Ep 10. W. Edwards Deming - The Prophet of Quality who Rebuilt Japan

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In 1950, an unknown American told 21 Japanese company presidents they’d take over world markets in five years. He was wrong, they did it in four. His name was W. Edwards Deming.  During the Second World War, the United States trained more than 31,000 people in quality methods. It was the largest quality training programme ever built. After the war ended, America was the only major economy left with its factories standing and quality stopped being a differentiator. The control charts came off the walls. Thirty years later, Detroit lost four billion dollars in a single year and the US government had to negotiate a cap on Japanese car imports. This episode covers the whole arc. The wartime programme America built and abandoned, then Deming's work teaching Japanese engineers, the red bead experiment, Toyota’s 1965 Deming Prize, 1983 Ford - Mazda automatic transmission manufacturing comparison, and we finish at Boeing's 2026 quality issues for the 737 Max and how they leveraged Deming's systems approach to address the quality failures. This is the story of one of the most influential individuals in the history of modern operations. 

Sources

• W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (MIT Press) — the 14 Points, the Seven Deadly Diseases, the red bead experiment, and the 94/6 estimate
• W. Edwards Deming, The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (MIT Press, 1993) — the System of Profound Knowledge and Taguchi’s loss function
• W. Edwards Deming Institute 
  • Biographical timeline — https://deming.org/timeline/
  • The 14 Points for Management, in full — https://deming.org/explore/fourteen-points/
  • History of the Deming Prize https://www.juse.or.jp/deming_en/award/01.html
• Toyota Motor Corporation 
  • Toyota Awarded the Deming Prize (the 1965 ceremony, and Shoichiro Toyoda’s remarks) — https://www.toyota-global.com/company/history_of_toyota/75years/text/entering_the_automotive_business/chapter1/section1/item7.html
  • Total Quality Management: SQC introduced 1949, Deming Application Prize 1965 — https://www.toyota-global.com/company/history_of_toyota/75years/data/company_information/management_and_finances/management/tqm/change.html

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