W. Edwards Deming

William Edwards Deming was an American statistician and engineer who developed his early quality-management ideas at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where Walter Shewhart mentored him in statistical process control, before joining the United States Census Bureau. Invited by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers, Deming spent much of 1950 lecturing Japanese industrial engineers and executives on statistical quality control; his teaching that quality is built into a process through cooperation between management and labor, rather than inspected into a finished product, was widely credited with helping postwar Japanese manufacturing rebuild its reputation. Japan's Union of Scientists and Engineers named its own annual quality award, the Deming Prize, after him, and Japan awarded him its Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1960. He later summarized his approach as fourteen points for management in his 1986 book Out of the Crisis.