The Life and Contributions of Joseph M. Juran

Adapted from the script for the television documentary, An Immigrant's Gift. The film, produced by Howland Blackiston, explores quality's impact on society and the life and career of Dr. J.M. Juran. Script by John Butman and Jane Roessner.

Both the life and influence of Joseph M. Juran are characterized by a remarkable span and an extraordinary intensity. Born in 1904, Juran has been active for the bulk of the century, and influential for nearly half that period. Juran's major contribution to our world has been in the field of management, particularly quality management. Astute observer, attentive listener, brilliant synthesizer and prescient prognosticator, Juran has been called the "father" of quality, a quality "guru" and the man who"taught quality to the Japanese." Perhaps most important, he is recognized as the person who added the human dimension to quality-broadening it from its statistical origins to what we now call Total Quality Management.

Accurately defining Juran's role in the quality "movement" is as challenging as defining quality itself. Both seem quite basic and yet, on closer inspection, are revealed to be enormously complex. Certainly, Juran's body of work abounds with features that have anticipated and met the needs of his worldwide "customers." A list of only the brightest career highlights swiftly proves that assertion. In 1937, Juran conceptualized the Pareto principle, which millions of managers rely on to help separate the "vital few" from the "useful many" in their activities. He wrote the standard reference work on quality control, the Quality Control Handbook, first published in 1951 and now in its fourth edition. In 1954, he delivered a series of lectures to Japanese managers which helped set them on the path to quality. The classic book, Managerial Breakthrough, first published in 1964, presented a more general theory of quality management, comprising quality control and quality improvement. It was the first book to describe a step-by-step sequence for breakthrough improvement, a process that has become the basis for quality initiatives worldwide. In 1979, Juran founded the Juran Institute to create new tools and techniques for promulgating his ideas. The first was Juran on Quality Improvement, a pioneering series of video training programs.

The Quality Trilogy, published in 1986, identified a third aspect to quality management-quality planning. In addition to these accomplishments, there is Juran's seminal role as a teacher and lecturer, both at New York University and with the American Management Association. He also worked as a consultant to businesses and organizations in forty countries, and has made many other contributions to the literature -in more than twenty books and hundreds of published papers (translated into a total of seventeen languages) as well as dozens of video training programs.

But even the most comprehensive accounting of Juran's achievements (and the many honors and awards they have brought him) cannot express the richness and intensity of Juran's influence. Managers who have learned from Juran-and there are thousands and thousands of them worldwide-speak of his ideas with a respect that transcends appreciation and approaches reverence. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer and NeXT, refers with awe to Juran's "deep, deep contribution." Jungi Noguchi, Executive Director of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers, states categorically that, "Dr. Juran is the greatest authority on quality control in the entire world." Peter Drucker, the writer and theorist, asserts that, "Whatever advances American manufacturing has made in the last thirty to forty years, we owe to Joe Juran and to his untiring, steady, patient, self-effacing work."

Like many managers who look forward and see only a great struggle in achieving higher quality, Juran's early years were anything but free from trouble. Joseph Moses Juran was born December 24, 1904, in the city of Braila, then and now part of Romania. His father, Jakob, was a village shoemaker. Sometime after 1904, the family moved to Gurahumora, a Carpathian mountain village then a part of the Austria Hungarian Empire. Here, Juran writes, "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." In 1909, Jakob left Romania seeking a better life in America. His father's goodbye to five-year-old Joseph remains one of Juran's earliest memories-the boy would not see his father again for three years, when the entire family joined Jakob in Minnesota in 1912.

Life in America did not immediately change the fortunes of the Juran family. They exchanged the dirt floored house in Gurahumora for a tar-paper shack in the woods of Minneapolis. To make ends meet, the children went to work at whatever jobs they could find. Joe drove a team of horses, he worked as a laborer, a shoe salesman, bootblack, grocery clerk and as a bookkeeper for the local icehouse.

Joe was a bright, even brilliant boy. He so excelled in his school classes-math and physics, in particular that he was repeatedly pushed upward through the grades and wound up three years ahead of his age group. In 1920, Joe enrolled at the University of Minnesota, the first in his family to attend college. Here he discovered an activity that profoundly changed his outlook on life: chess. His analytical mind reveled in the intricacies and complexities of the ancient game; he became the university champion and performed well in state-wide competitions. For the first time, he felt the warmth of admiration and the pride of respect from others. This success at chess helped Joe revise his opinion of himself. Gradually, he shed the image of the skinny misfit and outsider; now he knew that his difference was in the nature of a gift, rather than a curse.

In 1924, Juran graduated with a BS in electrical engineering and took a job with Western Electric. He was assigned to the Inspection Department of the vast Hawthorne Works in Chicago, where 40,000 people worked, more than five thousand of them in inspection alone. Juran was intoxicated with this life characterized by steady work and steady pay, and-despite a complete ignorance of inspection or quality-plunged into his work with vigor. The Hawthorne plant spread out before him like a giant, three dimensional chessboard, bristling with opportunities for investigation and learning. With his capacious brain and indefatigable memory, Juran soon developed what he calls "an encyclopedic knowledge of the place." It would have been impossible for Hawthorne's managers to miss Juran's intellectual and analytic gifts, and he quickly moved through a series of line management and staff jobs. In 1926, a team from Bell Laboratories made a visit to the Hawthorne factory. The team was made up of some of the pioneers of statistical quality control-including Donald Quarles, Walter Shewhart and Harold Dodge-and their intention was to apply some of the tools and methods they had been developing in the laboratory to operations in the Hawthorne plant. Working in collaboration with Walter Bartky, an eminent professor from the University of Chicago, the team established a training program at the factory. Juran was selected as one of the twenty trainees, and then as one of two engineers for the nascent. Inspection Statistical Department. It was one of the first such departments established in industry in this country. In retrospect, the greatest significance of this department may have been that it set Juran firmly on the path toward his life's work.

