Fixing Government Waste And Fraud Starts With Giving Power Back To States

Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of articles written by former Sen. Jim DeMint. Read the introduction here and the first three articles here, here, and here.

The United States became the world’s leading manufacturer and exporter after World War II. Over the decades that followed, major manufacturing companies in America became top-heavy in their management, costs increased, profits shrank, and the quality of their products declined. By the late 1970’s, Japan, a nation long-known for cheap, low-quality products, began producing low-cost, high-quality automobiles and many other products that were superior to those manufactured in America. Japan’s secret became known as total quality management (TQM). It was the brainchild of American consultants Edward Deming and Joseph Juran — experts who had been ignored by arrogant manufacturing executives in the United States.

I added TQM consulting to my practice in the 1980s and learned a lot about how it could revolutionize any company, including service companies like hospitals and universities. The concept of TQM was relatively simple, but hard for old-style executives to accept, because it required giving up control and pushing decision-making down to the people who were producing the products and providing the services. Giving up control is very difficult for executives — and politicians.

I was a certified quality trainer, and my job was to teach workers how to continuously improve quality and not accept anything less than 100 percent of the desired quality goal. One of the keys to making this work was to identify problems, defects, or inefficiencies, and then keep digging and asking “why” until you discovered the root cause of the problem. Understanding the connection between cause and effect was difficult for many workers, because our lifestyles, education system, and expectations have virtually eliminated critical thinking skills. Most people focus on the problem or the symptom of the problem and don’t naturally seek the root cause. This inability to connect cause and effect is evident with American voters.