I am a huge admirer of your stuff Ben, but you of all people realise that the heart of all ratonal consideration, scientific or otherwise, is impartiality. Question everything or your conclusions will be lopsided and at least appear like you’re just handing a pass to your fellow scientists while blaming absolutely everything on the journalists who write it up. Both sides bear responsibility for nonsense like this. It would not harm your case a jot to acknowledge it.

In psychological terms, beliecing with certainty something which is patently untrue is termed a psychosis. Does this mean that all of our commercial institutions are in fact mad? Perhaps some Fish Oil supplements will help.

It’s not a new phenomenon that the media try to sensationalise academic studies into scare stories, but you can hardly fault them in this case when such a juicy piece of gossip such as a ranking of British towns and cities by how happy they are is waved right under their noses.

If the findings were not “statistically significant” then the researcher should never have allowed the ranking table to be written.

They know how they are currently doing the job.

What about having experience of similar or even analogous work – that might let you “improve” (from the worker or productivity angle) how you do the work ?

In this case it would be someone perhaps with oversight of the whole process who is better placed, as long as they could see how the detail was done too.

I don’t think Deming is against performance related pay simply because it is unfair, but because it is unproductive. In the red bead experiment suppose that there was some subtle way to influence the outcome, say the red beads where slightly magnetic for example. Now what would be the best strategy for a smart worker who discovered this? They would not tell their colleagues because then they would loose their advantage. They would not tell the company because then there is no game/experiment and no extra pay. Worse (from the company’s point of view) the smart worker would have to be careful not to exploit his advantage too much for fear of being found out. If he/she won best employee every time people would begin to suspect and try to discover the secret.

The “treat ‘em mean to keep ‘em keen” school of management is really more about enforcing and maintaining power relationships, not about maximizing profits. This may be relevant to military situations but if you are trying to improve production or quality, cooperation is by far the best way. The people who know how best to do the job are usually the ones doing it, not those trying to manage the process. In my experience organizations work despite their management rather than because of it. I have often thought that a good way to destroy a company or business would be if the workers did exactly what the managers told them to do however my union has advised me that the courts would consider this as industrial action!

I think that Deming is against penalising people for red beads simply because it is unfair. However, from a business point of view, it doesn’t matter that your rewards and punishments are sometimes arbitrary. All that matters is that the workers understand that they need to whatever they can do to achieve results.

Oderint dum metuant, as some shite once rightly said.

Business isn’t about fairness and co-operation. It’s about “do this because I say so, and I can fire you”. It’s unfair and illogical to begin with, so making a fair and logical version of it won’t succeed.

That’s not to say he doesn’t have some good practical ideas, though.

Maybe the BBC journos should be reading the BBC’s own popular stories.

Also, the authors research was published their stats in Arxiv, not a journal.

http://www.rgs.org/PressRoom/Annual+Conference+2008/geographers+map+happiness.htm

It’s not till note to editors number 7 that the truth comes out.