What I have had truly learned from the Father of Quality Management Dr W Edwards Deming back in the early nineties:

Point #1 of his 'Fourteen Points of High Performance Management':

Create Constancy of Purpose for Continous Improvement

- Plan for quality for the long term;

- Don't just do the same thing; find better things to do;

Transposed to the personal setting:

To truly succeed in any endeavour on the Highway of Life, you must fully embrace continuous and never-ending improvement as a living element in whatever you do, making it the basis of your habitual domain.

By the way, his Point #1 resonates readily with the First Principle of Personal Success Achievement as postulated by Napoleon Hill, in the 'Law of Success', written in the 1930's.

To me, the acronym of S.U.C.C.E.S.S. to denote success traits as created by Dr Maxwell Maltz, writing in his Psycho-Cybernetics classic is indeed a marvelous piece of work, attesting to the intellectual horsepower and mental bandwidth of the author.

The first letter stands for Sense of Direction.

It resonates pretty well with the intellectual cues of Napoleon Hill (Definiteness of Purpose), Dr Edwards Deming (Constancy of Purpose), Tony Robbins (beginning part of his Ultimate Success Formula) and Joel Arthur Barker (Power of Vision, with corroborating research findings from Dutch social scientist Fred Polak, management consultant Jim Collins, psychologist Martin Seligman, Canadian educational psychologist Dr Benjamin Singer, and not forgetting, Austrian psychologist/psychiatrist Dr Viktor Frankl).

In a nut shell, and putting it in layman terms, it's all about the fact that goals set direction, in tune with Dr Maltz's concept of goal striving.

Other than the myriad aspects of Imagination, Opportunity Sensing, and Theatre of the Mind, this Goal Striving perspective of Dr Maltz actually fascinated me the most, ever since having read his classic for the first time in the late seventies.

It has had also benefitted me the most as a professional working in the corporate world during the ensuing years from the late seventies.

Interestingly, Dr Maltz added in his Prescription for establishing a Sense of Direction:

• Get yourself a goal worth working for. Better still, get yourself a project;
• Decide what you want out of any situation. That means, you must know your principal objective;
• Always have something ahead of you to look forward to - to work for and hope for;
• Always look forward, for the Nostalgia for the Future can keep you youthful;
• When you're not striving, not looking forward, you are really not living;
• Get interested in some projects to help others, not out of a sense of duty, but because you want to;

Bravissimo!

One of the most productive lessons I have had picked up during the late eighties or early nineties is the following inspiring quote from quality guru Dr Edwards Deming:

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

As I have understood, in order to change for the better and smarter in whatever we do, we just have to take a proactive stance in our personal change process.

Vision, goals and values are important things, and so is a personal strategy formulation, but more importantly, are self-motivation, diligence, discipline and tenacity.

That's to say, we have to force change into our life, consistently and massively, to paraphrase internationally acclaimed peak performance strategist Anthony Robbins.

If we don't force the change upon our own life, we will always remain in status quo.

Naturally, change comes with discomforts and uncertainties, but that's part of life's journey. We are all born to tackle problems and challenges in one way or another.

I have had the opportunity to go through this tough learning curve myself, because had I stayed back in the corporate world during the early nineties, and even if I had won the rat race, I would still be a rat.

That thought wasn't comforting.

FROM DILIP MUKERJEA'S MINDMAP GALLERY

Here's a hand-crafted mind-map rendition of Edwards Deming's 14 Points for Quality Improvement by Dilip Mukerjea.