I'm so happy when people bring up the "...wtf" side of Deming, in context of his more useful contributions. Hero worship is bullshit. A person who has really great ideas also has really crap ideas, because nobody is perfect. We should be more comfortable humanizing people, so we don't get trapped in the cargo cult or appeal to authority, and so we can accept more ideas from people who don't look like geniuses.
All that said: I find it so fascinating that his focus was on statistics and science, when so much of his advice is actually holistic observations from experience, and not all the result of scientific experiments or research. There is both a science and an art to making an organization (read: a group of people doing organized work) work well. You really need both, because people are, unfortunately, not science experiments, but weird blobs of meat and emotions interacting in an unfathomably complex system of systems of systems.
All that said: I find it so fascinating that his focus was on statistics and science, when so much of his advice is actually holistic observations from experience, and not all the result of scientific experiments or research. There is both a science and an art to making an organization (read: a group of people doing organized work) work well. You really need both, because people are, unfortunately, not science experiments, but weird blobs of meat and emotions interacting in an unfathomably complex system of systems of systems.