used for any purpose *other* than consumer welfare protections.

This is manifestly untrue, a Qanon-grade conspiracy that is refuted by the plain language of the statutes, the statements of their sponsors, and the record of the Congressional debates leading to their passage.

Despite the wealth of evidence that US antitrust is not a “consumer welfare” project, neoliberals have insisted that their project was not “reforming” antitrust, but rather, “restoring” it to its original purpose.

It’s a Big Lie, and they know it. That’s why GOP Senators Mike Lee (UT) and Chuck Grassley (IA) introduced “The TEAM Act to Reform Antitrust Law” — a bill intended to neutralize the muscular new antitrust bills that just passed the House committee.

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/06/25/the-plan-to-water-down-antitrust-reform/

The bill does two things:

It takes antitrust authority away from the FTC, sidelining the incredible Lina Khan, a once-in-a-generation antitrust scholar who now runs the agency; and

It codifies “consumer welfare” as the basis for US antitrust law.

That second part is the tell: after 40 years of insisting that any rational reading of US antitrust proved that “consumer welfare” was obviously its sole purpose, they’re now introducing a law to *change* its purpose to “consumer welfare.”

Like the Stolen Election lie, they never truly believed this one. The pose of objectivity that quantizing antitrust allowed was never about creating a truly objective standard for competition policy — it was only ever about neutering competition policy.

The thing is, there is a way to integrate both the objective and subjective into policy-making — as was demonstrated by David Nutt’s 2008 leadership of the UK’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which established the policy framework for a wide range of drugs.

Nutt’s panel of experts rated drugs based on how harmful they were to their users, the users’ families, and wider society. This allowed him to sort drugs into three categories:

Drugs that were dangerous irrespective of your public health priorities;

Drugs that were safe irrespective of your public health priorities; and

Drugs whose safety changed based on whether you prioritized the safety of users, families or society.

Those priorities are a political choice, not an empirical finding. Nutt told Parliament that it was their job to establish those subjective priorities, and once they did, he could objectively tell them how to embody them in the rules for each drug.

This is a beautiful example of how the objective and subjective fit together in policy — and the tale of what happened next is a terrible example of how “consumer welfare” hurts us all.

You see, booze is one of the most concentrated industries in the world. The “consumer welfare” standard let booze companies buy one another until just a handful remain — globe-straddling collosii with ample resources to influence policy-makers.

Nutt, an empiricist, reported just as rigorously on the harms of booze — one of the most dangerous drugs in the world — as he did on other drugs. He was fired for refusing to retract his true statement that tobacco and alcohol were more dangerous than many banned drugs.

Thanks to “consumer welfare” antitrust, the alcohol industry is able to choose who its regulators are, and use their political influence — purchased with the excessive profits of a monopolist — to rid themselves of pesky officials who actually pursue objective policy.

You can read the column here:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

And here’s the podcast episode:

https://craphound.com/news/2021/06/28/qualia/

As well a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the @InternetArchive; they’ll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_395/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_395_-_Qualia.mp3

And here’s a link to my podcast feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

Image: OpenStax Chemistry: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Figure_24_01_03.jpg

CC BY: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en

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earlymorningmassacre · 7 years

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Neutrality Means Little

Hetalia Historically Based (Hopefully correctly)

Genres: Angst, Wartime, Hurt/Comfort, Family and (probably) Drama

Characters: Spain, Netherlands, Romano, Prussia and Belgium

Summary: The Spanish were neutral in this godforsaken war, they deserved at least that much. But their ties to the Germans... leading soldiers to them. Perhaps they were not as neutral as they’d like to be. None the less, for their warrior’s sacrifice to the German people Spain is given a gift. One filled with memories, pain, and suffering. Yet one he feels obliged to fix. ~ Ffnet ~

It's not unusual for people to come to his house unannounced, everyone seems to do it. It actually seems to be a bit of a trend. France will do it on very rare occasions, Prussia will randomly appear out of thin air, Romano will just kind of materialize in his bed some nights, but fewer times as of late, and Portugal can easily be seen wandering his gardens on an early summer's morning. It didn't seem to matter if he was considered neutral nor did it matter that he was in fact 'isolating' himself from the rest of the world.

