The Quality Gurus

people who have made contributions to the field of quality management

Deming

Dr. W. Edwards Deming* was a statistician and a student of Dr. Shewhart. His early career was spent teaching the application of statistical concepts and tools within industry. Latterly he developed a theory of management and "Profound Knowledge". Deming was well known to the Japanese and their national award for quality management was named for him. He remained largely unknown in his native USA until he was 'discovered' by the media in 1981. He continued to write and to deliver his four-day seminar (with the famous 'red bead' experiment) until his death in 1993.

Juran

Dr. Joseph Juran is a management consultant and a prolific author whose hallmark is a common-sense, practical approach. Like Deming he was instrumental in helping the Japanese to learn and apply quality management in the 1950's. He has written and edited a number of authoritative books and countless articles. He is also the founder of the Juran Institute, a research and consulting organization.

Crosby

Phil Crosby was a highly successful quality manager within ITT, and rose to become an executive. Approaching retirement, he wrote "Quality is Free", which was an immediate best-seller, and he went on to establish a training and consulting company. One of the key features of Crosby's approach is the use of financial indicators of waste (e.g. the cost of poor quality) to capture management's attention.

Baldrige

Malcolm Baldrige* is not generally considered to be one of the quality management 'gurus' (he was the US Secretary of Commerce from 1981 to 1987) – but the creation of the award named for him was one of the landmark events in rekindling interest in quality management in North America. The Baldrige award criteria is an important tool that defines the elements of an effective, customer-focused management system based upon quality principles. It is widely used for educational and assessment purposes.

Shewhart

Dr. Walter A. Shewhart is considered the father of Statistical Process Control (SPC). Shewhart worked in Bell Laboratories and was engaged in a search for practical methods of quality control for the emerging telephone industry, which required mass production on a huge scale. His ideas, published in the 1930's, formed the basis for a system/process oriented approach to quality control, by viewing any repetitive activity as a process and using statistics to understand and to manage the variations that will always occur.

* Deming and Baldrige have in common that many people find their names tricky to spell. Common mispellings of Baldrige include: Baldridge, Balridge, Balderige, Ballrige and Ballgrige. Common mispellings of Deming include: Demming and Deeming.

TQM Resources | Baldrige Resources