October 1, 2002
Hon. George Bush
Presidential Medal of Freedom
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Mr. President:
It is my honor to place into nomination for the Presidential Medal of Freedom the names of three individuals whose lives and teachings have already had a giant impact on our economy, our society, and our way of life -- and whose influence will only grow stronger in the decades to come.
I nominate the three individuals most responsible for the creation and development of the discipline of quality today:
William Edwards Deming
Joseph Moses Juran
Armand Vallin Feigenbaum
This nomination is unusual in two ways. First, the nomination is for three individuals, instead of one. Second, the nominations are of statisticians -- not soldiers or statesmen or artists; statistics is not a profession people intuitively associate with the theme of freedom.
Honoring these men does more than acknowledge their unusual careers. It sends a signal to Americans everywhere that quality matters, that the United States of America stands behind businesses that try to do better, and that every action every individual takes to improve quality strengthens our country and our society for the competitive years that lie ahead.
In this letter and attached supporting statement, I hope to make clear that the award must be shared three ways, that each of the three is equally deserving of this highest recognition. I also hope to show that, while each man began his career as a statistician, each came over time to address issues of far greater breadth and significance to our society than abstract industrial statistics.
Sincerely,
Michael Finley
for American Society for Quality
Nearly everyone concedes that industrial quality is a good thing. But how does it relate to the concept of freedom? The two reinforce one another in a couple of ways. One involves the freedom of workers in making important decisions. The other involves the freedom of the entire country to pursue its dreams.
· In the first place, quality cannot occur unless workers enjoy a high degree of freedom. In the old thinking, managers managed and employees did what they were told. In the era of quality, however, employees are trained to utilize their own insights and intelligence to improve quality on the job. This training often goes by the name empowerment. But it could just as easily be described as the freeing up of the genius of all members of an organization.
In different ways, empowerment is the linchpin of each of the three quality philosophers' programs.
Deming's famous "14 Points" stress an end to reliance on inspection to achieve quality; the need to institute training on the job, and to drive out fear, and the removal of all barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship.
Feigenbaum's concept of total quality control requires as the first step that management acknowledge that quality is too important to leave to a handful of experts, that everyone in an organization must be involved in the process: "Quality is everyone's job."
Juran preaches the importance of "identifying the customer" -- that, in a large company, one's customers are the workers in adjoining departments, and that meeting their needs is the paramount challenge for every worker.
In each system, a new balance is formed between management, whose job it is to lead employees toward consistent goals of quality improvement, and an empowered workforce, who are trained in the practices and methodologies of continuous improvement, and are given the freedom to achieve higher levels of customer satisfaction.
· In the second place, no free society can long ignore the issue of quality, because competitive societies control their own destinies, and societies that can not compete do not stay free for long.
Throughout history, the decline of a given society has been paralleled by a decline in the output of its citizens. Healthy societies are societies in which the entire population is trained and motivated to do good work -- in services, in manufacturing, in the arts, in every sector. Extraordinary civilizations -- "golden ages" -- occur when every sector is aware of and working toward excellence.
The careers of Deming, Feigenbaum and Juran began with statistics, formulas, and bar charts. But as their insights and ideas developed, they quickly overflowed the discreet, esoteric world of numbers, and extended in the areas of organizational dynamics, motivation, and leadership.
The three men disagree on incidentals, and take different perspectives on important issues. But they have created a combined vision of not just a mathematics, but a politics of empowerment, and an ethics of interdependence and cooperation. This vision may eventually do as much to keep America strong, prosperous and free as all the might our military forces can muster.
Quality is a vague word, whose meaning changes from utterance to utterance. Philosophers have argued the meaning of quality since the days of Aristotle. The quality discussed here is the quality of goods and services, and all the characteristics that make a product or service "good quality" or "poor quality."
