This is a very trivial treatment of Deming and I’m surprised how it makes its way to the top of HN.
The arc from Walter Shewhart to W.E. Deming is a bedrock foundation in an Industrial Engineering curriculum. These men paved the manufacturing process quality principles of modern industrialization. Drucker was about management science, truly an apples to oranges comparison.
It is also worth noting that US management is notoriously bad at the actual management. Toyota v. US car manufacturers did not look like a fair fight when Deming was in the ascendant, and it is hard to tell given the scales involved but it looks a lot like the US has been outmanoeuvred in all aspects of industry by the Asians.
US companies are generally a better bet though, because despite the handicap of being run by Americans, they are hosted in a country that generally believes in freedom and rule of law which means they have an unfair advantage even if they do a sub-par job of making the most of what they have.
Not necessarily limited "intellect", but rather limited background knowledge.
Deming requires quite a bit of knowledge and understanding in failure/success modes. The core tenet of Deming is that every output is a result of some process and, therefore, output is controlled by controlling* the process itself. Look at your process and tackle failure modes in this priority list.
Drucker, on the other hand, puts the process under the fog of war and basically says deploy pressure on process outputs and let the process adjust itself. It requires much less understanding behind the processes to make sense.
* - Process control in Deming is mostly about variability.
that kind of ties in with the article's thesis; deming's approach is more scientific in the classic sense of taking observations and using those to build up your mental models, whereas drucker proposes a one size fits all recipe for managing roadmaps.
US companies are generally a better bet though, because despite the handicap of being run by Americans, they are hosted in a country that generally believes in freedom and rule of law which means they have an unfair advantage even if they do a sub-par job of making the most of what they have.
Exceptions abound in the details.
Where Deming reads like a science paper, Drucker reads like an installation guide.
Deming requires quite a bit of knowledge and understanding in failure/success modes. The core tenet of Deming is that every output is a result of some process and, therefore, output is controlled by controlling* the process itself. Look at your process and tackle failure modes in this priority list.
Drucker, on the other hand, puts the process under the fog of war and basically says deploy pressure on process outputs and let the process adjust itself. It requires much less understanding behind the processes to make sense.
* - Process control in Deming is mostly about variability.