W. Edwards Deming

William Edwards Deming was born on October 14, 1900, in Sioux City, Iowa, and raised on a forty-acre homestead in Powell, Wyoming, where the family lived in a tarpaper shack through harsh winters.1 He worked his way through the University of Wyoming, earning a degree in electrical engineering in 1921, then completed a master's at the University of Colorado and a PhD in mathematical physics at Yale by 1928.2

In the late 1920s, Deming befriended Walter Shewhart, a physicist at Bell Laboratories who had pioneered the use of statistical methods to monitor manufacturing processes. Shewhart's control charts allowed factories to identify problems before they produced large numbers of defects.3 Deming spent two decades refining and teaching these methods, first at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and then at the Bureau of the Census, where he helped develop the sampling techniques still used today.

In 1950, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers invited Deming to teach statistical quality control to Japanese executives and engineers.4 He returned repeatedly over the following years. Japanese firms adopted his methods with a commitment that their American counterparts had not shown. In 1951, Japan established the Deming Prize, awarded annually to corporations that demonstrated excellence in quality control.5 By the 1970s, Japanese manufacturers in automobiles, electronics, and steel were outperforming their Western competitors.

American corporations did not begin adopting Deming's ideas until after an NBC documentary titled "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" aired on June 24, 1980, introducing Deming to a national audience.6 He subsequently consulted for Ford, Toyota, Xerox, and Procter and Gamble. His 1986 book Out of the Crisis outlined fourteen points of management. Deming died on December 20, 1993, at ninety-three. When asked how he wished to be remembered, he replied, "maybe as someone who spent his life trying to keep America from committing suicide."7