Japan, under the guidance of W. Edwards Deming, mastered the crucial economic laws and disciplines of the Industrial Age and began to pull ahead of the rest of the world.

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There is something to this, but Japan's national obsession with quality was apparent early in its post-war industrialisation, when it adopted the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, an American quality-control guru.

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Many management gurus, including Frederick Taylor, W. Edwards Deming (the founder of the quality movement), Henry Mintzberg and Bruce Henderson (the man behind the experience curve), were trained first as engineers.

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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.

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He thus joined W. Edwards Deming (see article) in management mythology as one of the two Americans who, unappreciated in their own fast-food country for their ideas about quality, had been compelled to go abroad to find recognition.

ECONOMIST: Guru: Joseph Juran | The

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.

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