In Endless Pursuit : A Hero in Japan, Deming Continues His Quest for Quality at Home

By CARLA LAZZARESCHI

Dec. 5, 1993 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Phlebitis keeps him in a wheelchair. The prostate cancer he suffered for years has metastasized to his lungs, tethering him at all times to an oxygen tank. He wears hearing aids in both ears. And his alertness? Well, it often slips these days, as might be expected of any 93-year-old.

He is a shriveled version of his once towering, 6-foot, barrel-chested presence. Yet W. Edwards Deming--the American statistician credited with helping Japan become the global symbol of industrial reliability--persists in his seemingly quixotic effort to bring his lessons of quality control and management excellence to Corporate America.

On Tuesday, Deming begins his second four-day seminar in Southern California in the last month. In between trips here from his home in Washington, he gave another seminar at General Motors and consulted with both Ford and GM in Detroit.

The pace isn’t easy.

During a Pasadena appearance last month, a coughing fit triggered a call to the paramedics. But when they arrived, Deming waved them away. By the end of this month, he will have taught a total of 30 seminars this year. And if he has his way, he will complete the 30 already on his calendar for next year.

“He’s not just an ordinary workaholic,” says Philip Scanlon, American Telephone & Telegraph’s vice president for quality programs. “He’s a man with a mission.”

A mission, by his own account, that remains largely unaccomplished.

With only a few exceptions--notably Ford and GM’s Cadillac and Pontiac divisions--Deming believes that American companies have ignored him and his message. Indeed, no firm in the United States has embraced his teachings as thoroughly or as readily as the bombed-out, post-war Japanese did in the late 1940s.

Still, many of his once radical doctrines have been accepted into the nation’s collective conventional wisdom.

According to management experts, Deming was the first to blame short-sighted American executives--not shoddy American workmanship--as the real cause of the country’s declining industrial competitiveness.

It also was Deming who consistently taught that taking care of the customer will serve the shareholder--but that the reverse isn’t necessarily true.

And Deming, too, for decades preached the gospel of listening to workers--ridding the workplace of fear and fostering cooperation, not competition, among employees.

Some of his fanatically loyal disciples have mounted a campaign to award Deming a Nobel Prize. The most obvious category is economics (though he is not an economist), but some followers say he deserves the Peace Prize. More sober assessments of his contributions place him as one of the premier business philosophers of the 20th Century.

“When history is written, he will stand out for having more impact on businesses than almost anyone else,” predicts John Whitney, a Columbia University management professor and director of the Columbia business school’s Deming Center. “But his impact has been primarily in Japan, and only indirectly and incompletely in the United States.”

And so, much like an aging entertainer who cannot give up the limelight--George Burns comes readily to mind--Deming carries on, determined to reach as many of his fellow countrymen as he can in whatever time he has left.

These days, rather than beating his head against the closed doors of the nation’s executive suites, Deming is targeting his teachings to middle managers and other workers who hungrily soak up his homilies and vow to put them into practice.

“They’re the ones who will pass it on,” Deming says, pointing to an auditorium full of seminar students in Pasadena last month. “Ultimately, they can make a difference to America.”

“We are being ruined,” Deming tells every group of his students, “by our own best efforts.”

To illustrate, Deming offers his trademark “red bead” parable.

It is a highly theatrical performance highlighting his view of management’s foolish assumptions both about production processes and the ability of workers to control their output in a flawed system.

Six volunteers are selected from the audience and taught how to make white beads. First, they must shove a paddle with 50 depressions in it into a box filled with beads. Then they shake the paddle so the beads fall into the indentations. Only when every depression has a bead in it can the paddle be removed. The process must be followed exactly, because this is the way management wants to “make” white beads.

But wait! The box of 4,000 beads supplying this carefully controlled assembly line includes 800 red beads. Yet management wants the workers to make only white beads. So three inspectors hover over the six workers counting the red beads as the paddles are removed and exhorting them to strive for “zero defects” in their work.

After each of three production runs, the workers producing the highest number of white beads are given merit raises for their efforts. The three workers with the worst records get a stern dressing down and are dismissed for their shoddy workmanship.

This is Deming at his pedagogical best, and the audience laps it up, laughing during every bean count and after every pep talk.

Of course, the moral of the story isn’t lost on anyone. Only management can fix the problem, either by purchasing an unflawed bead supply or by better equipping the workers to sort out the red beads. But management, Deming says, often doesn’t see the flaws in its systems and rarely listens to the workers who do.

The result, he says, can only be failure.

“All that happens comes from the system, not the workers,” he says. “It’s absolutely frightening, . . . just frightening.”

A mathematical physicist by training (he earned a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1928) Deming blends ordinary statistics and humanist philosophy into a doctrine of production reliability and respect for labor.

To Deming--and a host of other consultants who have followed in his footsteps--quality is not synonymous with luxury. Rather, it is the result of consistency, efficiency and continual improvement of any process, whether in a factory, hospital, school or ballpark.

Over the years, he has borrowed liberally from the teachings of others, notably the theory of statistical variation developed in the 1920s by Walter Shewhart of AT&T;’s Bell Laboratories.

Shewhart established a groundbreaking approach to improving manufacturing processes. He sorted out problems into two groups. Some were “common,” or inherent in any system; these could only be minimized. Others could be eliminated outright because they were “special”--outside the norm.

Although seemingly simple on its face, Deming argues that the distinction is easy to miss; in fact, he says, management misses it all the time, usually because it is blind to the inherent, “common” problems in systems of its own creation.

Putting his own philosophical spin on Shewhart’s premise, Deming argues that only management has the opportunity and responsibility to reduce the common causes of production variation.

“Quality begins with the intent, which is fixed by management,” Deming wrote in “Out of the Crisis” in 1986.

