Steve Hoffman is happy but not that happy.

Meaning, he seems to walk a nice balance between being able to praise employees, enjoy his own life but at the same time keep striving for unreachable goals. He is the epitome of an American entrepreneur. He is restless and always in motion.

Steve is in motion to achieve continuous improvement, the concept that has been institutionalize due to the success of W. Edwards Deming. An American statistician who went to Japan right after World War II to help the Japanese set up a census, Deming "fell into" teaching Japanese engineers about statistical process control. You might want to read his writings if you want to truly understand what we see Steve doing. I was not surprised that Steve owns Deming's book but never managed to read it.

This proves a point we have often made here and that is most entrepreneurs who grow companies intuit the 14 rules Deming lists in his 1982 book titled, Out of the Crises. Deming's rules are: Create constancy of purpose towards improvement

1. Adopt the new philosophy.
2. Cease dependence on inspection.
3. Move towards a single supplier for any one item.
4. Improve constantly and forever. Institute training on the job.
5. Institute leadership.
6. Drive out fear.
7. Break down barriers between departments.
8. Eliminate slogans.
9. Eliminate management by objectives.
10. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship.
11. Institute education and self-improvement.
12. Transformation is everyone's job.

Steve achieved a digital workflow as early as 1995. This was before most people had email. This was at the front of the dot com boom. Steve was already doing what so many from Silicon Valley were promising.

Topic for discussion: What does this really mean and can any business do this?

Answer: A digital workflow means all information is inside a computer in some format somewhere. And, all of the computer talk to each other in some way. There is no paper needed to take an order, make and ship the order or collect for the order. Any business can do this but each of us has to weigh the cost/benefit and we have to understand where our customers are in their efforts to go digital.

Many small businesses are not digital because their customers aren't yet and the wise position is to be only slightly ahead of customers.

Topic for discussion: How did Steve know he would be able to cash in on his investment to create a digital workflow?

Answer: He didn't. Like we all must do, he took a calculated risk. His personal passion is improvement and he could see that computers, for example, could more accurately tell a press how much ink to apply than could the most highly skilled pressman. Steve learned to write computer programs and the systems used today throughout Modern Postcard are all based upon his own code.

You think about it: What would it take for you to go digital? Who in your organization would be the best person to be in charge of the effort? How will you discover how digital your customers are or want to be? Which of Deming's rules do you most need to embrace to see more improvement in your organization? Can you re-write each of these points in your own words so that you can fully own the ideas?