Entrepreneurship A La Deming

Posted 2 years, 9 months ago | Originally written on 22 Dec 2021

According to W. Edwards Deming, for an organisation to succeed it needs to incorporate a system of profound knowledge consisting of:

  1. Appreciation for a system
  2. A theory of knowledge
  3. Understanding of variation
  4. Psychology

This system of profound knowledge is a means for acquiring knowledge external to the organisation to become increasingly effective in its business. In essence, success is exclusively a function of how well an organisation is able to learn and incorporate new domain knowledge.

The organisation thus sits between the domain and domain participants hence it is an enterprise. The word enterprise comes from the French words entre and prendre which literally mean between and to take. An enterprise is an intermediary between some domain and typically some technology.

Entrepreneurship is thus, according to Deming, the task of exploiting knowledge external to the enterprise by applying some technology to serve domain users in an increasingly meaningful way. This relation builds upon itself because as the domain benefits from the enterprise it’s impact and complexity grows.