W. Edwards Deming Philosophy

W. Edwards Deming Philosophy       Student:   Professor:   Course title:   Date:             Abstract W. Edwards Deming was a teacher, an author, a consultant, and an adviser to some of the most prominent companies, business people, as well as scientific pioneers of business process reengineering. His message, directed chiefly at management, is described in a few words in his well-known fourteen points for management. In the year 1950, business leaders in Japan invited this quality guru to teach engineers and executives with regard to the new methods. Companies in Japan rapidly implemented Deming’s 14-point plan method, and this resulted in a commitment to quality control which helped Japanese corporations dominate some product markets in several parts of the globe. Keywords: Total Quality Management, 14 Points, Deming philosophy, Japanese manufacturers                   W. Edwards Deming Philosophy The quality guru: Life and philosophy of W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) W. Edwards Deming was a teacher, an author, a consultant, and an adviser to some of the most prominent companies, business people, as well as scientific pioneers of business process reengineering. In Japan, W. Edwards Deming has been described as a national folk hero given that he was very much responsible for guiding and inspiring the spectacular rise of Japanese industry following the Second World War (Swinton, 2009). This quality guru was born in the year 1900 and was trained as a physicist. He studied at University of Wyoming and University of Colorado before going to Yale and graduated from there with a Doctorate Degree in the year 1928. Deming became Walter Shewhart’s student as he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bendel, 2010). Deming worked at the Western Electric Plant in the state of Illinois, and learned the early quality control theories of Walter Shewhart during this time. For the following 19 years after earning his PhD in the year 1928, Deming worked for several branches of the federal government (Smith, 2010). Following the Second World War, this quality guru renounced his career with the government to begin his own global consulting company with the aim of helping war-torn nations rebuild their economies. He travelled to several different nations including Mexico, West Germany, India, Turkey, and Greece. It was in Japan, nevertheless, that this quality guru made his biggest mark (Gitlow, 2005).   Deming, in the year 1946, became a statistics professor at New York University’s Graduate School of Business Administration (Smith, 2010). In the year 1947, Deming was hired in Japan to help this country in preparing for its census in 1951. During the era of his celebrated turnaround activities in Japan where he taught 20,000 engineers in rudimentary statistical techniques in just ten years, he followed the same mission in America but it took people in the United States much longer than in Japan to consider his teachings. In the year 1988, W. Edwards Deming joined Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business after being inv...