Two centuries ago, Eli Whitney wrestled with the problem of manufacturing rifle parts so that they were interchangeable. In our own century, Frederick Taylor and Frank Gilbreth led the way in seeing management and manufacturing through scientific eyes. But while mass assembly revolutionized American industry, quality itself lagged. Too many faultily made parts were showing up at the end of the assembly line; too many assemblies and components were breaking down during testing; too many finished products came back to the factory under warranty; too many sales were lost because buyers simply did not trust the quality of manufactured products. A few theoreticians in obscure industrial laboratories were tinkering with ideas on how to improve industrial processes, but in a world in which scant attention was paid to quality, their impact in the early stages was minimal.
Statistical process control. One of these men was Walter S. Shewhart, who in the 1920s created an intellectual framework -- called statistical process control, or SPC -- for methodically monitoring and measuring the "conformance to specifications" of manufactured items. Shewhart, one of a brilliant team of statisticians at Bell Telephone Laboratories, was an acquaintance and inspiration for all three nominees, and was especially close to W. Edwards Deming.
Shewhart and his team understood that there was no such thing as 100% conformance to manufacturing specifications. In any phenomenon, there is some degree of natural variability due to such factors as aging machines, differences among parts, differences in worker skills, etc. Hence the challenge of quality is to control variability between manufactured things so that they fall into acceptable limits.
Statistical process control is the scientific methodology that led to the management discoveries of Deming, Feigenbaum, and Juran. It was a tremendous leap forward for quality, because it allowed workers on the factory floor to monitor the quality of their own work by visually plotting variations of output. If variations became too wide or too frequent, then workers intervened and did whatever was necessary to make the process work again. In addition, managers could tell, by looking at the data in the charts that were created, when the system was stable and when structural changes -- new technology or new methods -- were called for.
W. Edwards Deming helped develop and broaden the tool that Shewhart had fashioned. It was to prove of inestimable value during the years of World War II, when quality of manufacturing became a matter of life and death, of victory and defeat for our armed forces.
World War II. SPC was an exotic and technical tool during the Depression years, a statistical approach too complex for ordinary factory workers to master. Only the most advanced industries, those for whom quality failures were intolerable, paid Shewhart, Deming, Feigenbaum, and Juran much heed -- mainly the telephone and electrical companies.
World War II, and the extreme demands made upon the entire industrial base, changed that. In the race to arm and fight against aggression, speed and flexibility were vital. But so was quality. quality failures meant life and death for our armed forces. Each manufacturing failure, no matter how small, threatened the freedom of hundreds of millions of people around the world. It brought to mind the proverb from Poor Richard's Almanack: "A little neglect may breed great mischief. For want of a nail ... the rider was lost."
Ed Deming, Joseph Juran and A.V. Feigenbaum each served in the war effort, working to improve quality in manufacturing and ordnance. After the war, each continued his quest to improve quality and profitability, and reduce costs. Often, their words were met with deaf ears. In their own country, which was enjoying unprecedented prosperity as the only nation with its manufacturing infrastructure intact, their ideas were largely ignored. Abroad, however, countries seeking to find a foothold in the postwar world listened eagerly. All three men provided invaluable assistance to Japan in its efforts to create a new culture of manufacturing. In those days it was common to dismiss Japanese manufacturing. But those days came to a sudden end.
Quality assurance and total quality control. With the end of the war, the quality profession took another major step forward. The sudden increase of inspectors and quality engineers saw the formation of an academic and professional society to further the spread of techniques and technologies. This group, formally established in 1945, was originally called the Society for Quality Engineers. We know it today as the American Society for Quality Control (ASQC). Its creation went a long way toward legitimizing quality control as an integral part of the industrial scene. Deming, Feigenbaum and Juran are all members of ASQC, as are almost 85,000 quality professionals worldwide today.
For years these three scientists toiled in obscurity in the U.S. But their work abroad, particularly in Japan, was yielding astonishing fruit. Where Japanese manufacturing in the 1950s was the subject of disparaging jokes, by the 1970s it had improved and was on the verge of overtaking targeted American industries, including consumer electronics, autos and semiconductors.
