W. Edwards Deming: Rebuilding Japan, Then Telling Ford It Was Their Fault

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W. Edwards Deming was born in 1900 in Iowa, grew up on farms in Iowa and Wyoming, and earned a PhD in mathematical physics from Yale in 1928. In 1927 he met Walter Shewhart of Bell Labs, whose control charts separated common cause from special cause variation, and Deming became the translator of Shewhart's dense theory. He helped develop the Deming-Stephan sampling algorithm for the 1940 Census and taught statistical methods to wartime factories, but postwar American industry, facing no competition, set his discipline aside. In 1947 the Army sent him to Tokyo for census work, and in 1950 the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers had him lecture top executives, including Sony co-founder Akio Morita.

Japan adopted his teaching that better quality lowers costs, created the Deming Prize, and the emperor awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure. In 1980, at age 80 and running a consultancy from his Washington basement, he was featured in the NBC documentary If Japan Can, Why Can't We? Ford, which lost $3 billion from 1979 to 1982, hired him, and he told executives that 85 percent of the company's problems were management's fault. The Taurus-Sable line followed in 1986, the year Ford outearned General Motors for the first time since the 1920s.

• Ford customers waited for cars with Mazda-built transmissions because the Japanese parts clustered tightly around the target size and ran smoother.
• His System of Profound Knowledge covers appreciation for a system, knowledge of variation, theory of knowledge and psychology.
• He opposed quotas, merit ratings and annual performance reviews, arguing the system drives most performance differences.
• He credited the plan-do-check-act cycle to Shewhart and later revised it to plan-do-study-act.
• He played flute and drums, composed sacred choral music, and said he hoped to be remembered for trying to keep America from committing suicide.