Joseph M. Juran

Early life

Juran was born to a Jewish family in 1904 in Brăila, Romania, and later lived in Gura Humorului. In 1912 he immigrated to America with his family (including his brother Nathan Juran, a future film director). He excelled in school, especially in maths.

In 1924, with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering (he would later earn a law degree), Juran joined Western Electric at the Hawthorne manufacturing plant. His first job was in the inspection branch. He married Sadie Shapiro in 1924.

Juran was promoted to a managerial position in 1928, and the following year became a division chief. He would publish his first quality related article in Mechanical Engineering in 1935. In 1937 he moved to Western Electric/AT&T's headquarters in New York City.

Japan

After World War II, Japan was experiencing a crisis in product quality. Japanese goods were thought to be cheap, easily broken and in general extremely poor quality. The Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) recognized these issues and invited Juran to Japan in 1954.

Working independently of W. Edwards Deming (who focused on the use of statistical quality control), Juran - who focused on managing for quality - went to Japan and started courses (1954) in Quality Management. The training started with top and middle management. The idea that top and middle management need training had found resistance in the United States. For Japan, it would take some 20 years for the training to pay off. In the 1970s, Japanese products began to be seen as the leaders in quality. This sparked a crisis in United States due to quality issues in the 1980s.

Pareto principle

It was in 1941 that Juran discovered the work of Vilfredo Pareto. Juran expanded the Pareto principle applying them to quality issues (e.g. 80% of a problem is caused by 20% of the causes). This is also known as the "vital few and the trivial many". In later years Juran has preferred "the vital few and the useful many" to signal that the remaining 80% of the causes should not be totally ignored.

Contribution to management

When he began his career in the 1920s the principle focus in quality management was on the quality of the end, or finished, product. The tools used were from the Bell system of sampling, inspection plans, (tables), and the Shewhart control charts. The ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor dominated.

Juran is widely credited for adding the human dimension to quality management. He pushed for the education and training of managers. For Juran, human relations problems were the ones to isolate. Resistance to change - or, in his terms, cultural resistance - was the root cause of quality issues.

Juran credits Margaret Mead's book Cultural Patterns and Technical Change for illuminating the core problem in reforming business quality. Juran wrote (published 1964) Managerial Breakthrough outlining the issue.

In 1966 Juran promoted the Japanese idea of quality circles.

He also developed the "Juran's trilogy," an approach to cross-functional management that is composed of three managerial processes: planning, control, and improvement.

In 1979 he founded Juran Institute. He currently lives in Rye, New York.

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