W. Edwards Deming:

“10: Eliminate slogans and exhortations for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.”

Deming / Out of the Crisis / Chap 2 / Principles for Transformation

Is it sloganeering or a Meme? What’s a Meme?

I have all kinds of bumper sticker wisdom that I would share with the team. There was always creeping guilt that I was perpetrating an Exhortation. If you are counter-Deming, you are off the path. It made my life hard at work, because the floors and walls were littered with things that Deming would think silly. Having Deming awareness can be a tough way to go through life.

I started calling my bumper sticker wisdom a Meme. A meme isn’t a snarky internet post of N-Po eating ice cream. Meme has a definition and is being proposed as something that can enter your genetics…. Slow down Richard Dawkins.

“The word meme is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins.^[11] It originated from Dawkins’s 1976 book The Selfish Gene. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.”

Wikipedia

Our team Meme’s were intended as symbols, short hand. One line or a symbol could help re-center the conversation and nudge people back on the path (at least among the initiated). “If you know the way, you see the way in all things”. A meme is a prison joke.

New guy goes to prison, stressful first day, his cell mate, just after lights out, leans out the door and yells “FIFTY THREE” and the whole tier breaks out in laughter. New guy says, “what just happened?” Cell mate says, “We all know all of the same jokes, so we save time by just yelling out the number, everybody thinks of it and laughs”. New guy says, “can I try?” Cell mate says “sure, 28 is sure fire. Always kills” New guy works up his courage, leans out of the cell and yells “Twenty Eight!” Silence. New guy asks “What went wrong?” Cell mate says “It’s how you told it.”

Street Joke

Frequently Occurring Memes

Granny used to say……

“The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions“…. It’s a longer way of saying that someone needs to get a round-TUIT. My intent of this post was originally to explain “Make it Look Easy”. This may turn into a series of ‘what’s behind the meme’. Each of these memes has an etymology and origin story. I’ll get there! Next post?