Even Joseph Juran, one of the two American post-war germinators of the quality idea (the other was W. Edwards Deming), considered that quality circles were pretty useless if the company's management was not trained in the more general principles of total quality management.

ECONOMIST: Idea

It gave Americans some solace at the time to discover that behind the Japanese quality miracle had been two Americans that few of them had heard of: Joseph Moses Juran and W. Edwards Deming.

ECONOMIST: Guru