Well, technically anyway. But today all he really sees is the beating sun and the shade disappearing from the front side of his house. He doesn't mind the silence most of the time, but the silence can get deafening if he remains in it too long. Especially when his country, his people are so divided, sighing he resigns himself to leaning on the windowsill and watching the day begin.

That's when he notices the shadow appearing at the end of the road. The Spaniard cranes his neck out the window to get a better look. He can barely see it, but it's there. The vague outline of a car just at the far end of the drive, a large dust cloud in the machine's wake. Engine gunned and the tires spitting up the dust and rocks; it reminds him of some sort of beast coming to drag him to hell's gate. But as he watches the machine realizes something.

It's Prussia's car that he's looking at and for a moment or two he's actually excited to have company until he can hear something. A scraping noise, almost as if…as if something is being dragged behind the car. His excitement quickly disperses.

This is not a social visit, this is business. The Spaniard lightly frowns, pulling himself back into the house from the window and tiredly makes his way to the door, only turning the knob and going out when he knows the car is closer. He stands what is left of the shadow in front of his house, watching the vehicle make its way up. The heat wouldn't bother him most days but today he doesn't feel like baring it now.

The car is exactly what he would expect of the Prussian. The underside being a shiny black that seems to shimmer in the light, the upper part the same if not a darker color, and in the middle a thick white line with an unfinished decal painted on the door. Appearing very similar to that of the nation's own flag. The car stops in front of the door and enthusiastically Prussia leaps over the door and window, landing directly in front of the Spaniard. Posing like some kind of hero that the world has yet to know.

"Spain! My isolated friend," Prussia swings his arm over nape of his neck and wraps it around so his arm is resting on the opposing shoulder. Spain doesn't mind it, Prussia is a friend, but he finds it to be rather warm for such a heated day. Nor does he find the physical contact all that friendly but rather threatening as of late.

"Prussia," is all he can really say to greet him. He feels the need to properly greet his old friend but he can't seem to bring himself to do that. He can smell the irony scent of blood, the smoke that's clinging to his skin, the burnt flesh and the decomposition on the Prussian from a mile away. He's been in a battle recently; it will take more than one bath to rid him of the scent. But it's a scent he's well used to by now.

The Germanic laughs, the obnoxious sound filling the quiet air of the later morning. The stench of alcohol under his breath. "Nothing else?"

Spain doesn't even dare look him in the eye. Prussia just grins again and finally removes his arm from behind the Spaniard's head. "I bring gifts!" It's far too joyous as the Prussian swings his arms up in the air and practically dances to the mangled thing that he knows is laying there. There's too much happiness in his eyes as if he doesn't realize what he's done, what he's doing. Spain stares in the opposite direction, Prussia reminds him of a dog he'd seen once, playing with a dead cat long after it had passed. He supposes the dog killed it in a futile attempt to play with it. It apparently thought the cat was still alive and continued on, swinging the corpse around and chasing it. Perhaps at the time, the dog didn't understand the concept of death.

He doesn't want to look at what's been dragged behind the back of the car. He's seen his fair share of war, its carnage, and destruction. He's seen it all before, he was an empire after all and it's how you become such an empire, but he doesn't want to see it now. He's different now, he doesn't… he's done with war…

The Prussian cuts the rope tied to his bumper, grabbing the thing's legs and swings the mangled body at the Spaniard's feet. Spain still doesn't want to look at it. He just wants to admire the garden; this isn't his war. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Prussia bow as he would to any great ruler or king. It's less of a formality and more of a mockery... "It is with my great pleasure, that I, the Awesome Prussia present the Kingdom of Spain with their lost colony! The Netherlands!" The Prussian is laughing his ass off again. He's laughing so hard he can't even breathe. Holding his stomach and keeling over with laughter. Spain convinces himself he's not shaking with some sort of fear and some sort of anger.