The reason for Japan's skyrocketing industrial success was quality. And one reason why Japan was obsessed with quality was that Deming, Juran and Feigenbaum had each, in different degrees, spent time in Japan in the 1950s, lecturing, consulting, and exhorting Japanese manufacturers to lift their sights. If Japan's companies committed to a program of continuously improving its industrial processes, Deming suggested to a war-torn nation in 1951, it could lead the world within a single generation.
Evidence that Japan listened to the ideas of Deming, Juran and Feigenbaum are everywhere today. Of the world's manufacturing giants, Japan is the undisputed quality champion. Japan's quality standards, and unrelenting focus on giving the customer what the customer wants, has raised the standards of every other manufacturing nation. By the 1980s, Japan had arrived as an economic power, and was gaining market share on American companies in markets America had long considered its own -- cars, electronics, machinery and tools. The driving force behind Japan's emergence was a passion for kaizen -- attention to the "little things" in manufacturing that add up to quality, and to success.
In Japan today, quality is a national obsession. In 1987 alone, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) and the Japanese Standards Association ran 520 courses for 48,560 students, and JUSE published 660 books on quality control!
The transformation from industrial weakling to powerhouse took America by surprise. In the days following World War II, the U.S. had been the only industrial power with its industrial infrastructure intact. In a world eager for manufactured goods, quality was important, but not the critical element in making a purchase. Now, suddenly, a complacent U.S. yielded ground to aggressive, successful foreign competitors -- Japan, Korea, Singapore, Germany, even Mexico.
The marketplace today is much more competitive and much more global than it was fifty years ago. And in the wake of this increased competitiveness, consumers are more particular about the quality -- however consumers choose to define the term -- of what they buy.
Statistical process control was the first stage of the quality revolution. Deming was its foremost proponent. Two important developments were about to occur which would evolve quality from a narrow, technical field into an idea involving every employee of every company.
The first development was to go beyond quality control to quality assurance. Instead of improving quality by placing inspectors at the end of production lines, quality was to be built into manufactured goods. Quality was no longer after-the-fact; it was a planned dimension of manufacturing.
In 1951, the "bible of the quality assurance movement" was published, Joseph M. Juran's mammoth Quality Control Handbook. In it he articulated the principle that quality ought not to be seen solely as a cost measure but as an investment in profitability. Avoidable quality losses were, in fact, a "business" unto themselves -- care in reducing them had the potential, by his calculations, of saving as much as $1,000 per worker per year.
Following on the heels of Juran's breakthrough was Armand Feigenbaum, the first proponent of total quality control. Juran's insight was that the task of quality was too central to a company's survival to be assigned to a separate quality function. For a total response, every single employee and vendor had to be brought into the process.
The Baldrige Award. The quality profession in the U.S. took the ideas of Juran and Feigenbaum to heart, as it had with the ideas of Shewhart and Deming. But America's corporate leaders paid little heed. Quality had a schizoid existence in our country during the 1960s and 1970s -- while its technology enjoyed notable advances, its message went largely ignored by top management. It took the recession of 1980-1981, coupled with the explosion of sales of Japanese cars in the United States, boosted by their superior quality, to convince corporate officers that quality could no longer be given lip service -- it had to be introduced into the culture of every company wanting to do business into the next century.
the men that America had so long ignored were suddenly looked at in a new light. Deming, Juran and Feigenbaum are seen today as "quality gurus," as superstars of the science of management. Each attacked the problems of poor quality from a different angle. The ideas of all three have been indispensable in addressing the key economic -- and ultimately social -- issue of our day, competitiveness in a global marketplace.
Overnight, America rediscovered its quality leaders, and the three key disciplines each had helped create -- statistical process control, quality assurance, and total quality control. Companies like Ford Motor Company, Motorola, Inc., and Xerox Corp. conducted well-publicized crash courses in quality improvement. Under the threat of competition from abroad, quality, an American concept, finally became an American passion.
