Not only software companies, but most companies in the US are indeed wrong about the prevailing methods and styles of management and leadership. Is this really that surprising to you? Do companies you work with appear chaotic yet surprisingly successful? Do the same things keep going wrong? Do they get in cycles of cultural upheaval? And do we accept these things as "normal business" and go on with out lives, powerless to control them?

And I'm not saying it's easy. Not at all. It might be the hardest problem in all of business—combining the true systems of work into a cohesive philosophy: systems, statistics, people, and knowledge. I'm just saying (and I'm just repeating the words of some great thinkers in the quality space, mind you) that if we change the way we think about quality and companies in general, we'll get a lot of gigantic unrealized gains in productivity.

This happens naturally in many companies in small pockets, but human nature and psychology tends to break it down eventually.

If I'm wrong, then a great many other people are also wrong, primarily W. Edwards Deming, who, as I noted, single-handedly turned around the entire economy of Japan using these exact methods and ideas.

Here's a great place to start: http://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Handbook-Making-Things-Getting...