W. E. Deming, Quality Control Guru, Dies at 93

W. Edwards Deming, the American quality control guru revered by the Japanese for helping them become the global symbol of industrial reliability, died early Monday at the age of 93. Deming, who suffered from cancer, died peacefully in his sleep at his Washington home, an aide said.

Considered one of the most influential management theorists in the modern industrial world, Deming is widely credited for teaching Japanese corporations after World War II the business methods that later allowed them to outpace their American counterparts in industries ranging from autos to consumer electronics.

“He changed the world by what he did in Japan,” said Kosaku Yoshida, a statistics and quality management professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills and one of Deming’s close disciples. “His legacy is that the economic conditions of the world have been forever altered by his successes there.”

Deming’s theories were discovered by a few American managers in the early 1980s as they struggled to catch up to such Japanese companies as Toyota and Matsushita, which had adopted Deming’s methods. Although he found a few converts--Ford Motor Co., which now advertises that “Quality is Job 1,” was his prize pupil--he was never fully accepted by the American corporate elite.

Still, in recent years, Deming developed a growing and devoted following among American middle-level managers frustrated with the sloppy performance and slow pace of change within their corporations. And it was to these managers that Deming, who worked seven days a week until the final weeks of his life, devoted the last several years of his work.

Just 10 days ago, confined to a wheelchair and tethered to an oxygen tank, Deming completed a weeklong seminar on his business philosophy in Universal City--the last of 30 sessions he taught every year that attracted 10,000 students annually. Deming at that time confided to associates that he had “made it to the end.”

“He just could have meant the end of the year, but we all knew what it really meant,” said I.J. Grandes del Mazo, a consultant with Quality Enhancement Seminars, the West Los Angeles organization that sponsored Deming’s nationwide tutorials.

Trained as a statistician, Deming developed methods that allowed businesses to improve the quality of their manufacturing and other operations by charting the variations in their activities and then refining the processes to reduce those differences.

Later, he expanded those methods into a complete management philosophy that stressed the importance of worker involvement, cooperation over competition, and, most critically, the value of continued improvement.

Although Deming remained bitterly disappointed that only a few American corporations embraced his teachings, many of his once radical doctrines have become a part of the nation’s corporate consciousness.

For example, Deming is widely cited as the first to blame shortsighted American executives--not shoddy American workmanship--as the real cause of the country’s declining industrial competitiveness. Deming also taught that taking care of the customer will serve the shareholder--but not necessarily the reverse. And Deming long preached the gospel of listening to workers, ridding the workplace of fear and fostering cooperation among employees.

To Deming, workers were intrinsically motivated to do well. That they did not always perform well, he argued, was management’s fault.

“American management on the whole has a negative scrap value,” he told his audiences. “It’s like an old refrigerator you can’t sell. You have to pay someone $25 to cart it off.” At other times he advised that the United States should never export its management to a friendly country.

Deming was born Oct. 14, 1900, in Sioux City, Iowa, the eldest of three children. While he was still a young boy, his family moved to Wyoming, where Deming’s father homesteaded a 40-acre parcel and tried to scratch out a living as a farmer. Deming attended the University of Wyoming and later won a scholarship to Yale University, where he received his doctorate in physics in 1928.

For the next 18 years, Deming worked as a mathematician and statistician for the federal government, including a stint at the Census Bureau, where he was instrumental in developing sampling techniques. Gen. Douglas MacArthur summoned Deming to Japan in the late 1940s to help assess the war damage and conduct a census.

In 1950, he conducted a now-famous series of seminars for Japanese business leaders on how to rebuild their factories and improve the shoddy connotations associated with the label “Made in Japan.” The Japanese rewarded Deming for his efforts in 1951 by establishing a corporate quality award in his honor. The Deming Prize is often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Japanese business.

After leaving Japan in the 1950s, Deming, who lived in Washington, remained in his native country a relatively unknown professor and occasional consultant. Then, in 1980, an NBC television documentary credited his teachings for Japan’s rise from the ashes of World War II. At an age that most men never live to see, Deming became an overnight sensation.

Among those who came calling in those early years was Donald E. Petersen, then president and later chairman and chief executive of Ford Motor Co. Petersen, now retired, credits Deming for helping Ford regain its lost momentum and customer loyalty.

Ford mourned Deming’s death Monday, noting in a statement that he had become the company’s consultant, catalyst “and a burr under our saddle when we’re not making enough progress.”

Yet, as Deming acutely regretted, most of the changes he brought to the United States were largely the indirect result of his efforts in Japan in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Asked once how he would like to be remembered in his native land, he replied, “I probably won’t even be remembered.” After pausing, he added: “Well, maybe . . . as someone who spent his life trying to keep America from committing suicide.”