Delivering better products or services to customers is the undisputed aim of any organization. They just don’t always act that way. Manufacturing organizations have circled the wagons since the 1950s, when Japanese competitors began capturing market share from the rest of the world.

Looking back at the history of the quality and improvement movement, you can see the wake left through which we’ve traveled. In the book, The Man Who Discovered Quality (Penguin Books, 1992), author Andrea Gabor allows us to go back in time to see the dire straits faced by manufacturing in the United States. The story of Nashua Corp. during the 1980s paints a bleak picture.

At that time, Nashua made carbonless paper for U.S. industry. As it began to export internationally, the company discovered that its quality wasn’t good enough to compete with Japanese firms, which had moved in with a better quality product and thereby captured the market. What stupefied William Conway—CEO of Nashua—were the hurdles that the Japanese had to clear just to be competitive.

After WWII, W. Edwards Deming provided the spark that ignited Japan into making quality products. I like to refer to it as the greatest upset in economic history. How did such a small country with few economic and natural resources build a manufacturing juggernaut that could overcome the great resource advantages of the United States?

Some say the devastation that the Japanese suffered made them open to Deming’s ideas; others say that Asian culture allowed for the adoption of his ideas. Regardless, Deming came back to the United States and worked with American companies, where in 1985 he listed his original 14 points for the transformation of management at a Deming Users’ group meeting in San Diego (detailed in Nancy Mann’s 1989 book, The Keys to Excellence). Later, these 14 points were seen to flow from his System of Profound Knowledge (SoPK), which included appreciation for a system, knowledge of variation, theory of knowledge, and psychology.

In my last column, “Deming’s Challenge to Us, Part 1,” I sounded the alert that just being improvement people is not enough, and waiting for management to do something is a poor strategy. In this column, I’m focusing on our choices and options to move forward as change agents.

For a couple of decades I have spoken to executives, change agents, and workers about how entropy can destroy organizations. Entropy is the natural deterioration that occurs when energy is not exerted for company growth and sustainability. Like a plant that will ultimately die if water and sunlight are taken away, organizations wilt if not nourished.

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ometimes it’s necessary for a person to offer up views that seem to be an affront. Because these views often challenge the status quo, people’s reactions can be mixed. Some will consider the person a heretic for expressing them, and others will wonder why anyone would say such a thing. The latter group is the one worth convincing, because the people who comprise it are curious by nature and interested in the truth.

So at the risk of affronting, I believe there’s too important a story to be ignored when it comes to Japan: Copying Toyota is a bad idea. Not because I say so, but because if we look at the foundational elements of Japanese manufacturing, we find the work of W. Edwards Deming. Many in the lean community agree that without Deming, there would have been no Taiichi Ohno or Toyota Production System (TPS). The fact that Toyota achieved a set of results is really of no use to another company, even one in a similar industry, unless that company understands how Toyota did it and how that applies to the company’s own issues.