W. Edwards Deming, an American with a mission to make industry more efficient, found a home for his pioneering theories. It just wasn't his own.
Across the Pacific, Japanese corporations seized Deming's gospel of quality control, helping to transform a bombed-out country at the end of World War II into an economic superpower.So successful were his ideas that inexpensive Japanese products from Toyota cars to Sony radios drove U.S. products off American shelves even while executives in his homeland ignored his ideas.
Deming died Monday - his quest to find the same acceptance in the United States largely unfinished. He was 93.
A grandson, Kevin Cahill, said Deming died in his sleep at about 3 a.m. at his home in Washington with family members present.
Deming's theory of quality control focused heavily on worker involvement, goal-setting and com-munication within the corporate structure, as opposed to competition among workers and management control.
Deming, who used a wheelchair because of phlebitis, had been battling cancer for some time.
That didn't keep him from traveling around the country, giving dozens of seminars on business management. "He was very active almost to the very end," said Cecilia Kilian, his secretary of 35 years.
A statistician by training, Deming became one of the most influential experts on corporate quality control. While U.S. companies were slow to embrace his ideas, Japanese executives took them to heart beginning in the 1950s.
Only in the 1970s, when U.S. manufacturers began to feel pressure from Japanese competitors, did corporate America begin to listen to the sometimes cantankerous and self-assured management guru, who by that time was being hailed widely in Japan.
Asked once how he would like to be remembered in his native land, Deming replied, "I probably won't even be remembered." Pausing, he added: "Well, maybe . . . as someone who spent his life trying to keep America from committing suicide."
Although a number of U.S. companies embraced his theories, Deming maintained even recently that most of corporate America had ignored him and his message.
Deming over the years reserved his harshest words for corporate management.
"The basic cause of sickness in American industry and resulting unemployment is failure of top management to manage," he wrote in his 1987 book, "Out of the Crisis."
Ford Motor Co. became one of Deming's most ardent supporters. In a statement Monday, the automaker said Deming was instrumental in getting the company to put "a sharp focus on quality, not only in its manufacturing processes, but in all of its operations."