[The following article appears in _The_Community_Quality_Journal_, Special 1994, pages 4, 12, and 13.] W. EDWARDS DEMING BY HIS WORKS SHALL YE KNOW HIM A Tribute to Dr. Deming by Myron Tribus, P.E (Ed.-Up till his 93rd year when he passed away, Dr. W. Edwards Deming was an active man who did not retire from life--continuously he sought to learn and grow. He was a man on a mission. Even though Deming was physically incapacitat- ed by illness in his last years, he continued to write and lecture to people around the world. The following was taken from a speech by Dr. Myron Tribus to honor Dr. Deming, who was the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award from the National Society of Professional Engineers in Pitts- burgh, Pennsylvania on July 19, 1993. It serves as an appro- priate tribute to the man who many regard as the Father of The Third Wave of the Industrial Revolution.) While Henry Ford and Frederick Winslow Taylor made enormous contributions to factory production, W. Edwards Deming has gone beyond them. He has influenced every facet of work in every industry, including government, schools, and hospitals. In short, Dr. Deming has had a profound effect on how we think, how we behave, how we see ourselves, and how we relate to our customers, to one another, and to society. Over a full lifetime, Dr. Deming has labored to lift us to a higher plane of service and fulfill- ment. Thanks to Ceil Kilian, his secretary of over thirty-five years, we have Dr. Deming's publications list covering the years 1928 to 1991. To what did he pay attention? In 1928, we find a 28 year old newly minted Ph.D. in Physics writing about equipotential surfaces for electrons and the effect on the structure of materials. He started his career already at the frontiers of physics. In the next four years he published a number of papers on the properties of industrially important gases. If you look closely, you will see that most of the papers were published with Lola E. Shupe. In 1934 he concluded his work on the properties of gases and at the same time brought to conclusion another project, which is not documented in the literature, but can be inferred from his publications. We see that his coauthor has changed her name to Lola S. Deming! We can only guess what was going on during those four years when the record merely shows that he devoted his energies to research. He did not publish much about the "second research project", probably because it did not come under the heading of original research, but the record shows it produced three daughters, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. In 1934 he began to move away from physics and physical chemistry and published his first paper in the field of statis- tics. By 1937 he had teamed up with Raymond T. Birge, writing a paper on the statistical theory of errors. This was no simple recitation of old ideas. The paper runs forty-two pages in _Reviews_of_Modern Physics_. Dr. Deming also teamed up in 1940 with Edward Teller to write a paper dealing with absorption of gases. Up to the age of forty, therefore, we can think of him as a physicist, capable of working with the leaders in his field, with a strong leaning towards statistics and its use in the interpretation of data. In the 1930's Dr. Deming was still deeply immersed in problems of physics. His publications up to 1940 reflect this interest. But we also can see a developing interest in statis- tics. By law the federal government is required to take a popula- tion census every ten years and in 1940 Deming became involved with the Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce. His techni- cal background made it natural for him to look at problems of the census in a scientific way. The proper tool for this task is statistics, and so we find in his list of publications a series of twenty-six papers dealing almost solely with problems of sam- pling, mostly with respect to the problem of taking a census. He stopped his publications in physics about this time. One paper, published in 1944, during World War II, intro- duced Shewhart's methods of quality control to engineers. This paper reflects two aspects of his career: a) his work at the Bell Laboratories with Shewhart and b) his concern that American engineers become acquainted with this powerful approach to production quality. We also know, from other sources, that Dr. Deming took the lead in getting this subject into the wartime training of engineers, giving the first course himself at Stan- ford University. This is the first documentation of the kind of man he was to become--When there is something that needs to be done, he just goes ahead and does it. In the period up to 1953 we find in his publication list a wide variety of interesting problems to which he applied statis- tical methods, such as sampling of the population in Greece, estimating birth and death rates, and the variation in accident rates from automobiles. These papers were published in several different countries and in several different professional jour- nals. They went far to establish his reputation as a skilled statistician. It would appear that from around 1945 onwards, people did not think of him as a physicist but as a statistician. It is not surprising, therefore, that when General MacArthur needed to make a population survey in Japan in 1948, he called upon W. Edwards Deming. In his publications we find no reference to the Japanese experience with census taking. But we do find that in 1953--three years after he started to work with Japanese managers--he started his crusade to bring quality management principles to American managers. In 1953 he published "Management's Responsibility for the Use of Statistical Techniques in Industry", thus marking the start of a theme he would pursue for the next forty years. He had begun to see the transformation in Japan and wanted to warn American managers. No one listened. From the 1950's to 1980 he continued to make contributions to a wide variety of fields. These included problems of the deaf, teaching statistics to people in industry, census taking with roving populations, and institutionalization of the elderly. During these years, another theme emerged. Dr. Deming, a man with a deep concern for humanity, reached out to the