Joseph M. Juran
Joseph Moses Juran (December 24, 1904 �
February 28, 2008) was a 20th Century management consultant who is
principally remembered as an evangelist for quality and quality
management, writing several influential books on those subjects. He was
also the brother of Academy Award winner Nathan H. Juran.
Early life of Joseph Juran
Juran was born to a Jewish family in 1904
in Brăila, Romania, and later lived in Gura Humorului. In 1912, he
immigrated to America with his family, settling in Minneapolis,
Minnesota. Juran excelled in school, especially in mathematics. He was a
chess champion at an early age, and dominated chess at Western Electric.
Juran graduated from Minneapolis South High School in 1920.
In 1924, with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the
University of Minnesota, Juran joined Western Electric's Hawthorne
Works. His first job was troubleshooting in the Complaint Department. In
1925, Bell Labs proposed that Hawthorne Works personnel be trained in
its newly-developed statistical sampling and control chart techniques.
Juran was chosen to join the Inspection Statistical Department, small
group of engineers charged with applying and disseminating Bell Labs'
statistical quality control innovations. This highly-visible position
fueled Juran's rapid ascent in the organization and the course of his
later career.
In 1926, he married Sadie Shapiro, and they subsequently had four
children: Robert, Sylvia, Charles and Donald. They had been married for
over 81 years when he passed away in 2008.
Juran was promoted to department chief in 1928, and the following year
became a division chief. He published his first quality related article
in Mechanical Engineering in 1935. In 1937, he moved to Western
Electric/AT&T's headquarters in New York City.
As a hedge against the uncertainties of the Great Depression, he
enrolled in Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 1931. He
graduated in 1935 and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1936, though
he never practiced Law.
During the Second World War, through an arrangement with his employer,
Juran served in the Lend-Lease Administration and Foreign Economic
Administration. Just prior to the war's end, he resigned from both
Western Electric and his government post with the intention of becoming
a freelance consultant. He joined the faculty of New York University as
an adjunct Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering, where
he taught courses in quality control and ran round table seminars for
executives. He also worked through a small management consulting firm on
projects for Gilette, Hamilton Watch Company and Borg-Warner. After the
firm's owner's sudden death, Juran began his own independent practice,
from which he made a comfortable living until his retirement in the late
1990s. His early clients included the now defunct Bigelow-Sanford Carpet
Company, the Koppers Company, the International Latex Company, Bausch &
Lomb and General Foods.
Japan
The end of World War II compelled Japan to
change its focus from becoming a military power to becoming an economic
one. Despite its ability to compete on price, Japanese consumer goods
manufacturers suffered from a long-established reputation of poor
quality. The first edition of Juran's Quality Control Handbook in 1951
attracted the attention of the Japanese Union of Scientists and
Engineers (JUSE) which invited him to Japan in 1952. When he finally
arrived in Japan in 1954, Juran met with ten manufacturing companies,
notably Showa Denko, Nippon Kōgaku, Noritake, and Takeda Pharmaceutical
Company. He also lectured at Hakone, Waseda University, Ōsaka, and
Kōyasan. During his life he made ten visits to Japan, the last in 1990.
Working independently of W. Edwards Deming (who focused on the use of
statistical quality control), Juran - who focused on managing for
quality - went to Japan and started courses (1954) in Quality
Management. The training started with top and middle management. The
idea that top and middle management need training had found resistance
in the United States. For Japan, it would take some 20 years for the
training to pay off. In the 1970s, Japanese products began to be seen as
the leaders in quality. This sparked a crisis in the United States due
to quality issues in the 1980s.
Pareto principle
It was in 1941 that Juran discovered
the work of Vilfredo Pareto. Juran expanded
the Pareto principle applying it to quality issues (e.g. 80% of a
problem is caused by 20% of the causes). This is also known as "the
vital few and the trivial many". In later years Juran has preferred "the
vital few and the useful many" to signal that the remaining 80% of the
causes should not be totally ignored.
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Contribution to Management
When he began his career in the 1920s the
principal focus in quality management was on the quality of the end, or
finished, product. The tools used were from the Bell system of sampling,
inspection plans, (tables), and the Shewhart control charts. The ideas
of Frederick Winslow Taylor dominated.
Juran is widely credited for adding the human dimension to quality
management. He pushed for the education and training of managers. For
Juran, human relations problems were the ones to isolate. Resistance to
change�or, in his terms, cultural resistance�was the root cause of
quality issues.
Later life and death
Juran credits Margaret Mead's book
Cultural Patterns and Technical Change for illuminating the core problem
in reforming business quality. He wrote Managerial Breakthrough, which
was published in 1964, outlining the issue.
In 1966, Juran promoted the Japanese idea of quality circles.
He also developed the "Juran's trilogy," an approach to cross-functional
management that is composed of three managerial processes: planning,
control, and improvement.
In 1979, Juran founded the Juran Institute, and in 2004, he became
honorary doctor at Lule� University of Technology in Sweden.
Juran died of a stroke at age 103 in Rye, New York.
Bibliography of Joseph Juran
- Juran, Joseph M. (1944).
Bureaucracy, a challenge to better management. New York, London,
Harper & Bros. OCLC 986504.
- Juran, Joseph M. (1945).
Management of inspection and quality control. New York, London,
Harper & Bros. OCLC 1744335.
