Improvement Insights Blog

Joseph Juran felt that the American Society for Quality focused too heavily on statistics and not enough on quality as a management discipline.

“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“Again, I was looking through my old Quality Progress [issues] about Juran, and in here he said he was very dissatisfied with the statistical orientation of the American Society for Quality. He thought there was too much emphasis on that. He did think one of the biggest barriers to anything is just plain old resistance to change, and an interesting thing in this article [was that] people thought that the whole part of Total Quality Management… they thought that Deming was really “Mr. SPC” and then Juran was really “Quality Management.” (How do you turn quality into a management discipline?), and then back when there was TQM, they ascribed that to Feigenbaum.

“But Deming and Juran came at it from two different perspectives: one was the statistical side, the other was the management side. I think that if you look around, Juran’s influence was very strong… very strong.

“So, you know, maybe… maybe we’re spending too much time on statistics when we should get better at just solving problems and making things better, faster and cheaper.

“That’s my Improvement Insight. Let’s go out and improve something this week.”