ill-treated of our society. He sought ways to help them, not by giving direct aid, but by improving the system in which they were caught. Another characteristic appears in the literature. He cares what happens in society and when he sees something that needs to be done, he goes ahead and does it, inviting others to join in the necessary work. I have purposely omitted from this review of the written record his extraordinary activities in the field of management. His books, his seminars, his videotapes, his lectures, and his publications are now so well known there is no need to chronicle them here. His writings have spawned a whole new industry of writing about quality, dominated by people who, having almost understood what he has said, scurry into print to explain it to the rest of us. Prior to going to Japan, it is evident, as we read about his experiences with Shewhart, that Dr.Deming early on had begun to see what could be done by enlightened management. He observed the way people were treated under what was called "Taylor's Scientif- ic Management" and he knew something of the costs in human, financial, and physical terms. There was waste all around and he saw, more clearly perhaps than Shewhart himself, how all of this could be traced back to management. His attempts to interest American managers came to naught, for we were then in an era of unprecedented growth and expansion, in which any damned fool could make a living, and the more ruthless could make a fortune. His impact in Japan has now been told so many times, I shall not discuss it here. What needs to be said, however, is what these activities reveal about the man himself. With a deep and abiding love for the human race, he saw that managerial practices were causing human waste and suffering. He dedicated his life to rectifying the root causes of our misery. He saw what needed to be done and he set about doing it. He knew that the only salvation for the Japanese would lie in a transformation of their management. So he insisted on lecturing to them. Why did he succeed? Well, for one thing, the Japanese were desperate. They listened. But they were also influenced by the fact that he was a generous, kind, and loving man. They say so in their recollections of his lectures. This side of Dr. Deming is hard for those American managers who have attended his lectures to understand, for when he sees them behaving badly, he does not hesitate to scold them publicly. They see him as tough and irascible. While he is tough on managers, he is gentle and caring with workers. If you do not believe this, take a look at the videotape of his discussions with workers at the Pontiac plant, made in 1981. In Japan another side of his character is evident when he refused to take any royalties from the Japanese translation of his lectures, instead donating them to start the Deming Prize. His generous nature is renowned in Japan. It is little known here. But I have seen it here in gifts he has made to teachers and authors. No fanfare, no public relations. He saw what needed to be done and he set about doing it. A turning point in his career came in 1980 when NBC broad- cast the famous video tape, "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" Just before that tape appeared, both Ford and Pontiac had sent teams to investigate what was going on in Japanese auto manufacture. The teams came back mystified. They saw nothing different. The same equipment, the same flow of materials. Nothing spectacular in the way of automation. As the two teams puzzled over what they had seen, they also happened to see this famous videotape. There were a few shots of Dr. Deming in the tape. At one point he said of American manufacturers: "Inspection does not build quality, the quality is already made before you inspect it. It's far better to make it right in the first place. Statistical methods help you to make it right in the first place so that you don' t need to test it. You don' t get ahead by making product and then separating the good from the bad, because it's wasteful. It wastes time of men, who are paid wages; it wastes time of machines, if there are machines; it wastes materials." It so happens that several months later, [he] visited both Ford and Pontiac, and met with some of the team members who had gone to Japan. They confessed that without the insights they got from Dr. Deming's brief appearance on that tape, they would not have understood what they had seen. This was the beginning of the transformation in America Late, of course, but a beginning. Dr. Deming often said, in the early 1980's, "I lit many fires, but they all went out." Today he could say that no more. Today there are people all around the globe who study his books, watch his video tapes, and follow his teachings in an almost religious way No one knows how many people he has touched either directly or indirectly. It must be a number measured in the millions. First of all, there is the entire Japanese population. In one trip to Japan we saw his teachings at all levels, from high-tech factories to clerks working in a tourist center. We even saw a young woman working in the Bunny Club of Kyoto who was applying quality management tools to the operations of the club. In France there is the French Deming Association. In the UK there is the British Deming Association. In Australia and in New Zealand there is the Total Quality Management Institute (though Dr. Deming does not believe in the phrase "Total Quality Management"). Across the USA, aided in part by the National Society of Professional Engineers, there are now about 300 groups, all devoted to the application of his ideas in their own communities. From his works, we know a great deal about the man. We know what he has become in the eyes of millions of people: a man of great wisdom, dedication, and selflessness, determined to save the human race from its inherited follies. W. Edwards Deming is the man who saw what needed to be done and just went ahead and did it. He saw the need for a superior theory of management. Singlehandedly, he created it, taught it, and through tireless lecturing, writing and campaigning, made it a way of life for millions of people. We, and succeeding genera- tions to come, owe him much more than we can ever repay. + By M. Tribus