In 1986, President Reagan signed into law the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Act, creating an industrial award that would go to those American companies or company divisions that showed the greatest amount of improvement in seven separate categories -- Leadership, Information and Analysis, Strategic Quality Planning, Human Resource Development, Management of Process Quality, Operational Results and Customer Satisfaction.
The "seven pillars" of the Baldrige criteria are striking evidence of how far the quality profession had grown from its earliest days, when the lonely process chart was all quality had to go on. Quality, and the notion of quality, had overflowed its earliest definitions. It was now much more than statistical "conformance to specifications," though that was still an important dimension. A company committed to quality is committed:
The age of the customer. And most important of all, quality is measured against the yardstick laid down at different times by Deming, Feigenbaum and Juran -- how well a product or a service meets the requirements of the customer.
Walter Shewhart died in 1971. Including Shewhart, the accomplishments of the four men's careers taken together surpass the sum of their accomplishments.
Together they helped created a separate new profession, quality control. More important, though, the effected the transfer of quality tools, technology, and training to all workers everywhere.
Together, they played an important part in the rebirth of industry in Japan. More important, they contributed to a rebirth of seriousness in manufacturing in their own country.
Together, they urged a new mentality onto industrial leadership, the attitude that "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is the worst possible response to challenges from competitors. More important, they urged a new mentality for the entire workforce -- the idea that every action matters, and that quality is the responsibility of every individual, at every level, at every task.
Together, they charted a course for the elimination of waste in every industry, one process at a time. More important, and perhaps most important of all, they explained the need and a method for every person in industry to work to continuously improve, for greater efficiency, and for greater customer satisfaction.
The quality revolution is not complete. By definition, a philosophy of determined, continuous improvement, can never be complete. But in large part because of the efforts of these three men, it is begun, and the world is a different and better place.
The popular demand for quality today is stunning, broad-based, and worldwide. But learning how to deliver quality -- understanding customer requirements, and taking steps to meet them, and then seeking to continuously to improve on the level of customer satisfaction -- is not something that happened overnight. It began long ago, before World War II, in the laboratories and classrooms of an obscure group of industrial statisticians: Walter S. Shewhart, W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran, and Armand V. Feigenbaum.
It is unusual to seek the nomination of three individuals together. But in this case it is appropriate, because the changes that have occurred in industrial quality are so important to our national security, and the achievements of each of the three men have been crucial to redirecting our national focus.
It is oversimplifying to break out the three developmental stages of quality -- statistical process control, quality assurance, and total quality control -- and say that Deming, Juran, and Feigenbaum are responsible for the development of each, respectively.
The ideas and teachings of each man overlap with the ideas and teachings of the other two. Often they have agreed completely; sometimes they have disagreed on emphasis or perspective; occasionally they have completely disagreed on approach.
But the thrust of their careers has been uniform, from beginning to end: that all of us can do the things we do better. Not by brutalizing employees, not by making passionate speeches, not by working 100-hour weeks.
True quality is the result of paying attention to the little things. "For want of a nail..." And taking logical, thoughtful steps to making them right.
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W. Edwards Deming at age 92 is the world's best-known proponent of quality. He was born in 1900, and for a time in his childhood lived in a tar paper shack. During his youth he took any job he could to help pay for his schooling. He had his first job at a hotel, when he was 8 or 9 -- he can't remember exactly.
Deming studied engineering at the University of Wyoming in 1917, but he sensed that engineering was not his true calling, and eventually switched to mathematics. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from Yale University in 1927.
In the 1930s there was no such discipline as "statistics," and certainly no "quality profession." Yet Deming decided his life's work would be in the area of quality in those years, when he met and became friendly with quality pioneer Walter Shewhart. The two remained close until Shewhart's death in 1967. In the '30s Deming used Shewhart's statistical methods to establish sampling techniques for the 1940 census.
It was to teach census methods that Deming went to Japan in 1947. During a second visit in 1950, he told the presidents of twenty-one leading manufacturers that if they would only use his statistical analysis to build quality into their products, they would overcome their reputation for shoddy quality within five years.
