Deming’s 14 principles were formulated by William Edwards Deming, an engineer and statistician, in the second half of the 20th century. They concern fundamental management values that facilitate productivity and quality in the organization’s operations. Per Lim (2019), they are as such: the constancy of purpose for improvement, adoption of the new philosophy, an end to dependence on inspection, constant improvement of the production and service system, training on the job, leadership, inter-department barrier breakdown, slogan, exhortation, and target elimination, numerical quota removal, a barrier to pride removal, education and self-improvement programs, and taking action to accomplish the transformation.
The expectation for the principles is that, by following them, the company’s management and personnel will be able to change their thinking. They will be able to abandon the practices Deming viewed as harmful and become more effective and productive while also improving the quality of their products.
Baldrige’s 11 core values owe their name to Malcolm Baldrige, who served as the Commerce Secretary under President Reagan. Their role is to define organizational performance excellence that enables an organization, whether for-profit or otherwise, to achieve success and sustain it. According to Mukhopadhyay (2016), they consist of visionary leadership, learning-centered education, organizational and personal learning, valuing faculty, staff, and partners, agility, focus on the future, managing for innovation, management by fact, public responsibility and citizenship, focus on results and creating value, and systems perspective.
Some of these values change depending on the nature of the institution, as terms such as faculty may not be relevant outside of education. The model provides a method for the quick and efficient assessment of an organization based on whether it adheres to the criteria. There is also a governmental award, also dedicated to Baldrige, that is given to organizations that achieve the utmost excellence in following the 11 values.
Overall, Baldrige’s 11 core values are more specific than Deming’s 14 principles and relate more to practical realities. They can be used for the assessment and evaluation of an organization to provide suggestions for how it may improve its functioning. On the other hand, Deming’s 14 principles are more abstract, relating to overall management commitments that cannot necessarily be measured. They list dangerous practices that should be abandoned as well as helpful approaches that the company’s management should use. It is the expectation that, by following the principles, the organization’s management will be able to develop methods that will improve its performance. On the contrary, Baldrige’s values set out specific objectives for the organization to meet, some of which are more specific than others but most of which are overall measurable.
In the author’s opinion, Deming’s 14 principles are superior to Baldrige’s 11 core values for the purposes of fostering high quality. They are more abstract, which makes starting the process of improvement more challenging than in the case of the core values. However, they are also more flexible as a result in comparison to the more rigid requirements of the other set of requirements. The development of specific improvement measures is left to the management, which is the most aware of their organization’s context. With that said, there is substantial overlap and little contradiction between the two sets discussed in this paper. As such, they can be used together to maximize excellence and ensure that the organization performs well in both the short and the long term.
References
Lim, J. S. (2019). Quality management in engineering: A scientific and systematic approach. CRC Press.
Mukhopadhyay, M. (2016). Quality management in higher education. SAGE Publications.