He was a 20th century management consultant who is principally remembered as an evangelist for quality and quality management, writing several influential books on those subjects.
He was the brother of Academy Award winner Nathan H. 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, settling in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Juran excelled in school, especially in mathematics. He was a chess champion at an early age and dominated chess at Western Electric. Juran graduated from Minneapolis South High School in 1920.
In 1924, with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota, Juran joined Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works. His first job was troubleshooting in the Complaint Department. In 1925, Bell Labs proposed that Hawthorne Works personnel be trained in its newly-developed statistical sampling and control chart techniques. Juran was chosen to join the Inspection Statistical Department, a small group of engineers charged with applying and disseminating Bell Labs’ statistical quality control innovations. This highly-visible position fueled Juran’s rapid ascent in the organization and the course of his later career.
Juran was promoted to department chief in 1928, and the following year became a division chief. He published 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.
As a hedge against the uncertainties of the Great Depression, he enrolled in Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 1931. He graduated in 1935 and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1936, though he never practiced Law.
During the Second World War, through an arrangement with his employer, Juran served in the Lend-Lease Administration and Foreign Economic Administration. Just before war’s end, he resigned from Western Electric, and his government post, intending to become a freelance consultant. He joined the faculty of New York University as an adjunct Professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering, where he taught courses in quality control and ran round table seminars for executives. He also worked through a small management consulting firm on projects for Gilette, Hamilton Watch Company and Borg-Warner. After the firm’s owner’s sudden death, Juran began his own independent practice, from which he made a comfortable living until his retirement in the late 1990s. His early clients included the now defunct Bigelow-Sanford Carpet Company, the Koppers Company, the International Latex Company, Bausch & Lomb and General Foods.
Japan
The end of World War II compelled Japan to change its focus from becoming a military power to becoming an economic one. Despite Japan’s ability to compete on price, its consumer goods manufacturers suffered from a long-established reputation of poor quality. The first edition of Juran’s Quality Control Handbook in 1951 attracted the attention of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) which invited him to Japan in 1952. When he finally arrived in 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 the United States due to quality issues in the 1980s.
Contributions
Pareto principle
In 1941 Juran stumbled across the work of Vilfredo Pareto and began to apply the Pareto principle to quality issues (for example, 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 preferred “the vital few and the useful many” to signal that the remaining 80% of the causes should not be totally ignored.
Management theory
When he began his career in the 1920s the principal focus in quality management was on the quality of the end, or finished, product. The tools used were from the Bell system of acceptance sampling, inspection plans, and 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.
Juran’s vision of quality management extended well outside the walls of the factory to encompass non-manufacturing processes, especially those that might be thought of as service related.
Juran’s Trilogy
He also developed the “Juran’s trilogy,” an approach to cross-functional management that is composed of three managerial processes:
- quality planning,
- quality control
- quality improvement
* Quality Control Handbook, New York : McGraw-Hill, 1951, OCLC 1220529
* Managerial Breakthrough, New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964
* Management of Quality Control, New York, New York: Joseph M. Juran, 1967, OCLC 66818686
* Quality Planning and Analysis, New York, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970
* Upper Management and Quality, New York, New York: Joseph M. Juran, 1980, OCLC 8103276
* Juran on Planning for Quality, New York, New York: The Free Press, 1988, OCLC 16468905
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