"Have fun España!" And with that, the Prussian jumps back into the car, narrowly avoiding the window and almost taking the mirror clean off, and drives off. Still cackling at something he finds so very humorous that Spain doesn't get. No goodbyes or stories to regale, just that, do your job and be done with it.

That was not the Prussia he knew, yes, the nation was vile and a bit of a pervert sometimes but he didn't drag people behind cars on a regular basis. Prussia was part of Nazi Germany now, and they were willing to do anything to get back the all power they had lost and then some. Even if it meant doing things like this, but to do that, they needed allies. Strong allies, not weak allies that were in the middle of recovering from a civil war. But despite that, his boss was still lending troops to the Germans… he hated politics. Therefore, apparently as at token of the Germanic's appreciation he decided to give Spain a 'gift'.

Spain still didn't want to look down or even in the general direction of what was lying before him. He knew what to expect either way but he didn't want to see it. For a brief moment, the thought crossed his mind about leaving Netherlands there and going back inside. Like nothing had ever happened. But even he's not that cold and there was no way he could ever do something like that to anyone… anymore…

Internally wincing, he sucks in a breath and finally looks over and down at his former colony. Netherlands is lying on his stomach, head turned to the side, his normally spiky blond hair muddied and matted, and his eyes pinched shut. But he looks rather unharmed, despite the crimson-tinted mud clinging to his every feature and clothing. He was probably dragged off the battlefield that way and no one bothered to clean him off. They didn't care, it wasn't their problem. He frowns at the very thought of it. To think, that he, was once like that, but aren't they all at some point?

Spain kneels down, brushing bits of dirt off the man's once tan jacket. Netherlands groans in response, cracking an eye open. The Spaniard grins, "Heh, I guess you were just knocked out, you know for a guy who just came out of an all-out war with someone you don't look too bad."

The former colony glares, or winces, one of the two. Spain smiles happily and moves to help the nation up from the dirt. Wrapping an arm under his chest, careful to avoid the scrapes on his shoulders and neck. Lars screams, actually screams, it's short and not very high pitched but a scream nonetheless. It takes the Spaniard a moment or two to actually register exactly why. He doesn't quite remember the dirt being so red earlier, or muddy. Actually, it had been quite dry earlier, and sandy. Spain fully turns Holland over.

He's riddled with bullet holes. He can't even really tell exactly where the bullet holes are, that kind of riddled. His chest probably took a couple and his abdomen looks worse, if the Spaniard had, to be honest with himself it looks like they took him down to a shooting range and used him as the target. Netherlands coughs, blood spattering the untouched spots and smaller droplets onto Spain's pant leg. It continues on for a moment before under the nation's breath he mutters, "Not bad aye?"

Spain swallows, okay, okay, okay, and he ignores the bile that's threatening to make its way up his throat. He really doesn't like blood anymore, blood's messy, blood's part of living beings, blood's blood and there's a lot of it here. Netherlands draws a ragged, wet breath and Antonio wonders how exactly he missed that noise in the first place.

Lars winces and mumbles to himself in Dutch, periodically spitting out or coughing up said accumulated blood. It's even dripping out of his nose. Finally, Spain manages to fully collect himself before reaching for the Dutchman. Moving a bit closer and peeling Netherland's previously blue shirt from his wounds and skin. He barely even touches the fabric before the nation hisses through his teeth. Antonio tries to ignore it, continuing on, but even as he's looking under the tattered fabric he can't even see the injuries very well at all either.

He's not a doctor, nor a physician or even a medic. Spain himself has a very basic idea of battlefield medicine and even that's a bit outdated. It takes him a moment to retrieve any information about treating wounds. He needs to clean them; otherwise, the chance of them getting infected is higher. "Please, tell me you can stand?"