In 1928, Juran authored his first work on the subject of quality, a training pamphlet called Statistical Methods Applied to Manufacturing Problems, which explored the use of sampling in analyzing and controlling manufacturing quality. It became an input to the well-known AT&T Statistical Quality Control Handbook, still published today.

In 1937, Juran found himself as the head of Industrial Engineering at Western Electric's corporate headquarters in New York. During this period, he became a kind of in-house consultant, visiting and exchanging ideas about industrial engineering with many U.S. companies. It was on one such visit, to General Motors in Detroit, that he first conceptualized the Pareto principle.

In December of 1941, Juran took a "temporary" leave of absence from Western Electric to serve in Washington as an assistant administrator with the Lend-Lease Administration, which managed the shipment of goods and material to friendly nations deemed crucial to the war effort. Here, Juran first experimented with what today might be called "business process re-engineering." He led a multi-agency team that successfully eliminated the paper logjam that kept critical shipments stalled on the docks. The team redesigned the shipment process, reducing the number of documents required and significantly cutting costs. Juran's temporary assignment stretched to four years.

On September 1, 1945, Juran left Washington and, at the same time, disembarked what he called the "ocean liner" of Western Electric and launched his untested and unproven "canoe" as an independent. He would, he had decided, devote the rest of his life to the subject of quality management. His plan was to do it all: philosophize, write, lecture, and consult.

The seaworthiness of Juran's canoe was proven decisively in 1951, with the publication of his Quality Control Handbook. The Handbook established Juran's reputation as an authority on quality and became the standard reference work for quality managers throughout the world. On the strength of the book, Juran found himself in great demand as a lecturer and consultant, and its reputation extended well beyond the borders of the United States.

In 1954, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers and Keidanren invited the celebrated author to Japan to deliver a series of lectures. These talks about managing for quality were delivered soon after another American, W. Edwards Deming, delivered his lectures on statistical quality methods. Taken together, the visits represent the opening chapter of a story that every business manager in every country in the world knows by heart-Japan's remarkable ascent from its pre-war position as a producer of poor quality, manufactured goods for export to its current reputation as a world paragon of manufacturing quality. Although Juran down plays the significance of his lectures there, the Japanese themselves do not. Nearly thirty years after his first visit, Emperor Hirohito awarded him Japan's highest award that can be given to a non-Japanese, the Order of the Sacred Treasure. It was bestowed in recognition of his contribution to "the development of quality control in Japan and the facilitation of U.S. and Japanese friendship."

With the publication of Managerial Breakthrough in 1964, Juran's sphere of influence broadened further still and he became a trusted authority to general managers-in addition to quality managers-who came to rely on him as a source of knowledge and guidance. Gradually, Juran became recognized as an insightful analyst of developments and trends throughout the field of management theory and practice. As early as 1966, Juran warned Western business that "The Japanese are heading for world quality leadership, and will attain it in the next two decades." In 1969, he noted the growing dependence of the technological society on effective quality control. He has often referred to the "quality dikes" which serve as our best protection against such catastrophic breaches of quality as the Chernobyl and Bhopal disasters. In 1973, he argued that the "scientific management" model first espoused by Frederick Taylor in 1911 was antiquated and needed replacement. In the same year, he began to advocate that quality concepts are equally as applicable to service activities as they are to manufacturing.

In 1979, after twenty-eight years of what Juran calls a "blissful life as an international author, lecturer and consultant," he changed course once again. Overcoming his reluctance to create an institution-which he feared would become his master rather his servant-he founded Juran Institute. The immediate purpose of the Institute was to provide a continuity of Juran's ideas through an emerging form-video programs.

The video series, Juran on Quality Improvement, met with great success, and the proceeds served to fund a host of other activities. Even with the responsibilities of this new role-which never ceased to be a burden to Juran, despite the Institute's success-he continued to write, lecture, and consult. In 1986, Juran expanded his analysis of the role managers must play in the quality process with publication of The Quality Trilogy. Also in that year, he helped with the creation of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, testifying before Congress and serving on the Board of Overseers.

In 1987, Dr. Juran, with a sigh of relief, relinquished his leadership of Juran Institute, Inc. After a triumphant series of lectures in 1993-94, "The Last Word" tour, he ceased all public appearances in order to devote his time to writing projects and family obligations.

As a result of the power and clarity of Joseph Juran's thinking and the scope of his influence, business leaders, legions of managers and his fellow theorists worldwide recognize Dr. Juran as one of "the vital few"-a seminal figure in the development of management theory. Juran has contributed more to the field-and over a longer period of time-than any other person, and yet, feels he has barely scratched the surface of his subject. "What I want to do has no end," he writes, "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."

Today, Juran focuses his attention on a new mission: repaying the debt he feels he owes this country for providing him great opportunity and exceptional success. The sourness and the grudge he felt toward his life as a boy have long since been replaced with an abiding gratitude and affection. Juran has established The Juran Foundation to explore the "impact of quality on society" and make his contributions in the field-and those of others-available to serve society in a positive way. "My job of contributing to the welfare of my fellow man," writes Juran, "is the great unfinished business."