Thinking about Quality: Progress, Wisdom, and the Deming Philosophy

Emerging from cataclysmic WW II destruction, Japan adopted quality standards of continual improvement that propelled the country into the international marketplace. The system's architect was the mercurial W. Edwards Deming, who in 1950 began to help Japan to change its industrial management methods. The next year, the Japanese government created the prestigious Deming Award to honor corporate quality successes. Dobyns and Crawford-Mason ( Quality or Else: The Revolution in World Business ) describe Deming's didactic teaching methods and 14 points of quality: break down barriers between staff areas; eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets; institute education and self-improvement; etc. ``The Deming management system takes years to implement because it is a philosophy, not a technique,'' stress the authors, who collaborated with the late Deming on the Deming Library, a 15-volume videocassette series. They here present an effective work about one of the major management thinkers of this century. Illustrated. (Apr.)