A Man of Quality

While interviewing the Managing Director of an Indian company the other day, I was told that the company was 'going for the Deming Prize.' Embarrassed at the time, as I had never heard of the award before, I resolved to find out more.

I discovered that the prize honours someone whose teachings and philosophy led to the modern concept of TQM (Total Quality Management), compounding my embarrassment still further, since I have participated in several courses on TQM in the past!

The individual concerned is the American statistician, lecturer and author, Dr William Edwards Deming (1900–1993), who is widely credited with improving production in the United States during the Cold War, and for laying the foundations of the Japanese industrial postwar economy. He is, perhaps, now best known for his pioneering work in Japan, where, from 1950 onwards, he showed top management how to improve product design, quality, testing and sales in global markets. His efforts were largely the reason for the rapid international rise of Japanese manufacturing, especially in the electronics industry. Such was Deming's influence in Japan, that he is regarded as something of a hero, and is viewed as having had the single most influence on industry there by a non-Japanese.

Deming trained in electrical engineering and undertook research in maths and physics, during which time he learnt statistics. After his postgraduate training in 1928, he was an intern at Bell Telephone Laboratories, and it was here that he learnt about the application of statistics to quality control. He subsequently worked at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Census Department. While working under General Douglas MacArthur, as a census consultant to the Japanese government, he started visiting Japan in the early 1950s. At the invitation of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), Deming began giving his now famous series of lectures to business leaders there on the application of statistical process control methods. He returned to Japan on many occasions giving similar lectures, and began to witness the country's explosive economic growth, that he had predicted as a result of the application of the techniques he espoused.

Deming wrote seven books, three of which have been immensely influential – 'Some Theory of Sampling' (1950); 'Out of the Crisis' (1986); and 'The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education' (1993). His ideas on industrial management and quality control were proposed in terms of his so-called 'System of Profound Knowledge and Points for Management'. He was the first to emphasise the need for a change in management style, prevailing at the time in American industry, and he pointed out that such a transformation needs a view from outside of the company. He emphasised the importance of understanding how systems work, how individuals work and how variation influences these processes to affect production levels and quality. He also stressed the need to treat workers as individuals and warned against placing too much emphasis on zero-defects and production targets, at the expense of understanding the basics of the production process.

Deming's suggestions are as relevant today as they were when first proposed nearly 60 years ago, and many form the basis of modern approaches to Total Quality Management (TQM). An extract from 'The New Economics' will suffice to illustrate the point. 'A manager of people needs to understand that all people are different. For example, the number of defective items that an inspector finds depends on the size of the work load. Some understanding of variation, including appreciation of a stable system, and some understanding of causes of variation, are essential for management of a system, including management of people. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production that may be encountered with the product or service.' 


Deming's teachings in Japan made a deep impression on the participants of his courses, and provided great impetus to quality control there, which was in its infancy at the time. Deming donated royalties from his lectures and books to the JUSE. In appreciation of this generosity, the late Mr Kenichi Koyanagi, managing director of JUSE, proposed in 1950 using the money to fund three prizes – the Deming Prize for Individuals, the Deming Application Prize and the Deming Quality Control Award for Operations Business Units. The first of these is awarded each year to a statistician for contributions to statistical theory. The second prize is awarded to a company for improved use of statistical theory in organisation, consumer research, design of product and production. The third award is given to operations business units of a company that have achieved distinctive performance improvement through the application of quality control/management in the pursuit of TQM.

The prizes were first awarded in 1951. Initially only for Japanese individuals and companies, eligibility for the awards has now been opened out to include other countries, and the 2008 Application Prize was awarded to Tata Steel of India.

Industry around the world clearly owes much to the foresight and teachings of Dr Deming, whose ideas are now kept in archives in the Deming Institute that he founded in 1993 in Washington. Moreover, his legacy is not confined to the application of statistics in industry. He was an accomplished musician, playing the flute and percussion, and he composed music throughout his life, including an arrangement of 'The Star Spangled Banner' – truly a man of quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming" l "cite_note-3"

You are not currently signed in, please sign in or register to post a comment