It takes about half a minute for the Dutchman to even understand the words that are coming out of his mouth. "Not well." It sounds more like a choke than actual words, but he can understand them.

"Linkernie geschoten." And we've slipped into two different languages, forget understanding.

"I don't speak Dutch, ehe…" The Dutchman grits his teeth and tries to get his arms underneath himself in a futile attempt to get up.

Spain jumps in to help, immediately taking the arm nearest to him and pulling Netherlands shakily to his feet. The nation grunts as soon as he's up, painfully glancing down at his chest and stomach. Whatever veins that had clotted before seem to have been opened again, he's bleeding more steadily now. Antonio gives a barely audible curse and ushers Lars to move a bit faster but the man is almost dead weight at this point, and he finds it almost impossible. But Netherlands still has his pride and despite everything is, with very little effort, pushing Spain off him. Idiota.

Even though he's not using his left leg no matter what and refuses to place all his trust in the Spaniard to basically drag him inside. In short, it was making the Spaniard's life that much more difficult. Opening the door was a bit of a trick and he didn't even bother closing it after. He barely manages to get Netherlands upstairs to the washroom without falling back down them. He's basically dragging the persona by the time they get up to the second floor.

Spain unhooks Netherland's arm and manages to get him into the empty tub. The Dutchman's head lolling back over the edge despite his boots touching the footer. Spain has officially concluded that the Dutch are just far too tall.

Netherlands continually switched from consciousness to unconsciousness now, once and awhile he'd throw himself forward and choke out an amount of blood Antonio didn't even think was in his body anymore. Then there was the fact that cleaning the wounds in the first place was almost completely fruitless. You'd clean them off and they'd only continue bleeding. He'd managed to remove the sand and the mud though which was at least a small accomplishment.

Clothing was getting to be an issue too; he couldn't really get Lars to take his jacket off, or his scarf, much less his shirt. They'd probably had a pretty one-sided conversation a couple of times about how if Netherlands wanted to keep his human body alive for much longer he'd have to actually be able to treat the wounds properly. He just kind of lay there, eyeing Spain or the wall, mumbling to himself in his strange, harsh language.

Eventually, he did manage to shrug off his jacket, hissing away Spain every time he even looked like he was going to help. The shirt he gave up on and just peeled it off the skin before cleaning around the wounds so Antonio could at least gage where to bandage the persona. God this was a mess. Although only to reveal that the Dutchman's right side was bruised and mildly malformed, probably a couple broken ribs. As if it didn't hurt to breathe already…

Netherlands seemed almost completely out of it after he'd been bandaged. Staring at nothing particularly and now completely limp instead of tense like he had been before. There was a two-minute time frame of where Antonio actually debated about leaving him in the tub and just covering him up with a few blankets. The idea was rejected after a couple moments of consideration.

So, dragging the impossibly-too-tall Dutchman out of the tub and readjusting his position to better suite Spain, they went on. The Spaniard would continue to readjust this position throughout their little 'walk'. But he got the persona to one of the nicer guest rooms of his house. "Alright Netherlands," grunting, Spain eased him onto the bed in a fluid motion that he was quite proud of, "and there we go. You're just lucky that most of those bullet holes had exit wounds otherwise there'd be a lot more pain than what you're feeling now mi amigo."

"Don't call… me… that…"

"Ah… so we're back to English, finally, I was wondering if you'd ever get back to it."

Lars groans, lazily opening his eyes to glare at the Spaniard again. Spain perks up, "Which reminds me," turning around and padding off through the door, he disappears around the corner.

Netherland's just eyes the doorway for less than a moment before letting his head rest again. What'd he say? Which… what does that mean… sleep seemed like it would be a good idea at this point. Not translating, translating takes time. He can't even really tell exactly what's hurt and what's not hurt anymore. It just all hurts, every little movement just makes it worse. He doesn't even really think this body will make it through the night in this state even. So what's the point? What's the point of Spain saving him? It's not like he'd go away forever, it'll be such a pain to heal anyway.

