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W. EDWARDS DEMING
1 900-1 993
BY MYRON TRIBUS
EDWARDS DEMING, consultant in statistical studies, the man
who transformed the style of Japanese management after
World War II and who, thereafter, profoundly affected mana-
gerial practices throughout the worIcl, died on December 20,
1993, at the age of ninety-three.
At the time of his election to the National Academy of
Engineering in 1983, Dr. Deming was already famous
internationally, having been awarded the Second Order Medal
of the Sacred Treasure, from the Emperor of Japan, in 1960
for the improvement of quality and the Japanese economy,
and the Shewhart Medal from the American Society for Quality
Control in 1955. Subsequently, in 1986, he was enshrined in
the Science and Technology Hall of Fame in Dayton, Ohio,
and in 1987 received the National Meclal of Technology from
President Ronald Reagan. In 1993 he was awarded the
Distinguished Service Award by the National Society of
Professional Engineers. He was an honorary life member of
the Royal Statistical Society, the Arr~erican Society for Quality
Control, the Biometric Society, the Arr~erican Society for
Testing and Materials, the Union of Japanese Scientists and
Engineers, the Japanese Statistical Association, the Deutsche
Statistische GeselIschaft, and the American Institute of
Industrial Engineers. By the time of his death, he had received
sixteen honorary degrees.
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Born William Edwards Deming on October 14, 1900, in
Sioux City, Iowa, to a family in strained financial conditions,
he grew up in Powell, Wyoming, and attended the University
of Wyoming in Laramie, where he supported himself by odd
jobs as he studied for an engineering degree. After a master's
degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Col-
orado, he was awarded a doctorate in mathematical physics
from Yale University in 1928.
Dr. Deming's fame rests on four sets of contributions over a
productive career of more than six decades. The first began in
ITS, when he received his Ph.D. and began to apply statisti-
cal methods in science. In 1934, working with Raymonc! T.
Birge, he published a significant paper on the estimation of
errors in physical constants.
The second phase established his reputation as a profes-
sional statistician and involved him in the census of 1940. His
work generated such interest that he was invited to apply sta-
tistical methods to elections in Greece, to national surveys in
India, and to census activities in Germany and for the United
Nations.
A third phase, which continued for the rest of his life, saw
his attention directed toward the improvement of manage-
ment. It began in 1944, in midst of World War II, when he
published his first paper on the implications of statistical pro-
cess control for managers.
The fourth area of contribution is to the field of economics.
Economists have been slow to acknowledge this contribution. Japan
was defeated in World War II more thoroughly than any other nation
in modern times. Without natural resources, with a very large
population on a small amount of tillable land, anti without the
benefit of conquering armies, Japan has created one of the worIcl's
foremost economies. There was nothing in economic theory that
would have predicted that Japan would have succeeded. The
Japanese, themselves, credit their rise largely to the teachings of W.
Edwards Deming, whom they call the 'Tather of the Third Industrial
Revolution." Dr. Deming's work demonstrates that quality, pursued
relentlessly, can harness the energies of a people and defy the
predictions of economic theorists.
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W. EDWARDS DEMING
67
In 1947 and 1950 Dr. Deming was invited by General Mac-
Arthur to assist in the first postwar census in Japan. In 1950,
acting on the advice of Homer Sarasohn, then on MacArthur's
staff in Tokyo, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers
(JUSE) invited Dr. Deming to Tokyo to give lectures on statis-
tical process control. His lectures to large numbers of
enthusiastic Japanese engineers were transcribed word for
word, edited by him, and translated into Japanese. Thousands
of copies were sold. When the Japanese offered to pay him
royalties, he ddeclined and suggested that they use the money
to create a prize for companies that had shown exemplary
performance in the improvement of quality. Japanese compa-
nies added funds and today the Deming Prize is regarded
around the world as the premier prize for quality. When the
U.S. Congress understood the importance of the Deming Prize
in Japan as a spur to increased attention to quality, it created
the Baldrige Prize in the United States. Other countries are in
the process of establishing similar prizes. The modest propos-
al he made in 1950 in Japan has become a global activity.
. _ ~ . . . . .
When Fleming attemptect to cnange managerial practices
in the West, he found an enthusiastic response among engi-
neers, but only rejection among managers. Therefore, after
he saw the enthusiastic response of Japanese engineers, to
guarantee that his work would not be subverted by Japanese
management, he insisted that the JUSE arrange a meeting of
the leaders of Japanese industry. Eighty of them came. In this
lecture Deming told them that if they would follow his pro-
posals to change their managerial style, within five years they
~ , .
would begin to capture a significant share of world markets.
They did not believe him, but in the words of one attendee,
"Since we did not argue, we would lose face if we did not at
least try." Within a month a manufacturer of insulated wire
reported a 30 percent increase in productivity. Others also
found increases in productivity and quality. Thus was Japan's
rebirth begun.
In the West his work in management was ignored. People
continued to believe that quality added to cost and that peo-
ple would not pay extra for quality. Japanese carmakers and
electronics manufacturers proved them wrong.
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Unable to convince western managers, Dr. Deming was not
idle. He continued to work as a statistician. During the period
from 1946 until 1980, he published or presented 105 papers
on a wide variety of topics: the analysis of election results, the
analysis of market surveys, the analysis of birth and death rates,
the sampling of bulk materials, accidents with motor vehicles,
statistical analysis as legal evidence, the birth and death of
newspaper subscriptions, deaf patients of psychiatrists, fertility
among schizophrenics, mental health of the deaf, and the use
of statistics in the setting of rates for motor freight.
