ABSTRACT
W. Edwards Deming was an icon of the “quality” movement. Most remembered for his work in relaunching the Japanese economy, his influence did not stop there. Rather, Deming’s principles spanned much of the globe as he contributed to advancing both the thinking and practice of quality in India, Germany, the USA, and other countries. Revered as a technical genius, Deming became known as a public figure through strongly held and candidly stated opinions such as:
The cause of decline in United States competitiveness in the 1980s was that management had walked off the job of management, striving instead for dividends and good performance of the price of the company’s stock.
OrThe follies of the systems of management that thrived in the expanding market that followed the War are now all too obvious—they must now be blasted out.
OrThe biggest problem that most any company in the Western world faces is not its competitors, nor the Japanese. The biggest problems are self-inflicted, created right at home by management that are off course in the competitive world of today (Walton, 1986, pp. xi, xii).
