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The Decalogue^TM is a series of ten steps. It provides organizations with conceptually powerful guidelines to manage any organization systemically. It combines the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming (Theory of Profound Knowledge) and Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt (Theory of Constraints) into a new whole, allowing organizations to be managed as networks of projects.

The Decalogue was developed in the mid 90s by Domenico Lepore and Oded Cohen and published by North River Press in 1999 in a book called Deming and Goldratt: The Decalogue. In the ensuing years, the book was translated into several languages, circulated in tens of thousands of copies and adopted by many academic institutions worldwide.

Implementations of The Decalogue have been carried out for more than 10 years in many organizations, in Europe and North America, from small businesses to multinationals in a variety of business sectors as well as not for profit; moreover, hundreds of professionals and academics have been trained in Europe, North America and Asia.

The ten steps of The Decalogue enable the support of a Deming based, truly systemic organizational model where one element of the system is chosen as the constraint. The constraint is protected against disruptions by a buffer of time and the fluctuations of the buffer are statistically studied to detect and filter out noise from signals. (Indeed, every relevant process in the system is studied in statistical terms in order to gain full understanding of its predictability). Over the years we have come to call such an organizational model the “choked system”.

Both the organizational model and the ten steps were derived semi-empirically from the “inherent conflict” of organizations as portrayed in the companion book to this website.

Over the years, the scientific validity of The Decalogue has been proven but, with it, also the huge gap that exists between what is valid and suitable for application and what is cognitively manageable for individuals and organizations at large.

The Decalogue is, from an epistemological standpoint, a very solid piece of science applied to management, and the tools that enable its successful adoption are intuitive and very well tested. Nonetheless, in-spite of many and remarkable successes, its application can be cumbersome and requires a very committed and knowledgeable leadership. The reason for these difficulties is threefold:

1).  the amount of learning that must accompany the adoption of The Decalogue is undeniably extensive and more often than not flies in the face of conventional business school teachings.

2.) the level of formal interaction and accountability (we call it “interdependencies”) that must take place in a “Decalogue” environment is often beyond the mental covenant that many people have with their work

3.) the teachings of The Decalogue can be made fully operational only in a truly systemically designed (and measured) organization. This is often very difficult to achieve because mental models regarding behaviors, measurements and policies in functional organizations are very ingrained.

This website aims at transitioning The Decalogue into a mainstream, easily adopted, body of managerial knowledge informed by and formulated with the language of Network Theory.

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