Deming visited Japan seven times between 1947 and 1965, lecturing and counseling industrial leaders to stake out quality in their goods and services as a distinguishing feature. He also consulted in Greece, India, Germany, Mexico, Turkey, Great Britain, France, Taiwan and Argenina.
Deming's work was so pivotal to Japan's postwar economic turnaround that the country founded a national quality award to promote industrial quality, and named it The Deming Prize. The Deming Prize is the world's foremost industrial award.
Deming is sometimes described as the "philosopher" of quality. Some proponents of his approach liken it to a religion because, they say, it not only improves quality in manufacturing, service, government and education, but it also focuses on improving the quality of people's lives. It is strange to hear a statistician expounding on "joy in working," yet Deming does this. Deming, admirers say, reaches people through the heart.
Entire books have been written about each of the three themes undergirding his famous points: continual improvement, constancy of purpose, and profound knowledge.
Continual improvement means that an organization must be committed to constant, ceaseless change. Nothing is perfect -- it can always be improved. Constancy of purpose means having a higher goal than just "making money." Businesses must have a vision of what business they are in, and pursue that vision relentlessly. Profound knowledge sounds mysterious, but it is really the sum total of all the ways managers have of understanding their business processes -- the system the business works in, the kinds of variations in quality that can occur (statistics), skill in predicting what will happen next, and an understanding of what motivates people to excellence.
Deming's theories of industrial quality, summed up in his famous "14 Points" extend far beyond the boundaries of statistical process control, to include a host of insights into management, productivity, and motivation. Taken together, the fourteen points revolutionize the traditional relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees.
Books by Deming include Statistical Adjustment for Data, 1943; Some Theory of Sampling, 1950; Statistical Design in Business Research, 1960; Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position, 1982; his monumental Out of the Crisis, 1986, and his most recent, The New Economics for Management, 1991.
In 1960, in commemoration of Deming's work in helping Japan rebuild, he was awarded the Second Order Medal of the Sacred Treasure, the highest award Japan can bestow on a foreigner. He wrote in his travel journal: "As far as I know, this is the only instance where a man from an occupying power was actually invited back and paid by the people that were occupied, to continue the same work that he was doing under the occupation."
Deming has been showered with other honors, as well: American Management Association's Taylor Key Award, 1983; enshrinement in the Engineering and Science Hall of Fame, 1986; and in 1987, Deming was awarded the National Medal of Technology from President Reagan.
Despite having been honored for over a generation abroad, Deming was ignored in his own country until he was 80 years old. In 1980, Ford Motor Co. turned to him to help that company revolutionize its goals and processes. The outcome of that relationship made Ford the clear quality leader among American carmakers. In the years since, books about him and his fourteen points have multiplied. He is the most celebrated of his generation of "quality gurus." Yet he lives and works as simply as ever. A favorite pastime is liturgical composition -- his two Masses have been performed in numerous churches, as have several canticles and anthems. At 91, he continues to work from an office in his home. His entire staff is still just Ceil Kilian, the "temporary" secretary he hired in 1954.
Deming's 14 Points for Management
1. Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product and service.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag alone. Instead, minimize total cost by working with as single supplier.
5. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production, and service.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Adopt and institute leadership.
8. Drive out fear.
9. Break down barriers between staff areas.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force.
11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the work force and numerical goals for management.
12. Eliminate barriers that rob people of pride in workmanship. Eliminate the annual rating or merit system.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everybody.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation.
Joseph Juran was born on Christmas Eve in 1904 in Braila, in what is now Rumania. His father was the village shoemaker. At age 8 he emigrated with his family to Minnesota. Growing up in Minneapolis, he took any job he could, including bootblack and bookkeeper.