Clearly, Deming’s message plays well to audiences of professionals and middle managers, many of whom feel stifled and powerless to change the circumstances that form the battleground of their jobs day in and day out.

In Deming’s humanist view, workers intrinsically are motivated to do well. They don’t only because their best efforts are thwarted by incompetent, narrow-minded management--the people for whom Deming reserves his most barbed comments.

“American management on the whole has a negative scrap value,” he likes to tell his audiences. “It’s like an old refrigerator you can’t sell. You have to pay someone $25 to cart it off.”

Is it any surprise that Corporate America hasn’t taken kindly to his message? “He was never a very politic guy,” says Andrea Gabor, author of “The Man Who Discovered Quality.” “He has always told management what it did not want to hear.”

For nearly six decades, Deming remained a government statistician, professor and consultant, relatively unknown in the United States.

Then, in 1980, an NBC television documentary credited his teachings for Japan’s rise from the ashes of World War II. At 80, an age that most men never live to see, Deming became an “overnight” sensation. The morning after “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We?” aired, the phone in his office (the basement of his modest home near Washington’s National Airport) began ringing; his mail immediately more than quadrupled.

Among those calling in the early 1980s was Donald Peterson, then president and later chairman and chief executive of Ford.

Peterson, now retired, says Deming convinced him that the same methods that worked in Japan could help Ford regain its lost momentum and customer loyalty. “I agreed with Dr. Deming’s philosophy of management, and I especially liked the emphasis he placed on the importance of people,” Peterson wrote in his 1991 book, “A Better Idea.”

By the time Peterson retired in 1990, Ford had made major strides under Deming’s guidance--not only proclaiming that “Quality is Job One,” but showing it on dealer lots. In the mid-1980s, the company that had brought the world the Pinto, a subcompact notorious for exploding in rear-end collisions, unveiled the Taurus. By 1992, the Taurus unseated the Honda Accord as the top-selling model in the United States.

Columbia University’s Whitney says Ford owes its continued existence to Deming. The day before his retirement from Ford, Peterson wrote to Deming: “You have had a major impact on my life and my thinking.”

W. Edwards Deming (his first name is William, after his father) was born Oct. 14, 1900, in Sioux City, Iowa, the eldest of three children. While he was still a young boy, the family moved to Wyoming, where for years the family barely scraped by. Deming attended the University of Wyoming before heading to Yale for his graduate work.

For 18 years after collecting his doctorate, he worked as a mathematician and statistician for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Bureau of Standards and the Census Bureau, where he was instrumental in developing sampling techniques.

As a private consultant, one of his first jobs was for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who summoned Deming to Japan to help conduct a census and assess the country’s ability to rebuild after World War II.

There, Deming found a ready-made audience for the philosophy he had been developing over the years. In 1950, he conducted a series of seminars throughout the country, eventually lecturing to representatives of virtually every major Japanese corporation. In gratitude, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers created an award for industrial excellence in 1951, naming it after their teacher.

In recent years, a number of Japanese executives have said they assumed they simply were adopting methods that already were in widespread practice in the country that had just crushed them.

It is hard to ignore the religious undercurrent running through Deming’s seminars:

An elderly man preaches his wisdom to an assembled throng of 500 eager students. Anointed disciples hover around their frail leader, interpreting his instructions, attending to his every need. Nothing is said publicly, but everyone knows this seminar in Pasadena has got to be among the last of its kind.

“It’s why I’m here,” whispers one Air Force manager, who paid the $1,295 tuition from her own checkbook and used vacation time to attend the session last month. “My boss wouldn’t pay for this, and I knew I might not get a chance like this again.”

Says Deborah Hall of the Aerospace Corp. in El Segundo: “I’m enthralled.” Even after Deming repeatedly loses his place as he reads from his notes, Hall remains faithful: “I had always wanted to see him and this is everything I thought” it would be.

William Ouchi--UCLA business school professor, adviser to Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and celebrated author of “Theory Z”--doesn’t understand what all the hoopla is about.

“His acolytes have turned into a near religion what the majority of us believe is merely a business affair,” he says.

However, the loyalty Deming inspires among middle managers and white-collar workers comes as no surprise to consultants in the “science of quality,” as it’s termed.

“There’s a great deal of insecurity out there about what works,” says Blanton Godfrey, chairman of the Juran Institute, which offers its own quality seminars, developed by former AT&T; scientist Joseph Juran.

Godfrey doesn’t deny the religious qualities of such programs. He compares the teachings and methods to those of Weight Watchers, Alcoholics Anonymous and other self-help groups that offer participants a blueprint for significant change and a chance to share their experiences.

Whatever he provides, Deming wants to keep providing it.

(He doesn’t maintain a young man’s pace for the money, because much of the estimated $500,000 or more Deming earns every year is given away to charity. His church, St. Paul’s Episcopal in Washington is a favorite recipient, as are the American Red Cross, the colleges he has attended and taught at, and the hospitals that routinely treat him.)

After his coughing spell in Pasadena two weeks ago, Deming rested briefly in his hotel room. Within two hours, he was back at the podium to complete the course. When the session ended, he was surrounded by students seeking his autograph. Later, he joined some of his closest disciples for dinner.

“Telling him to stop is like talking to the wall,” says Cecilia Kilian, his secretary for the last nearly four decades. “He accepts his mortality. But before he goes, he wants to accomplish his mission.”

Words to Work by

W. Edwards Deming’s teachings boil down to what he terms “14 Points for Management”:

1. Create constancy of purpose.

2. Adopt the new philosophy.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.

4. Cease doing business on the basis of price tag alone.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service.

6. Institute training on the job.

7. Institute leadership.

8. Drive out fear so that everyone may work effectively.

9. Break down barriers between departments.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets.