Qualityworld
The Juran generation
The ‘father of quality’, Dr Joseph Juran, celebrated his 100th birthday in December 2004. Amy Holgate celebrated an illustrious career and talked to the man himself.
With elegant understatement, quality guru Dr Juran concedes to Qualityworld that: ‘I have some degree of ability for the remedy of problems, and I’m a competent analyst.’ This ‘degree of ability’ has caused Joseph Juran to endure as one of the most influential figures in the history of quality management. His lively career has been consistently driven by his desire to contribute to the welfare of his ‘fellow man’ -‘the great unfinished business’.
Juran conceptualised the Pareto principle often known as the 80-20 principle - in 1937, which helped millions of managers to separate the ‘vital few’ activities from the ‘useful many’. He is celebrated for bringing a human dimension to an industry submerged in statistics, and for coining the concept of total quality management.
A progressive thinker, he championed top management involvement as early as 1945, writing: ‘In the absence of sincere manifestation of interest at the top, little will happen below’, and also called for comprehensive training. He also famously contributed to the post-war revolution in Japanese manufacturing, and described quality from the customer’s viewpoint, identifying the need for more features that met customers’ needs, and fewer defects.
How it all began
It was an inauspicious start for the young Joseph Moses Juran at the beginning of the 20th century. Born on 24 December 1904, the young Joe and his family moved from Braila, Romania, to a Carpathian mountain village in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There, Juran notes, ‘they had no quality problems. Never had a power failure, never had an automobile fail. Of course, they didn’t have power; they didn’t have any automobiles.’
Escaping military service in Romania, the Juran family moved to Minnesota, US in 1912. Although the family saw the US as a ‘land of opportunity’, as Juran puts it, ‘things were just the same - we still lived in poverty in America, although we did escape a large amount of anti-semitism’.
The American dream proved to be elusive, however, and the Juran children took on a range of jobs to try and support the family. ‘I had a difficult childhood,’ Juran recalls. ‘I was a loner, a troubled youngster and a misfit, socially. I took refuge by building a world of my own; a world of books. As a youngster, one of my chief goals was to get rid of poverty.’
Academically, Joe excelled, quickly rising through the school until he was well ahead of his year group, and displaying particular ability in physics and maths. The first member of the family to attend university, Joe went to the University of Minnesota, where he also discovered that he had a talent for chess. He later became the university chess champion.
Graduating in 1924 with a degree in electrical engineering, Juran started work at Western Electric in the inspection department of the enormous Hawthorne works in Chicago. Invigorated by this new lifestyle and with the ballast of a regular income for the first time, he threw himself into life at the plant. The works provided great opportunities for his investigative mind and Juran was rapidly promoted.
In 1926, a team from Bell Laboratories arrived at the plant to apply their tools (which included methods of statistical quality control) to the plant’s workings. A training plan was developed, and Juran was chosen as one of the trainees. He became one of the engineers chosen to oversee the new inspection statistical department.
This new role was to pave the way for the course of Juran’s professional life. By 1937, he had been made the head of industrial engineering at the company’s headquarters. ‘I didn’t choose quality,’ Juran is quick to point out, ‘it was chosen for me by the powers that be… My employers were pleased with my analytical achievements, so I was promoted into a managerial position.’
Spending a period in Washington with the Lend-Lease Administration in 1941, Juran experimented for the first time with processes, and successfully reduced the number of documents that were handled which sped up the shipment process and reduced costs.
Downstream
It was after this that Juran took the decision to go solo and launch his own ‘canoe’, as he calls it. He embarked on a career as an independent proponent and consultant in quality management. This was the most rewarding ‘zone’ of his career; this ‘blissful life as an international author, lecturer and consultant,’ constituted ‘the best years of my professional life’, he recalls fondly.
Juran’s impact on Japanese manufacturing is well-documented. He was invited by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers and Keidanren (Japanese Federation of Economic Organisations) to lecture there, following a successful visit to the country by Juran’s friend and fellow quality guru, W Edwards Deming.
Although Juran downplays the significance of his time in Japan - he believes that without American experts lecturing there in the 1950s ‘it might have taken them two or three years longer to arrive at the same place’ - it is widely seen as the moment the country embarked on its journey to becoming a world-renowned manufacturer of the highest quality goods. In fact, almost 30 years after Juran’s first visit, Emperor Hirohito awarded him with the Order of the Sacred Treasure for ‘the development of quality control in Japan and the facilitation of US and Japanese friendship.’
The only immortality
Juran’s literature is his greatest legacy. A prolific writer, his early works continue to resonate around the world. In 1951, he wrote the Quality Control Handbook, a standard reference work on quality control which is a vital source of practical information designed to help organisations improve the quality of its products.
Juran’s sphere of influence spread even more when Managerial Breakthrough was published in 1964 - he was particularly respected for his ability to analyse trends in management theory and practice. A more general text, it expounded the theory of quality management, innovatively detailing a step-by-step approach for improvement.
Published in 1986, the Juran Trilogy provided a fundamental platform for quality management. It was split into the three major management processes necessary for improvement: quality planning (identifying the customers, ascertaining their needs and developing a product that fulfils those requirements), quality improvement (creating and optimising a process that will produce a product) and quality control (demonstrating the process can create the product in operating conditions).
Making a series of lectures in his ‘The Last Word’ tour between 1993 and 1994, Juran stopped making public appearances to make more time for his writing and family. Imposing on himself an unforgiving writing schedule from 8am to 8pm, he is currently writing a new book - which has ‘no precendent that I know of ’, he says - a ‘how to do’ called How to Manage for Quality, aimed at managers and senior managers. Formulating outlines with the help of his grandson, Juran is ‘fleshing it out at the moment. It’s due to be published at the end of 2005, if I last that long!’
Spreading the word
The Juran Institute was founded in 1979 as a vehicle to spread his ideas. The institute was highly successful, but Juran stepped down as its chair in 1987 due to pressures on his time. He admits that he ‘felt relief ’ when he relinquished control over the institute. ‘Based on my previous experience I realised that I don’t want a boss, and I don’t want to be the boss of anyone else. The institute engulfed me - it became my master instead of my servant.’ Juran also founded the Juran Foundation, but it was later assimilated into the University of Minnesota Business School which, he says, seemed to have similar objectives as the foundation: ‘I was worried about what would happen to the foundation when I was gone, so the foundation donated to the university’s Center for Leadership Excellence $2,000,000 - it’s now called the Juran Center for Leadership and Quality’. It will continue to cultivate and extend Juran’s principles above and beyond business and into education and other areas.
So what advice could Juran give a new quality manager? ‘The first thing is that he should certainly put his information into the money equivalence. The language is more than one in a company. The main language of quality managers is one of ‘things’ - materials etc.
For senior management, it is the language of money - revenue and profits. When communicating with senior management, quality managers need to use the senior management’s language of money rather than their own.’
But learning is an organic, constantly evolving process, he says, and patience and an eye for detail are of paramount importance. Writing his new book, which has a section on product development, he is ‘having to slave rather diligently to catch up with the field. There is much drudgery involved in formulating the phraseology, drafting and redrafting.’
Dr Juran may be approaching his centenary, but he is not slowing down and appears to still be following his dictum: ‘What I want to do has no end,’ he has written, ‘since I am on the endless frontier of a branch of knowledge. I can go on as long as the years are granted to me’.
