What strucks me every time I read Deming is how valuable his ideas are still today, and how few of the transformations in government, industry and education he longed for only have happened until now. Deming was a (systems) thinker way ahead of his times, and one can only imagine what the working world would look like if his thoughts and insights had been taken into account on a broad basis from earlier on. (While he was already an influence to the Japanese economy and especially the Toyota Production System in the 1950s, he gained perception in the US as late as in the 1980s).

"The New Economics" is a book with a style that is a bit hard to get used to, but it is full of gems, and large parts could have been written only years ago. Naturally, Deming often focusses on the repetitive nature of manufacturing, which might be less interesting in environments where variation is not necessarily a bad thing per se, but he touches so many different topics here that this might indeed be one of the best introductions to his work, albeit many prefer "Out of the Crisis" in that regard.

Anyways, W. Edwards Deming should be a mandatory read for everyone involved in management.