I realized with some surprise that two of the most influential books about management among those I read in the past year were written over 20 years ago – years before Agile was a formal concept, a buzz word, a knight in shining armour or the worst thing to happen to humanity depending on who you are or how you’ve experienced it. The first book was Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, the other – the subject of this post – W. Edwards Deming’s The New Economics for Government, Industry, Education. Yep, perhaps it was naive of me, but all these years I sort of assumed that Agile was the new kid on the block fighting age-old management concepts with groundbreaking new thinking. These two books finally enlightened meto the fact that many of the ideas at its core were around for a long long time.

W. Edwards Deming died in 1993 at the age of 93 and The New Economics was published the next year. He made revisions to it up until his death. He refers to sources written in the 50s and some even longer before than – in the 1920s, a couple in the late 1800s. This book is a summary of lifelong thinking that Deming formulated as Systems Thinking and the Theory of Profound Knowledge.

Deming’s thought and writing were focused on manufacturing where America used to excel at the beginning of the 20th century through the wars and into the 1950s. Nowadays it is popular to blame the weakening of US manufacturing on