Eric Christiansen on Being CEO of a Deming Company *

Show notes: https://www.leanblog.org/18  Remastered July 2021 Here is Episode #18 of the LeanBlog Podcast. My guest today is Eric Christiansen, the President of a translation services company, OmniLingua (more can be found here on their philosophy as a company, being a self-described “Deming Company.”) I was interested in talking with Eric about what it means to be a “Deming Company” and about their implementation of “wiki” tools (ala Wikipedia) for managing their standard work and process documentation. If you enjoy this podcast, I hope you'll check out the rest of the series by visiting the LeanBlog podcast main page. Show Notes and Approximate Time, Episode #18 1:30 Introducing Eric and his company 3:15 What does it mean to be a “Deming company?” 3:40 The Deming System of Profound Knowledge 4:00 The owner of OmniLingua had worked directly with Deming and appreciated the people aspects of his philosophy, how do you treat people with respect? 4:40 Has the annual review been abolished? Sales commissions were abolished, as well as production bonus plans. OmniLingua has a company-wide profit sharing plan instead. 5:15 More examples of the Deming philosophy in day-to-day life, including long-term sole-source supplier relationships 7:00 Is there still internal competition? 7:45 “Are we hiring salespeople who can't sell?” by not having commissions 8:40 How have lean methods evolved at OmniLingua? 10:15 Standard work within the company and the evolution into the use of “Wiki” technology for standard work 13:30 How they modified the process to allow some additional revision and ownership control (after an ISO audit) 15:00 How did it work when everybody had access to modify the standard work documentation? 17:00 How many people have access to the different standard work documents? 19:00 With a Word-document based standard work, people wanted to fancy them up, Wiki keeps people focused on the content 21:30 Deployment started last November (2005)