Guru Who Preached Quality Finally Gets to Say ‘I Told You So’

Even at age 86, W. Edwards Deming, the curmudgeon of manufacturing quality, can deliver his message with evangelical fire.

“Can you blame your competitor for your woes? No. Can you blame the Japanese? No,” he recently admonished a banquet room here filled with representatives from some of the biggest names in corporate America. “You did it yourself.”

Deming is a statistician who has become an international business legend. To drive out what he calls the “five deadly diseases” that impair product quality, Deming urges clients and seminar students to adopt his 14 management points. The messages are backed by a simple statistical process: Tally defects, scrutinize them, trace the source of the problem, make corrections and record the results afterward.

But his statistician’s fervor is born of bitterness. A native of Sioux City, Iowa, Deming is still best known in Japan, where he has been treated with reverence since the reconstruction days after World War II, when his advice was eagerly followed by nascent Japanese firms that helped trigger the country’s extraordinary economic rebirth. All the while, Deming’s own countrymen rebuffed him.

It wasn’t until the 1980s, when the battle for global markets is won by those who, like the Japanese, make products better and cheaper, that the New York University professor emeritus finally found a following at home. Now, American firms turn to Deming for advice on how to match the Japanese in manufacturing quality.

“He’s a national treasure, a charismatic leader who approaches management swinging a meat ax,” said William A. Golomski of Chicago, another prominent quality guru. “And he’s been able to capture their interest.”

Deming is credited, for example, with helping to steer Ford Motor Co. toward building cars with fewer factory defects. Better products have yielded prosperity. Last year, for the first time since 1924, Ford chalked up higher profits than its bigger rival, General Motors.

GM has taken note. Its Van Nuys assembly plant is undergoing changes more sweeping than those implemented at any auto factory wholly owned by a Big Three company. Deming spent a week there as a consultant. The Van Nuys work force has been issued cards with a list of Deming’s do’s and don’ts. The workers are also getting more power in decision making.

For his consulting work, Deming commands as much as $10,000 a day. The octogenarian workaholic, who works out of a modest Washington, D.C., home, is already booking appointments into his packed schedule for 1989. Deming has 21 seminars scheduled for this year, including one in Australia in July.

Executives who attend four-day seminars organized by George Washington University pay as much as $900 per person. At the one here, 300 attended, many standing in line during breaks so that Deming could autograph their copies of his latest book, “Out of the Crisis.”

Different View

Deming’s philosophy is essentially based on a compassionate ideal: a faith in the worker’s desire to do a good job. Deming advocates taking power out of the board room, bringing decision making onto the factory floor.

This is in direct conflict with the thinking that has dominated U.S. manufacturing since the beginning of the century. Most industrialists, dating to Henry Ford I, have viewed workers as most effective performing single, repetitive tasks on an assembly line.

“Henry Ford made great contributions, but the Model T wasn’t a quality car,” Deming said. “He treated people like commodities, and how can you have a loyal worker when you do that?”

A main Deming theme is that only a tiny fraction of all product defects are attributable to a single tool or worker. The rest, he says, are problems with management’s system, wther it involves getting the right tools, the best materials, good training or a workable production process.

Deming opposes relying on inspection as a means of quality control. Instead, he advocates improving the process itself--that’s No. 3 of his 14 points. But Deming abhors banners and posters with empty slogans even more (No. 9).

“You tell them, ‘Get it right the first time,’ ” he says, pacing in construction-style work shoes that make an odd match with his gray, three-piece suit. “Sounds great, but how many have that privilege? Very few.”

Indeed, much of what Deming says is jarring to executives. “The first thing we do is make management take a pay cut,” Deming often says. “The second step is have them take another cut.”

At the conference here at the Hotel del Coronado, managers and engineers from Control Data and Procter & Gamble, Eastman Kodak and Dow Chemical listened with rapt attention to Deming’s advice. One executive asked Deming if American industry will survive.

“There’s nothing compulsory about survival,” Deming answered.

He mocks his audiences by pointing out the strengths of the Japanese. “The Japanese aren’t just interested in finding the lowest price from suppliers,” Deming says. “Their main requirement is a working, long-term relationship. Given that, the rest all falls into place.”

Need for Ratings

Of course, some at the conference said they would have a hard time going back to their bosses pitching ideas as radical as completely eliminating competitive sourcing (No. 4), or scrapping employee performance appraisals (“Disease” 3).

Delmar Thompson, a transportation specialist for Polysar Ltd., a Canadian maker of rubber and petrochemical products, didn’t agree with everything Deming said. “Let’s face it, you still have to rate people,” Thompson said. “According to him, you never let anybody go. It’s ridiculous.”

Thomas B. Anderson, operations manager for Procter & Gamble’s Folger’s Coffee plant in Kansas City, said: “We’re P&G-izing; this because we can’t swallow it whole.” But Anderson’s plant has begun giving workers cost and capacity data previously restricted to upper management. “That way, they can make decisions, too,” he said.

For all of his advice, Deming was never a laborer on a factory floor. Deming was born the son of a ne’er-do-well lawyer and spent his grade-school days working odd jobs to help feed the family in Powell, Wyo., where the Demings lived in a tar-paper shack for a while.

Things eventually improved enough for the young Deming to attend the University of Wyoming, where he majored in electrical engineering. After getting his degree, he moved to Chicago, where he worked at Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant.

Deming developed much of his philosophy there. Hawthorne ran on a production-quota system, which the workers hated. Deming recalls that the first thing his boss told him was to avoid the stairways at shifts’ end, lest he be trampled. (“Eliminate Quotas” is Point 11.) Deming says quotas disregard quality and put an unnecessary ceiling on production.

Deming earned a doctorate degree in mathematical physics at Yale, and, during the 1930s, he went to Bell Labs, where he came under the influence of Walter A. Shewhart, the father of so-called “statistical process control.”

But in the affluence of the postwar years, a new generation of American managers had little interest in statistical quality control. “I was lighting a lot of fires,” Deming said later of the period, “but they were all going out.”

Deming started teaching at the New York University business school in 1946 and also worked for the Census Bureau, which sent him to Japan that year and in 1948. While in Tokyo, he met some Japanese engineers who knew of Shewhart’s work and were fascinated to listen to Deming.

In 1950, Deming was asked by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers to come to Japan to talk about quality. He also asked to talk with some of Japan’s leading businessmen, believing that any change must be a corporate goal supported by management (Point 1).

Back then, “Made in Japan” meant shoddy merchandise, and the Japanese knew they had to overcome their reputation. Within months, Japanese companies that followed Deming’s advice began to report improvements in quality and productivity.

A year later, the Deming Award was instituted in Japan. In the national contest, corporate representatives answer questions about the quality-control steps they instituted the previous year and provide the data to back up their quality claims. Now the Japanese consider the annual prize ceremony important enough for broadcast on national television. Winners include Nissan, Toyota, Hitachi, Matushita Electric and Nippon Steel.

Meanwhile, Deming worked in relative obscurity in the United States until a 1981 NBC news segment, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?”, finally got him the attention of some automotive executives in Detroit.

Prodded by a declining market share against the Japanese, Ford went companywide with Deming’s ideas, making him “principal consultant.” He also consulted with GM’s Fiero plant in Pontiac, Mich. GM says the Fiero has consistently had fewer defects than its other models.

Ernest D. Schaefer, GM’s plant manager in Van Nuys, was manager of car assembly operations in Pontiac at the time Deming was first brought in by GM. “He’s a tough teacher,” said Schaefer.