Demming was all about tight observe/act loops and planning for human frailty. These are not new concepts now, but like healthy eating and regular exercise everyone knows about it and yet businesses don't do it.

I would hardly say he is under recognised in the mainstream of business thought (I mean he never is going to compete with Brad Pitt for recognition status).

I think that's the meat of the problem—they're well-known and well understood ways to improve organizations, but they're difficult and against our nature. It's not that they're not respected at all, it's that they're largely not implemented, and I perceive that as a real lack of respect.

Let's put it this way: most managers and high-level executives I know of (and even ones I know personally) are very much all about blaming individuals and controlling companies through individual motivation, carrot-and-stick and hiring-and-firing. I think this is also a prevalent way of thinking in the business-school world, with very few schools teaching true statistics- and process-based management in the Deming style.

That is what I mean by lack of respect, and I stand by it: Deming has very little respect in the business world as a whole. His ideas brush up against everything stereotypical American MBA's believe to their core: that the individual is responsible for his own performance, that worker motivation comes from punishment and reward, and that fundamentally, it is individuals that drive success or failure of an organization, regardless of the system they work in.

In my opinion, now just speculating, I think this is deeply embedded in certain American Republican political and social ideologies: this idea that the individual is responsible for his own destiny and his own success, that there should be no safety nets and no dependence on outside influences. For many American executives, I think this is the prevalent way of thinking, and it's self-reinforced among the groups with which they associate. It's also severely at odds with Deming's ideas, and severely at odds with scientific facts (mathematical and social/psychological). But I won't get into that.

The sad part is that it extends to other areas of society as well; any place these ideologies infect the system. No Child Left Behind was fundamentally a way to seek out individual failure cases using pervasive testing and changed the entire system because of it. And it's done the same thing to the education system as it has been doing for quite some time to the corporate world. It sucked the life out of it and made it a social blame game with the wrong incentives, leading to the wrong results.

I have a glimmer of hope for you - the internal processs of a company today are opaque - deeply dependant on implicit knowledge and changing political patterns.

As we see technology replacing White collar workers, more of internal processes will be explicit, automated, coded. And so amenable to hooking up to simulations - at some point you can reliably simulate your internal company - and at that point you can experiment.

A/B test your internal processes and schumpter will allow deeming in through the back door