W. Edwards Deming

W. Edwards Deming was an American statistician who spent the summer of 1950 teaching statistical process control to Japanese engineers and managers, work Japan honoured with the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1960, and by naming its national quality award, the Deming Prize, after him. He was almost unknown at home until NBC’s white paper If Japan Can… Why Can’t We? put him on American television in 1980, after which his four-day seminars and his books — Out of the Crisis and The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education — made him the presiding figure of the quality movement. His argument was that most failure is built into the system and is management’s to fix, not the workforce’s to be blamed for.