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Quality or Else: The Revolution in World Business
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19643 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1991 |
11,453 Words |
| Author
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Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason
Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason have collaborated with
W. Edward Deming on the best-selling twenty volumes Video
Library. Dobyns, an award-winning journalist, held numerous
anchor and reporting posts at NBC News. He lives in Garner,
North Carolina. Crawford-Mason was senior producer at NBC
News, Washington bureau chief of People, and a
reporter/columnist for the Washington Star and the Washington
Daily News. She lives in Washington, D.C. |
Prehistoric man may have invented quality by accident, as Peter Scholtes suggests, but its beginning in modern times was not an accident and can be dated, at least by those who think that statistics led to quality in mass production--and among the experts, almost everyone does. Blanton Godfrey, at one time head of theory and technology at AT&T's Quality Assurance Center, says the quality movement started on May 16, 1924, the day Walter. A Shewhart gave his boss at Bell Labs at 63 West Street in New York a one-page memo, including a drawing of what may have been the first control chart. The memo suggested a way of using statistics to improve quality in telephones, which the company was all but desperate to do. Western Electric used "as alike as two telephones" in its ads, hoping to replace "as alike as two peas in a pod" in common usage.
The telephone company was growing, people demanded reliable phones, and the technical problems were severe. Of the 40,000 employees making telephone equipment at Western Electrics Hawthorne Works in Chicago, about 5,200 were in the inspection department. Shewhart, the company's leading theoretician, taught his statistical methods at Hawthorne and other plants. Within a few years, Western Electric put out a handbook of quality control methods that became an industrial bible. Two of the four Americans now recognized as quality experts were at Hawthorne. Joseph M. Juran worked in inspection and knew Shewhart; W. Edwards Deming was in research and development but did not work with Shewhart until later, in New York and Washington.
The other two recognized American experts, Philip B. Crosby and Armand V. Feigenbaum, did not work for the telephone company. Feigenbaum met Shewhart on several occasions, but Crosby did not. Feigenbaum, born in 1920, worked at GE in Schenectady, New York in the summers during college, then joined the company full time when he graduated in 1942. He stayed for twenty-six years. Crosby, the youngest of the four, was born in 1926; he still resents that, when he was already in his sixties, Juran once called him "a young whippersnapper," which Juran denies. Crosby worked in industry for twenty-seven years. Both men started at the bottom--Feigenbaum as an apprentice toolmaker, Crosby as a junior technician--and worked their way up.
Outside their work, the four men seem to have only two things in common.
The first is that each of the four thinks the other three are not quite right, yet some similarities in the four methods are striking; the obvious conclusion is that over the
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