Spain wanders back into the room, small vial in hand and ever-present grin, "This will help with the pain."

Lars rolls his head over to the side and flinches away, bringing on some more undesirable pain with it. He hisses a breath and weekly mutters, "No."

Antonio gives him a perplexed look, "I know you really hate me but I didn't think it was that bad."

Netherlands gives a slow blink, "Not what… I never… hated you…"

The persona relaxes into the far side of the bed, keeping himself a good distance from the Spaniard and the vial. "'ust… keep that away from me."

With half-lidded eyes the Dutchman watches Spain slowly glance at the vial, placing it on a table to the far side of the wall and slowly walk out. "Well, I guess I'll go then."

He doesn't close his eyes until the door is shut before he drifts off into the nothingness that knows him all too well.

…TO BE CONTINUED…

So previously I have been posting on Fanfiction, and continue to do so. But I was advised by some people to post on Tumblr as well, just to get my stuff out there. So basically, I’m going to see how this is received and probably put the chapters up I have done. It’s a tester if anything. So, thanks for checking this out if your reading this. :)

~EarlyMorningMassacre~

#fanfic hetalia #aph spain #aph netherlands #aph belgium #aph romano #first chapter #angst #fanfiction #tomato gang #idk what to do #new to tumblr #i can't function

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thepaintedbrain · 7 years

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The late management theorist Dr. Edwards Deming recognized that we as humans are social creatures. We are born with basic needs for love and esteem, and the need to relate to each other. We are driven by curiosity, joy in learning, and accomplishments. In his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation” Abraham Maslow, proposed a hierarchy of needs as a way to explain motivation. He subsequently extended the idea to include his observations of humans’ innate curiosity. This groundbreaking work was undoubtedly known to Dr. Deming, but he went further in his effort to understand human motivation.

http://ift.tt/2kry6Lw

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs defined in a nutshell:

Physiological needs (food, shelter, clean air and water)

Safety needs (job security, affordable housing, equity, social justice through equal opportunity in educational and vocational training opportunities)

Belongingness and love needs

The esteem needs – self-confidence

The need for self-actualization – the need to reach your full potential

http://ift.tt/2latTAq

“As Maslow back in 1965 presciently predicted in his key business text, EUPSYCHIAN MANAGEMENT, the principles of what he called enlightened management–involving team decision-making, personal fulfillment, and organizational productivity–would gain mounting importance as workers became more autonomous, self-respecting, and highly educated. Maslow saw this promising trend already underway in the USA, and expected it to spread eventually throughout the entire world.”

http://ift.tt/2krjV9o

And it certainly has…

What are the determinants of quality products and services?

People are motivated primarily from intrinsic – not extrinsic – needs.

When intrinsic motivations are harnessed, quality is a natural by-product. Or- to quote Deming, “Quality is pride of workmanship – the feeling of satisfaction and joy found in a job well-done”. For more on Deming’s model of total quality management, click here:

Knowing Your Constituents

The constituents of your company are the stakeholders (not only the stockholders) in your company.Stakeholder is defined to include all the people affected by your organization – both inside and outside.

Let’s begin by redefining constituency and let’s be clear about what it is. Conventional models would include these categories:

Stockholders

Management

Customer base

The list wouldn’t be complete it this was all, and this is a lesson too often lost in American-style corporate management because that’s where they often end. Here is more:

Employees including the rank and file at the bottom, the mailroom clerk, or the “foot soldiers”.

The external community or ecosystem, physical (virtual) or otherwise, within which the company works and operates, completely excluding employees, customers, or stockholders. We’re referring to something else entirely.

