"calitologi" din lume
|
|
unul din cei mai importanti
"calitologi" din lume |
O
lucrare originala romaneasca, intitulata "Istoria calitatii. Un eseu concentrat",
tiparita la inceputul acestui an si despre care informeaza ziarul "Romania
libera" din Bucuresti, il include printre cei mai buni "calitologi" din
lume, creatori ai acestui domeniu de cercetare stiintifica, si pe Joseph
Juran.
Cartea, scrisa de Dan G. Stoichitoiu si Viorel Gh. Voda, personalitati
recunoscute in domeniu, face o
incursiune in istoria calitatii prin prisma conceptului si a stiintei
corespondente, calitologia, incepand de la
vechii greci pana in era moderna. Sunt abordate si legaturile cu statistica
matematica si teoria probabilitatilor.
Cartea urma sa fie lansata oficial la 8 februarie 2002, la Muzeul Literaturii
Romane din Bucuresti.
..............................
Dr. Joseph M. Juran s-a nascut in 1904 la Braila si, cand avea patru ani,
familia s-a mutat la Gura
Humorului. Tatal sau a fost cismar. In 1912, familia a emigrat in Statele
Unite. In 1924, Joseph Juran a absolvit
Facultatea de inginerie electrica in sistemul Bell si a fost angajat
de Western Electric Division la cea mai mare
uzina a timpului, Hawthorne Works, care avea 40.000 angajati. El a
inceput sa lucreze in domeniul studierii
calitatii si a avut ideea de a introduce metode statistice in controlul
de calitate. In 1941 a devenit controlorul sef
al calitatii la Hawthorne si ulterior seful calitatii al corporatiei
Western Union.
In timpul celui de-al doilea razboi mondial a fost consultant al guvernului
american in toate problemele
legate de calitate, lucrand pentru guvern si dupa incheierea razboiului.
In 1945, el a publicat Manualul controlului
de calitate, care a devent o lucrare de capatai in domeniu si i-a atras
o invitatie de a lucra in Japonia. In 1978,
el a creat Institutul Juran de cercetari in problemele calitatii. A
primit mai multe Doctorate Honoris Causa si e
membru de onoare al mai multor institutii academice din alte tari,
inclusiv al Academiei Romane (1992),
Anul trecut, Joseph Juran a sponsorizat aparitia in Israela unei
istorii a comunitatii evreiesti din Gura
Humorului, in limba engleza, intitulata "Gura Humora, a small town
in Southern Bukovina", scrisa in ebraica de
Shraga Yeshurun (Jurgrau) si tradusa de Ike Tuliu Katz, publicata sub
auspiciile Asociatiei fostilor locuitori
din Gura Humorului si imprejurimi.
Datele despre Joseph Juran sunt luate din cartea d-lui Shraga Yeshurun
(Jurgrau) precum si din unele
statii Internet ce-i sunt dedicate savantului.
Adapted from the authors' script for the television documentary,"An Immigrant's Gift". The film, explores quality's impact on society and the life and career of Dr. J.M. Juran.
One of the Vital Few
Both the life and influence of Joseph M.
Juran are characterized by a remarkable span and an extraordinary
intensity. Born in 1904, Juran has been
active for the bulk of the century, and influential for nearly half that
period.
From his entry workaday position as a factory
troubleshooter, he has created a richly varied career as writer,
educator and consultant. Raised in dismal
poverty, he has attained a position of respect and prosperity. Juran's
major contribution to our world has been
in the field of management, particularly quality management. Astute
observer, attentive listener, brilliant
synthesizer and prescient prognosticator, Juran has been called the "father"
of
quality, a quality "guru" and the man who
"taught quality to the Japanese" (a claim he refutes). Perhaps most
important, he is recognized as the person
who added the human dimension to quality broadening it from its
statistical origins to what we now call
Total Quality Management. Although Juran's name may have received less
exposure than others, his impact on managers,
businesses, nations and the products and services we buy and use
each day has been profound. Accurately
defining Juran's role in the quality "movement" is as challenging as defining
quality itself. Both seem quite basic and
yet, on closer inspection, are revealed to be enormously complex. Juran
himself speaks of quality as having two
aspects. The first relates to features: higher quality means a greater
number
of features that meet customers' needs.
The second aspect relates to "freedom from trouble": higher quality consists
of fewer defects. But, as elementary as
that may sound, every manager knows that achieving higher quality is no
simple task. For Joseph Juran, planting
the seed of quality in the consciousness of the world has constituted the
task
of a lifetime. Certainly, Juran's body
of work abounds with "features" that have anticipated and met the needs
of his
worldwide "customers". A list of only the
brightest career highlights swiftly proves that assertion. In 1937, Juran
conceptualized the Pareto principle, which
millions of managers rely on to help separate the "vital few" from the
"useful many" in their activities. He wrote
the standard reference work on quality control, the Quality Control
Handbook, first published in 1951 and now
in its fourth edition. In 1954, he delivered a series of lectures to
Japanese managers which helped set them
on the path to quality. This classic book, Managerial Breakthrough, first
published in 1964, presented a more general
theory of quality management, comprising quality control and quality
improvement. It was the first book to describe
a step-by-step sequence for breakthrough improvement, a process
that has become the basis for quality initiatives
worldwide. In 1979, Juran founded the Juran Institute to create new
tools and techniques for promulgating his
ideas. The first was Juran on Quality Improvement, a pioneering series
of video training programs. The Quality
Trilogy, published in 1986, identified a third aspect to quality management
-
quality planning. In addition to these
accomplishments, there is Juran's seminal role as a teacher and lecturer,
both
at New York University and with the American
Management Association. He also worked as a consultant to
businesses and organizations in forty countries,
and has made many other contributions to the literature in more than
twenty books and hundreds of published
papers (translated into a total of seventeen languages) as well as dozens
of video training programs.