All this changed on dune 24, 1980, when NBC broadcast the
now-famous documentary entitled "If Japan Can . . . Why Can't
We?" In this documentary, Dr. Deming appeared briefly, with
a few scathing remarks about American managerial practices
in production. After seeing the broadcast, American manag-
ers, hard hit by competition from Japan, began to call him at
his home in Washington, D.C. In 1982 the Center for Acl-
vanced Engineering Study at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT)published his first book on management,
Quality Productivity, and Competitive Position, and releasecl vid-
eotapes in which Dr. Deming discussed his "fourteen
obligations of management." In addition, he was invited by
MIT and a growing list of sponsors to give a series of seminars
on management. These seminars increased in frequency and
size, and during the last years of his life, he attracted audienc-
es, including satellite stations, of over 5,000 people at a time
and was reaching more than 120,000 people per year. In 1985
he rewrote and retitled his earlier book on management and
called it Out of the Crisis. Over 250,000 copies of Out of the Crisis
have been sold. It has been translated into French, Italian,
Portuguese, and Spanish. A translation into Dutch is in
progress. In the year before his death he published a third
book, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education.
Over 30,000 copies have been sold.
Deming was at once both kind and generous and harsh and
critical. When clearing with workers he was sympathetic. He
aimed to put joy back into work. He believed, en cl produced
evidence to back up his judgment, that current managerial
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W. EDWARDS DEMING
69
practices robbed workers of the satisfactions so essential to do
good work. When dealing with managers he was often scath-
ing and derisive.
An early client in manufacturing in the United Sates was
the Nashua Corporation of New Hampshire. Applying Dem-
ing's approach, Nashua began to achieve significant
reductions in cost. After the broadcast of "If Japan Can . . .
Why Can't We?," the Forc! Motor Company called upon Dr.
Deming to help. According to Don Petersen, former CEO and
board chairman of Ford, Deming's approach was the key to
the turnaround in the fortunes of Forci. Waste was reduced,
labor relations improved, customer satisfaction increasecl, and
Ford was able to stay in business and compete again. Petersen
is unequivocal about the basis for Ford's success: "People
want to c30 a good job. Dr. Deming's ideas and concepts, as we
got them going through our system, gave people more and
more this feeling that they had a better chance to do a good
job. The rate of improvement, in many ways, was much great-
er than anything we could anticipate."
Deming was scornful of the practices of American manag-
ers and of the business schools that taught them. He
chroniclecl these practices in his oft- repeated "fourteen
points," his "cleadly diseases," and his "profound knowledge."
Although in 1980, no business school would acknowledge that
Deming hacI clevelopec3 a new approach to business, by 1992,
two years before his death, he was able to see many schools,
even prestigious ones like Chicago's School of Management
adopting his teachings.
His theory of management rests on the four elements of his
profound knowledge. (1) Variability: All systems exhibit
variability and this prevents accurate prediction of the
consequences of managerial decisions. Failure to understand
the role of variability leacis to tampering with a system and can
produce a result precisely the opposite of that intended. (2)
Systems: The second element of Deming's profound
knowledge is an ability to understand systems. The practice of
dividing the company into separate business "profit centers"
is, as Dr. Deming would often say, incompatible with
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
optimization of the performance of the system as a whole. Dr.
Deming insisted that managers look at the entire system of
production, including the suppliers and the customers. In his
view, the product in the hands of the customer is still in the
system. (3) Psychology: The third element of his system of
profound knowledge is an understanding of psychology.
Deming understood that when people find joy in their work,
their output rises, they make improvements in what they do,
and they remain loyal to their colleagues and to the enterprise.
In his list of deadly diseases and his fourteen points, he drew
attention to the practices of managers that destroyjoy in work,
that make workers afraid to tell the truth, and that result in
competition when cooperation is needed. (4) A Theory of
Knowledge: Deming believed that western managers, in
general, did not know, and were not taught, a theory of
knowledge and, in consequence, clid not know how to reason
correctly and did not understand the nature of proof, the
need for operational definitions, and why there is no true
value of anything. This ignorance of profound knowledge, he
argued, caused them to lay off people when they should have
worked on increasing quality, to be unable to interpret the
numbers placed before them, and, worst of all, to be unable
to appreciate that the most important costs in any business
are unknown and unknowable.
The greatest impact of Deming's teachings are yet to come.
Six years ago Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Sitka, Alaska, began
to apply quality management principles to the operations of the
school. Within a few years the effects on the students were so
dramatic that the school was besieged with requests for
information. Today schools in many parts of the world are
attempting the same transformation in their education systems.
In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and
Argentina, schools are adopting quality methods. Second- and
third-grade teachers have shown how quality management
approaches applied in the classroom can enhance learning,
increase student maturity and responsibility, and at the same
time, make learning more enjoyable and more relevant to life.
Ann Richarcls, the governor of Texas, launched a statewide
movement to make quality management the central theme in
Texas education. Other governors have followed suit.
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W. EDWARDS DEMING
71
Dr. Deming's contributions to science, statistics, and economics
were important, but his development of a comprehensive theory of
management overshadows Al else. This theory has already changed
the lives of millions of people. Applied to education, it promises to
change future generations. Dr. Deming is gone. His legacy lives on.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
profound knowledge