After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in electrical engineering in 1924, Juran worked in inspection at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Chicago, the site of many important technological advances. Like Deming, Juran knew Shewhart, and worked with him at Western Electric. Once, asked to explain why he was attracted to the quality field, Juran replied, "I wasn't. I was a young fellow out of engineering school. I'm an immigrant. The big goal was to find steady pay." In 1926 he worked with a team from Bell Laboratories to set up the first statistical process control techniques for factories. At the beginning of World War II, Juran joined the Lend-Lease administration. After the war Juran set up his own consulting business, but he had few clients. With the U.S. economy on an unstoppable roll, not many companies listened to his call for improvements.
Struggle was to be a part of Juran's career, from the end of the war until the publication of his Quality Control Handbook in 1951. But his book met a huge need in Japan, and he was invited there in 1954.
Juran led the way in broadening the definition and vision of quality. While a statistician by training, Juran believes that statistics alone are no guarantee of quality improvement, that they are a useful tool, and nothing more. Fitness for use, his pivotal definition of quality, helps point the way. "Quality involves a great deal more than the tools you use. It involves finding out what the customers need. And who are the customers? How can we design our goods and services to respond to those needs? How can we produce those goods and services using the proper technology?"
Identifying the customer is vital, Juran says -- and the customer is not always outside the organization. The customer may very well be the next individual or group that work goes to, in the step-by-step process of manufacturing products or delivering services. The chain is as strong as its weakest link. Quality means that each link in the chain knows what the next link needs, and making sure it gets it.
Juran was also important in linking quality improvement to real-life economics. Early on he stipulated that there were two kinds of quality costs -- those that could be avoided and those that could not. The unavoidable costs consisted of quality improvement measures, but the avoidable ones consisted of rework, scrap and failure. A company that invests in eliminating these avoidable costs will be repaid many times over. Juran calls these avoidable costs "gold in the mine."
Success did come to Juran eventually. Following the publication of his textbook, Total Quality Handbook, he was invited to share his insights with many top companies, including E.I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Motorloa, Inc. and Texas Instruments.
Books by Juran include Quality Control Handbook, 4th edition, 1988; Case Studies in Industrial Management, 1955; Managerial Breakthrough, 1964; The Corporate Director, 1966; Quality Planning and Analysis, 1970; Juran on Quality Improvement, 1981; and Juran on Planning for Quality, 1988
In 1981, Juran, like Deming, was awarded Japan's Second Order Medal of the Sacred Treasure for the lectures and teaching he had done in the 1950s. "Juran," said Japanese quality expert Kaoru Ishikawa, "created an atmosphere in which quality control was to be regarded as a tool of management, thus creating an opening for the establishment of total quality control as we know it today."
Juran is one of the most honored of all living scientists, and the honors have come from all around the world. In 1961, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers presented him with a Scroll of Appreciation. In 1965 he was given the 250th Anniversary Medal of the Czech Higher Institute of Technology. He was the 1967 winner of the Wallace Clark medal, and in 1968 he was given both the annual medal of the Technikhaza Esztergom, Hungary, and of the Federation of Technical Scientific Industries of Hungary. In 1970 he was honored with the the medal of honor from the Official de la Industria, Madrid, and the nation of Korea gave him an honorary Plaque of Appreciation in 1978. In 1992, Juran received the National Medal of Technology from President Bush.
Semi-retired at age 89, Joseph Juran Juran remains a vital intellectual force in the movement to restore American competitiveness. He is confident that quality works, but still skeptical that enough companies will demonstrate the leadership necessary to make it work.
"American companies know they need to improve," he has said. "But they need more than slogans. Managers must take charge of their quality programs and tell their people how to do things better."
Juran's Quality Trilogy
1. Quality planning, the process for preparing to meet company goals, is analogous to financial planning and budgeting.
2. Quality control, the process for meeting company goals during operations, is analogous to financial control.
3. Quality improvement, the process for breaking through to superior, unprecedented levels of performance, is analogous to cost reduction.
Other Juran ideas:
A.V. Feigenbaum, 72, is a pivotal figure in the history of quality because, with his book Total Quality Control, published in 1961, he broadened a discipline which had relied primarily on production employees to a new stage in which everyone in an organization -- production and support services -- participates in the process of quality improvement.