No definition of constituency is ever complete or whole, that would exclude any single one of these 5 categories. Whether that community happens to be a small town and you happen to be the biggest employer, or you are a college providing education to a large portion of your town, or are a county health care agency tasked with ensuring your area gets the quality health care it needs, to generate goodwill in such “communities” – the chances are you will have an army of loyal brand evangelists who will sing praises about your company, vouch for your brand, even stand up to critics or unfair criticism on your behalf – even if they aren’t asked to, even if they are not actual customers at all. From a marketing and PR perspective alone, the value of such a die-hard loyal base of supporters is incalculable.

Quality is the product of a loyal constituency, or stated differently, a loyal workforce, a community favorably disposed to the company, and a loyal (and growing) customer base that naturally follows. So who ever said it was anything about pleasing stockholders? Happy shareholders are simply the natural side effect of real value, not the end all, be all of that is profit, and what makes it possible is clarity about who your stakeholders are.

How can we better the bottom-line naturally?

Create “quality control circles” – Deming style

For a moment forget everything you’ve learned about quality control audits and inspections. Imagine for a moment that you were the CEO of a company and you’ve decided to do things differently, and that means to get rid of all outside quality control auditors. No more people brought in to do quality inspections any longer, whatsoever. As farfetched as it may sound, this exactly what Dr. Deming is suggesting. Save the money you would pay an outside party to do these audits and hold onto it. Save the money for something further down the line that may come in much more handy. Chances are, if you ensure that you do this one thing and ONE thing alone, you won’t need quality inspections or outside audits ever again.

Think of a quality control circle as an informal (as opposed to formal) “committee” – a grapevine if you will, spanning all layers of the company. This informal committee’s only purpose is to keep at the forefront of the company’s awareness, sparking vigorous discussion – around these key questions:

What needs to be improved?

What improvements can be made right away?

What actionable steps can we DO now, not later, no matter how small it seems in the overall scale of the project, that is within our ability, that if maintained consistently – will pay huge dividends down the road?

What change (no matter how small) can be immediately implemented?

Most importantly – which of these immediately actionable steps can be feasibly maintained over a long duration, with ONLY the current resources at our disposal (“feasible” means – without exerting undue strain on any essential component or personnel) without sacrificing consistency?

In fact – Deming would suggest that it is often these “small”, often intangible, sometimes invisible little things, these baby steps that are often ignored and overlooked – that when done in “good faith” – earnestly and consistently, acquire – like a round stone rolling downhill – unstoppable momentum.

Employees are allowed, even encouraged to step forward and voice their concerns and critiques without fear of retribution, as constructive critique is, welcomed and embraced, as all who give voice are invited to participate vigorously in brainstorming various scenarios in implementing improvements and changes throughout the system, the company. These are issues that normally only involve the top leadership. People from the rank and file and above are now given a voice. Passionate involvement in such quality circles is lavishly rewarded – not feared.

Start with Transparency

The conventional wisdom holds that improving quality costs, so if certain standards are met (product passes inspection or meets a quota) there’s no need to go further. This was the prevailing modus operandi amongst American car companies until the 1980s. “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”, was a popular maxim at Ford before the 1980s. According to Deming – not so. Process is never optimized, it can always be improved. Quality always costs less.

The purpose of quality control circle is to invite direct participants in brainstorming, creating, and implementing solutions together. In short – this means “transparency”.

Fail to be transparent, and deprive many a potential contributor of a meaningful way to contribute to the team’s success. Worse – risk under-utilizing your human resources, and create a workforce that is apathetic and demoralized. Left out of the loop, the creative potential of individual employees is squandered, turning them into gophers for hire, whose only job is to mindlessly follow orders, and whose desire is to do only what is required to keep their paycheck, and nothing more. Call it “learned helplessness”, and watch it translate into absenteeism, apathy, dulled job performance, low morale, and high turnover, placing further strain on the company’s bottom line.

Limit “formal” corporate meetings

One of the best ways to motivate employees is to involve them directly in discussing and solving problems that normally involve only top management. Ironically this often happens through informal, or virtual dialogue – not excluding social media, online chat boards, workplace gossip, or simply “chatting around the water fountain” – but rarely through the regimented talk often relegated to formal meetings. Formal, structured “corporate” meetings are overrated.