- Juran, Joseph M.; Frank M. Gryna
(1951). Juran's Quality Control Handbook. Mcgraw-Hill. ISBN
0-07-033176-6.
- Quality Control Handbook (1951) a
landmark guide to quality tools and ideas. (fifth edition, 1999)
- Case Studies in Industrial
Management, 1955 (fourth edition, 1988)
- The Corporate Director, 1966
- Managerial Breakthrough,
McGraw-Hill, 1964 . ISBN 0-07-034037-4
- Planning for Quality, 1988
- Leadership for Quality, An
Executive Handook, N.Y Freepress, 1989
- Quality By Design, The Free Press
, 1992
- A History of Managing for Quality,
- Architect of Quality, McGraw-Hill,
2003 , his autobiography.
Joseph M. Juran
Joseph M. Juran made many contributions to
the field of quality management in his 70+ active working years. His
book, the Quality Control Handbook, is a classic reference for quality
engineers. He revolutionized the Japanese philosophy on quality
management and in no small way worked to help shape their economy into
the industrial leader it is today. Dr. Juran was the first to
incorporate the human aspect of quality management which is referred to
as Total Quality Management.
The process of developing ideas was a gradual one for Dr. Juran. Top
management involvement, the Pareto principle, the need for widespread
training in quality, the definition of quality as fitness for use, the
project-by-project approach to quality improvement--these are the ideas
for which Juran is best known, and all emerged gradually.
A Lifetime of Professional and
Worldwide Quality
Braila, Romania. December, 1904. The
threadbare Jakob Juran family welcomes a newborn son, Joseph Moses. Five
years later Jakob leaves Romania for America. By 1912, he has earned
enough to bring the rest of the family to join him in Minnesota. Despite
this hopeful emigration and American opportunities, the family continues
in poverty.
Young Joseph Juran demonstrates his affinity for knowledge; in school,
his level of mathematical and scientific proficiency so exceeds the
average that he eventually skips the equivalent of four grade levels. In
1920, he enrolls at the University of Minnesota, the first member of his
family to pursue higher education. By 1925, he had received a B.S. in
electrical engineering and is working with Western Electric in the
Inspection Department of the famous Hawthorne Works in Chicago. The
complexity of this enormous factory, manned by 40,000 workers, presents
Juran with his first challenge in management.
In 1926, a team of Quality Control pioneers from Bell Laboratories
brought a new program to Hawthorne Works. The program, designed to
implement new tools and techniques, required a training program. From a
group of 20 trainees, Juran became one of two engineers for the
Inspection Statistical Department, one of the first of such divisions
created in American industry.
By 1937, Juran was the chief of Industrial Engineering at Western
Electric's home office in New York. His work involved visiting other
companies and discussing methods of quality management. During WWII,
Juran's temporary leave of absence from Western Electric stretched
through four years. During that time, he served in Washington, D.C. as
an assistant administrator for the Lend-Lease Administration. He and his
team improved the efficiency of the process, eliminating excessive
paperwork and thus hastening the arrival of supplies to the United
States' overseas friends. Juran finally left Washington in 1945, but he
didn't return to Western Electric. Rather, he chose to devote the
remainder of his life to the study of quality management.
As early as 1928, Juran had written a pamphlet entitled "Statistical
Methods Applied to Manufacturing Problems." By the end of the war, he
was a well-known and highly-regarded statistician and industrial
engineering theorist. After he left Western Electric, Juran became
Chairman of the Department of Administrative Engineering at New York
University, where he taught for many years. He also created a thriving
consulting practice, and wrote books and delivered lectures for American
Management Association. It was his time with NYU and the AMA which
allowed for the development of his management philosophies which are now
embedded in the foundation of American and Japanese management. His
classic book, the Quality Control Handbook, first released in 1951, is
still the standard reference work for quality managers. The following
table outlines the major points of Dr. Juran's quality management ideas:
Quality Trilogy:
1. Quality Planning
- Identify who are the customers.
- Determine the needs of those
customers.
- Translate those needs into our
language.
- Develop a product that can respond
to those needs.
- Optimise the product features so
as to meet our needs and customer needs.
2. Quality Improvement
- Develop a process which is able to
produce the product.
- Optimise the process.
3. Quality Control
- Prove that the process can produce
the product under operating conditions with minimal inspection.
- Transfer the process to
Operations.
An Honored Theorist
The Union of Japanese Scientists and
Engineers invited Dr. Juran to Japan, to teach them the principles of
quality management as they rebuilt their economy. Along with W. Edwards
Deming, his more colorful and perhaps better-known American colleague,
Juran received Second Order of the Sacred Treasure award from Emperor
Hirohito of Japan. Dr. Juran published his lectures from Japan in his
book Managerial Breakthrough in 1964. In 1979, Juran founded The Juran
Institute to better facilitate broader exposure of his ideas. The Juran
Institute is today one of the leading quality management consultancies
in the world, and it produces books, workbooks, videos and other
materials to support the wide use of Dr. Juran's methods. The institute
and the consulting practice continues to thrive today. Dr. Juran worked
to promote quality management into his 90's, and only recently retired
from his semi-public life. One can obtain the papers, lectures, and
tapes of Dr. Juran from The Juran Institute or other quality management
educational providers. The Juran Foundation, which he founded, continues
his work, exploring the social and industrial implications of quality
improvement while making his and others' valuable contributions more
accessible.
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_M._Juran
http://www.skymark.com/resources/leaders/juran.asp
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