Out of the Crisis

Deming's fourteen points for management, the theory of profound knowledge, and the argument that most quality problems are system problems, not people problems. The book is the source of the quality revolution that transformed Japanese manufacturing in the post-war era and eventually reached the West. Ries credits Deming as the intellectual ancestor of Lean Startup; Ohno and Toyota operationalised Deming's statistical methods into the production system. For product direction the most useful idea is probably the most counterintuitive: that optimising individual components of a system usually degrades the system, and that management's job is to work on the system itself. Dense, serious, occasionally repetitive; the fourteen points and the chapters on variation are the essential parts.