Understand variation and manage accordingly

The simple statement that “people are different” highlights one of many shortcomings in the current style of management. Fail to account for this variation, and risk degrading job performance in your employees.

People are different. Each person is a diverse constellation of unique abilities, traits, interests, weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and talents. Cease isolating departments from another by delineating clear and definite boundaries. Allow, even encourage and reward cross-training. Someone working in one department will never know that a better use of their talents exists in another area of the company otherwise. An employee may be a follower (rank and file worker) in one department and a leader (supervisor) in another. Variation not only exists, it is a fact of life that is often overlooked and ignored. Punishing poor performance due to variation is hitting the wrong nail with the hammer.

Understand that true quality begins – or ends – in the boardroom

“Victories are secured in the general’s headquarters, not out on the battlefield.”

-Sun Tzu, “The Art of War”

The term “layoff” is really an euphemism for the shortsighted actions of cutting the very workforce whose loyalty and wellbeing is essential to run the company. Giving “golden parachutes” to failed CEO’s is also another way of saying that when the top leaders fail, the people who suffer as a result are those (the “foot soldiers” at the bottom). Ironically, and chances are that the workers at the bottom had no hand in creating them in the first place, because these are problems inherent in the “system”, not any one particular “individual”. The wrong people are rewarded, and the wrong people are punished, only to satisfy the shareholders for short-term gain. The downside of the quota-driven mentally (Deming calls it “managing by the visible numbers”) rears its ugly head.

A common practice in American management is the tendency of firms to blame top management’s failures on those below. If not outright blame, at least penalize them with layoffs and pay cuts.

The wave of management practices instituted in Japan in the 1980s was a derivation of Deming’s model, and “focused on increasing employee loyalty to the company by providing a job for life with a strong focus on the well-being of the employee, both on and off the job.”

In Japan, when the firm was faced with losses, the stockholders were the first to get their dividends cut, then top management, then middle management. The last people to be asked to take the pay cuts were the people at the bottom. Does this sound unthinkable? It shouldn’t be. Imagine the difference in morale and employee loyalty that would result?

Stop blaming the wrong people

“As long as management is quick to take credit for a firm’s successes but equally swift to blame its workers for its failures, no surefire remedy for low productivity can be expected in American manufacturing and service industries.” [1]

– Edwards Deming

When things go wrong (quarterly losses are posted, customers leave, worker absenteeism is rampant, or turnover is high), they are due to failures in management, not the workers at the bottom. Failures in the system are management’s – and only management’s responsibility.

Systems – not people – create the problems. But people create systems. That is management’s job.

Reward based on merit, not seniority – by redefining accountability

“The purpose of leadership is not to gain more followers. The purpose of leadership is to produce more leaders.” -Ralph Nader

Let people rise in the company based on their initiative, willingness to take a role, and a track record of commitment and dedication, rather than how many years they have been at the company. Reward initiative, not the length of employment history.

Dump the dichotomy between people in charge and people taking orders. Cease making gophers out of your employees, and make them stewards instead.

There are essentially two types of delegation.

Gopher delegation It’s delegating by giving commands, without really imparting any sense of the larger goals being pursued or involving them thinking about what the mission is. It’s saying “go do this, and when you’re done come back and I’ll give you something else to do.”

‘Micromanagement” is the word.

Stewardship delegation Stewardship delegation, on the other hand is agreeing upon a result that should be achieved, but leaving the methods open to the person who has been delegated to. The person becomes a steward and is responsible for choosing the methods they employ to achieve their goals. Ideally, they have even been involved in the decision about what they have stewardship over.

Involvement encourages commitment.

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This is how leaders are made.

Kevin Naruse is a blogger and social media consultant. You can visit his site at http://kevinnaruse.com/

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