ABSTRACT
Born in Sioux City, Iowa on 14 October 1900, Deming grew up on his family’s farm in Wyoming. After leaving school he studied engineering at the University of Wyoming and mathematics at the University of Colorado before going on to take a PhD in mathematical physics at Yale University. While at Yale, he spent his summers working at the Western Electric Company’s telephone assembly plant at Hawthorne, near Chicago. During Deming’s time at Hawthorne the company was being intensively studied in one of the most famous pieces of business research ever conducted, the so-called Hawthorne investigations led by Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger of Harvard University. This study focused on the effects of environmental conditions on productivity (see the Argyris entry elsewhere in this book). Deming, according to Andrea Gabor’s biography, claimed to have been unaware of the research (if so, he must have been the only person in the factory who was), but his time at Hawthorne did teach him much about factory management and the mistakes being made in terms of both machine and human efficiency.
