Deming's Five Diseases of Management
Deming's Five Diseases of Management name five habits that quietly cap how good a company can get: no constant purpose, short-term profit focus, merit-rating systems, management mobility, and running on visible figures alone.
Reach for this when…
- Leadership changes every 18 months and each new hire resets the strategy.
- Bonuses are tied to numbers nobody trusts anymore.
- You suspect the annual review process is doing more harm than good.
How to run it
- Check for a lack of constancy of purpose: does the mission survive a bad quarter?
- Check for short-term profit emphasis crowding out long-term investment.
- Check for merit-rating systems that pit people against each other instead of the process.
- Check for management mobility: is leadership too unstable to be accountable for outcomes?
- Check whether the company is run only on visible figures, ignoring the costs nobody's counting.
A worked example
Situation. Selamawit Bekele managed Bekele Metalworks, a metal-fabrication plant near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the third general manager in four years had just resigned.
Applied. Running the five diseases as a checklist, she traced most of the plant's problems to one: management mobility, no GM stayed long enough to own the consequences of their decisions.
Result. She committed to a five-year minimum tenure for the role herself and tied her own incentives to outcomes three years out, not the next quarterly figure.
The catch
The five diseases describe symptoms more clearly than cures - Deming names what's wrong with merit ratings, but the alternative he proposed, removing individual rankings, is a hard sell in most reward structures now. It also assumes the diseases are equally curable, when instability of leadership is often driven by the board, not the manager reading the list.
Naming a disease doesn't cure it if the incentive causing it is still in the bonus plan.
Origin: W. Edwards Deming