Ed Johnson writes:
“Noted business consultant Peter Drucker famously said, ‘That which can be measured, can be managed.’”
And W. Edwards Deming, Drucker’s contemporary, said: “The most important figures needed for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“A manager of people needs to understand that all people are different. This is not ranking people. He needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in, the responsibility of management.”
W. Edwards Deming
http://deming.org/index.cfm?content=66
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Right! The buck stops at the top. What we have in many situations is the bastardization and the twisting of Deming’s principles. People say they use Deming’s principles and don’t.
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Deming has been proven over and over that he was correct in his beliefs about the responsibility of management for performance of employees in the workplace. He has also proven to be correct in the importance of removing incentives to increase productive. The emphasize today on paying teachers for improving test scores will destroy the public education system as Campbell’s Law has so often demonstrated. We are no where near understanding learning much less understanding how someone can demonstrate that they have learned something. Our present efforts are serving to destroy the very system that we so desperately need which is a strong public education system. Drucker may well be right in saying what he did but the point is we can’t measure learning well and therefore find it difficult to manage!
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Both are right and neither can be taken exclusive of the other.
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Deming doesn’t know what he is talking about. How does he think things operate, by osmosis?
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In the aerospace industry we called these people “Educated Idiots.” I have worked with engineers with PHD’s who could not read their own prints and had no sense of what they were dealing with. The same is in education. Most are so narrowly knowledgable they have no vision.
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Myron Tribus is right–his efforts helped Montgomery County, MD leverage Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge–epistemology, psychology, systems thinking.
But the US Department of Education apparently has no clue. Death and Life early on mentions Kearns but not Tribus–meaning Ed lacks the knowledge necessary for states to fulfill Horace Mann’s vision of common schools. Instead, federal tax dollars bribe educators –in a flawed attempt at Management By Objectives–to abandon the goals of state tax dollars.
As for the posting’s original prompt, see Wikipedia: Deming also pointed out that Drucker warned managers that a systemic view was required and felt that Drucker’s warning went largely unheeded by the practitioners of MBO
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