Born in 1920, Armand V. Feigenbaum is the youngest of the three quality masters. Feigenbaum worked for 26 years for General Electric in Schenectady. Starting as an apprentice toolmaker during his summers while in college, Feigenbaum learned quality from the ground level up. In 1944, at age twenty-four, he was named top quality expert at GE in Schenectady.
During World War II he worked on a team developing the first jet airplane engines. In his work at GE he discovered that whatever any individual did to improve quality had a ripple effect, improving quality throughout the organization. Sometimes things worked, sometimes they blew up. Feigenbaum developed statistical techniques to better learn the reasons for failure. In 1951 he earned a Ph.D. from MIT, and in 1958 he was named manager of manufacturing operations for GE worldwide, a position he held for ten years before forming his own company, General Systems. As a consultant, he has worked with such companies as the Italian tire maker Pirelli, John Deere & Co., and Union Pacific Corp, where his systems boosted rail traffic by 10% in the first year.
As a quality control expert, Feigenbaum had tried the conventional quality methodologies -- statistics, motivation, and training. But he found himself countered, often, by resistance from other functions -- design engineers, finance people, production people. "I began to realize that quality was not a group of individual techniques or tools. It was, instead a total field." From this realization he developed an inclusive approach to quality control in which all functions in an organization -- not just quality control professionals or production people -- were part of the quality improvement process. In a 1956 article, he called this idea Total Quality Control, and in 1961 he published a masterful compendium on quality processes, under that same title. Total Quality Control, now in its fourth edition, was to be one of the most influential industrial books ever written.
In addition to broadening the concept of quality, Feigenbaum pioneered in the study of quality costs. Traditionally, businesses have resisted quality improvement on the grounds that quality improvement efforts were not worth the necessary investment. Feigenbaum set out to learn what the actual rules of quality costs were. He published seminal articles in Harvard Business Review, preaching an idea that has yet to sink in with many businesses -- that quality and costs are not adversaries, that they are in fact partners. The principle was a bombshell that is still going off today. It states that quality, instead of adding to costs, subtracts from them. The principle was not a boast, it was probable and measurable. Not only that did the return on investment from quality installations increase profitability, but such investment increased profitability more effectively than any other kind of investment.
Feigenbaum eventually arrived at a new kind of definition for quality: "what the buyer says it is. When you run a business, and you're driven by sales, and you recognize that it's the buyer who makes the sales, the very fact that he's your arbiter of quality, I think, is the most simple but profound factor you have to recognize."
And that insight is growing in significance. In a survey conducted in 1979, three of ten buyers stated that quality was a more important factor in purchasing than price. By 1988 the same survey showed that the three had grown to eight -- a giant leap forward in customer expectations.
Feigenbaum describes the quality problem at many companies in terms of a "hidden plant." In this image of a company-within-a-company, a workforce comprising perhaps 40% of the total exists solely to undo the mistakes that the rest of the company makes. Ever the pragmatist, Feigenbaum shuns rhetorical calls to action, and disdains the philosophical approach others try. He instead insists that the key to quality is hands-on implementation.
Books by Feigenbaum include Quality Control: Principles and Practice, 1951; Total Quality Control, 1961; Management Programming, 1980; and The Organization Process, 1980.
Feigenbaum's ideas, like Juran's and Deming's, have been enthusiastically received abroad. Total Quality Conrrol has been published in over twenty languages, including French, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish and Russian. In Paris in 1988, he received the Georges Borel Prize, France's highest honor in quality control. He has advised many countries on their industrial policies, including China and Argentina. He is the first recipient of ASQC's Lancaster Award, for "leadership of the international development of quality control."
That same year, he was appointed by the Secretary of Commerce of the Board of Overseers of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. In 1992 the Governor of Massachusetts announced the Armand V. Feigenbaum Massachusetts Quality Award, to recognize businesses displaying the strongest competitive leadership.
"Quality," Feigenbaum said, "is everyone's job."
Feigenbaum's Benchmarks
for Total Quality Management