[The following obituary on Dr. W. Edwards Deming appears on page C9 of the 21 December 1993 edition of _The_Washington_Post_.] W. Edwards Deming Dies; His Lecture on Quality Control Fueled Japan's Rise By Claudia Levy Washington Post Staff Writer W. Edwards Deming, 93, the quality control guru who was instrumental in steering Japan from post-World War II industrial recovery toward world economic power, died of cancer Dec. 20 at his home in Washington. Dr. Deming, who was virtually unknown to the American general public, was a major public figure in Japan, where he had been held in awe for more than 40 years. He had first visited Japan in 1947, but he made his great mark in 1950 when he gave a landmark series of lectures to leading industrialists on the gospel of "quality control." His advice helped them raise their country from the ashes of World War II to enormous industrial power. Japan's manufacturers were eager to learn about American business techniques. But Dr. Deming urged them to eschew inefficient American methods and create new systems that focused on the consumer. He told them, in short, that they could do better than Americans. Eighty percent of Japan's top business and industry leaders, or about 230 officials, managed to attend the eight day-long lectures. Dr. Deming convinced the Japanese that focusing on quality, and producing goods that didn't break or wear out, could make them a force in world markets. At the time, "Made in Japan" was synonymous with cheap products and inferior construction. The country was locked in poverty created by the devastation of World War II, and economic planners thought it would be a miracle if the pre-war standard of living could be restored. Within months of his lecture series, Japanese companies began instituting the statistical consultant's ideas and eliminating waste that had helped suppress industrial growth. While energy consumption dropped, quality rose, and Japan's economic strength increased dramatically. "I told them that Japanese industry could develop in a short time," Dr. Deming told an interviewer in 1980. "I told them that they could invade the markets of the world and have manufacturers screaming for protection in five years. I was, in 1950, the only man in Japan who believed that." He told them that it was always cheaper to do the job right the first time than to let defects enter the production line. "Quality is not something you install like a new carpet or set of bookshelves," he would say. "You implant it. Quality is something you work at. It is a learning process." "We needed his authority," one Japanese industrialist said. "He fascinated the Japanese people." In later years, when Dr. Deming returned to Japan, he was always welcomed back by extensive television coverage and bowing dignitaries. "He is considered like a god," the director of the U.S. office of the Japan Productivity Center told Washington Post staff writer John Burgess in 1988. Since 1951, Japan has yearly awarded prestigious "Deming Prizes" to companies that excel in management and production. Another mark of the esteem in which he is held in Japan can be seen in the main lobby of the Toyota headquarters building in Tokyo. Three portraits dominate the lobby, one of the company's founder, the second of its current board chairman and the third, and largest, of Dr. Deming. In the United States, the tall, craggy quality control specialist worked out of a basement office in his home near Westmoreland Circle in Northwest Washington. He had been a longtime professor of statistics at New York University and also had taught math, engineering and physics earlier in his career. He also had been a Washington civil servant. He was a specialist in statistical quality control, the careful monitoring and analysis of all aspects of production. He lectured businesses and other organizations about identifying weak points and eliminating defects. He urged manufacturers to involve workers in decision-making. In recent years, his teachings have been more readily embraced by American industrialists anxious to compete with the Japanese. Some, including automakers, have reported improvements in productivity. One outgrowth of his Japanese lectures was the creation of so-called quality circles, committees of workers trained to analyze and solve quality problems. Widely adopted in Japan since the 1950s, quality circles first appeared in this country at Lockheed Missile and Space Co. in 1974. A decade later, there were thought to be more than 3,000 such circles at U.S. compa- nies, including 90 percent of the Fortune 500 corporations. He advised cooperation over competition, both with employees and subcontractors. Rather than switching from supplier to supplier to get the best price, he counseled, a company should settle on one supplier and build a long-term relationship. But for years, American industrialists thought Dr. Deming's ideas would prove too hard to institute, saying that management and workers differ in many ways from those in Japan. Dr. Deming remained largely a prophet without honor in his own land until 1980. It was a year in which the per capita gross national product in the United States, once first in the world, had fallen to seventh place, and the Japanese had come to dominate consumer goods markets. That summer, NBC News broadcast a special report, featuring Dr. Deming and others, called "If Japan Can . . . Why Can't We?" It helped generate new interest in the manufacturing techniques of Japan. NBC received thousands of requests for videotapes and transcripts. American companies anxious about foreign competitors began to seek Dr. Deming's advice. He become a consultant at Fortune 500 companies, including Ford and General Motors. Dr. Deming was born in Iowa and raised in Wyoming. He was an elec- trical engineering graduate of the University of Wyoming and received a doctorate, in mathematics and physics, from Yale University. He came to Washington in 1927 to do research for the Agriculture Department on the physical properties of compressed gases. By 1936, he was in charge of courses in mathematics and statistics at the Agriculture Department's graduate school. He joined the Census Bureau in 1939 as head mathematician and statistician and began lecturing about quality control. His work during World War II focused on teaching American engineers and technicians to use statistics to improve the quality of war materiel. It was essentially the same course he de- livered to post-war Japan. He joined the NYU faculty in 1945. He was a member of the International Statistical Institute and the National Academy of Engineering. He was elected to the Science and Technology and the Automotive halls of fame. His books included "Out of Crisis" and "The New Economics." Dr. Deming's first wife, Agnes Deming, died in 1930, and their adopted daughter, Dorothy Deming Baker, died in 1984. His second wife, Lola Deming, a researcher at the National Bureau of Standards, died in 1986. Survivors include two daughters from his second marriage, Diana Deming of Los Angeles and Linda Ratcliff of Potomac; seven grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.