Quote of the Day 3.1.06: Systems

"If you put good people in bad systems, you get bad results." -W. Edwards Deming

Boy, how true it is!  I know others can commiserate with finding yourself working in a company, and trying to succeed within a dysfunctional system.  Your frustration level rises daily while you struggle to conform, knowing that you cannot possibly succeed because the system is set up to make you fail.  We can identify such systems and by the level of staff turnover in that department or company.

If we agree that a major responsibility of a leader is to remove all obstacles that prevent the success of the team, why are so many poor systems left in place?  Most likely because it is a commonly held misconception that it is easier to replace workers than it is to reinvent an entire system.  It takes a great amount of courage to take the time and effort to examine the system or process and truly understand the nature of the problem, separate from the human elements.  But the leader who takes this risk, whether he finds that the true problem is minor or very major, comes to the realization that good people are much more difficult and costly to replace than poor systems.