Episode Details

Kevin Cahill, President and Executive Director of the Deming Institute, reflects on growing up with Dr. Deming, learning about his grandfather's impact on the world, and his own Deming journey.

Kevin also describes The Deming Institute's origins, the DemingNEXT initiative, and using Deming in the real world.

SHOW NOTES

Books mentionedThe New Economics and Out of the Crisis, both by Dr. Deming (available via www.deming.org) Transform Your Business with Dr.Deming's 14 Points, by Andrew Stotz

0:00:36 Growing up in the Deming family

0:04:29 Watching If Japan Can, Why Can't We? with my grandfather

09:07 Kevin's own Deming journey

14:21 The origins of The Deming Institute

21:35 Why Deming, why now

39:14 Introducing DemingNEXT

46:06 Andrew's Deming journey

53:34 Deming in the real world

TRANSCRIPTDownload: Transcript of Kevin Cahill's Podcast 4-22-22

Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I'm here with featured guest, Kevin Cahill. Kevin, are you ready to share your Deming journey?

Kevin Cahill: Absolutely, Andrew. Excited to be here, looking forward to it.

AS: Yeah. Well, I think we gotta kick this off by introducing you. Tell us what is your connection to Dr. W. Edwards Deming.

KC: Well, I'm very fortunate to be his grandson, and also very fortunate that as I grew up in the Washington DC area, I got to spend a tremendous amount of time with my grandparents, my grandfather, Dr. Deming, and his wife, Lola Deming, who also assisted him in his work for many, many years, and got to know them growing up. And so, it was absolutely fascinating to see this man that I knew as a kindly, gentle, soft-spoken man who worked out of the small basement of his house in Washington DC, not in a big office, this little, tiny basement that used to flood in the rainy season and was just very, very small. And I always wondered what he did because everything that I saw was just figures and numbers and all this stuff, and he never talked about work. When we were together with him on Thanksgivings and Christmases, he was always talking about family and what it was like with my mother and her sisters growing up. So, a very different perspective of who this man was. That all changed at one point in my life but growing up, it was a very different kind of relationship.

AS: You know, my first connection with your grandfather was when I was like 24, and I was just in awe, but I was also in terror because I watched him pretty strict, pretty tough when he was dealing with people that just had nonsense questions in some cases, or had the wrong idea, and he really needed to straighten them out in one way or another. And it's kind of surprising, but now that I think about it, in our families, we don't bring that toughness necessarily into the family. Is that the case?

KC: That was the case. We never noticed that. He would sit at the dining room table, and he would just be quiet at the head of the table, and occasionally he'd pull this little notebook out and make some notes. I always wonder what he was writing. I found out later. Something came to mind, and then, occasionally, in the middle of the dinner, he would say... He would have this great story about my mother or something that he had. He would tell us growing up, and he just burst into this fantastic laughter of his, and it was so much fun. And we really didn't know what he did. We knew he traveled, and we knew that... Like I said, growing up, we would get scrap paper from his office, and it always just had sheets of number