But even the most comprehensive accounting
of Juran's achievements (and the many honors and awards they have
brought him) cannot express the richness
and intensity of Juran's influence. Managers who have learned from Juran
-
and there are thousands and thousands of
them worldwide - speak of his ideas with a respect that transcends
appreciation and approaches reverence.
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computer and NeXT, refers with awe to
Juran's "deep, deep contribution." Jungi
Noguchi, Executive Director of the Japanese Union of Scientists and
Engineers, states categorically that, "Dr.
Juran is the greatest authority on quality control in the entire world."
Peter
Drucker, the writer and theorist, asserts
that, "Whatever advances American manufacturing has made in the last
thirty to forty years, we owe to Joe Juran
and to his untiring, steady, patient, self-effacing work." Lawrence Appley,
chairman emeritus of the American Management
Association, uses a metaphor to express his admiration for Juran.
"Joe is like a river," says Appley. "He
just flows on and on. You don't know where it starts, you don't know where
it
ends. You just know it's rich and there's
always water in it and it's always for good use." These managers, leaders
and fellow theorists attach so much worth
to Juran's ideas for many reasons. Perhaps most important, his work has
been devoted to revealing and promulgating
bedrock principles. He is no faddist, he has not sought fame as a
trend-spotter or futurist. Particularly
today, when we are bombarded with a jumble of information, buzzwords,
manifestos and old ideas repackaged as
new, Juran's messages come across as the genuine article,
down-to-earth, helpful, common sensical
and wise. Of course, it is impossible to separate the character of the
man
himself from the impact of his work. Juran
does not match the popular profile of the best-selling author and
globe-trotting consultant to the powerful
leaders of the world. To read Juran's work, to talk with the man, is to
come in
contact with a keen mind and a generous
spirit passionately devoted to quality and improvement in the broadest
sense of those words. His strengths lie
in his ability to listen, to synthesize ideas and articulate concepts in
a way
that renders them unusually precise and
accessible. His whole life has been characterized by a respect for facts;
he
refuses to overstate them when it comes
to measuring the value of any one individual, including himself. He always
has been reluctant to claim credit for
ideas not wholly his own, has shunned self-promotion and been content to
take
less than his share of the limelight. In
one journal entry he confided, "It wouldn't bother me if I'm not remembered
at
all."
top
Grim Beginnings
Like many managers who look forward and
see only a great struggle in achieving higher quality, Juran's early years
were anything but free from trouble. Joseph
Moses Juran was born December 24, 1904 in the city of Braila, then
part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now
part of Romania.
An unknown worker in a
shoe factory, circa
1920's. Joe Juran's
father, Jacob was a
shoe maker in Romania,
but had trouble finding
work in America where
shoes were made in
factories.
His father, Jzakob, was a village shoemaker.
Sometime after 1904, the family of five moved to the neighboring
village of Gurahumora. Here, Juran writes,
"They had no quality problems. Never had a power failure, never had an
automobile fail. Of course, they didn't
have power; they didn't have any automobiles." In 1909, Jakob left Romania
seeking a better life in America. His father's
goodbye to five-year old Joseph remains one of Juran's earliest
memories, the boy would not see his father
again for three years, when the entire family joined Jakob in Minnesota
in 1912. Life in America did not immediately
change the fortunes of the Juran family. They exchanged the dirt-floored
house in Gurahumora for a tarpaper shack
in the woods of Minneapolis. To make ends meet, the children went to
work at whatever jobs they could find.
Joe drove a team of horses, he worked as a laborer, a shoe salesman,
bootblack, grocery clerk and as a bookkeeper
for the local icehouse. During those years, he undoubtedly began to
develop a visceral understanding of the
practical workings and underlying principles of business. Joe was a bright,
even brilliant, boy. He so excelled in
his school classes - math and physics, in particular - that he was repeatedly
pushed upward through the grades and wound
up four years ahead of his age group. Always a small boy, now he
found himself as the youngest in class,
as well. To make matters worse, he possessed the quick, acerbic tongue
that often accompanies a sharp mind. Small,
young smart-alecks are the natural prey for school predators and Joe
became the favored target for flying snowballs
and pummeling fists. The grind of school, poverty, never-ending jobs
and chores at home combined to produce
a high school graduate who, in his own words, "was pretty soured on the
world. I had a grudge against the world
for a long, long time." In 1920, Joe enrolled at the University of Minnesota,
the first in his family to attend college.
Here he discovered activity that profoundly changed his outlook on life:
chess.
His analytical mind reveled in the intricacies
and complexities of the ancient game; he became the university
champion and performed well in state-wide
competitions. For the first time, he felt the warmth of admiration and
the
pride of respect from others. This success
at chess helped Joe revise his opinion of himself. Gradually, he shed the
image of the skinny misfit and outsider;
now he knew that his difference was in the nature of a gift, rather than
a
curse.
top
Discovering Quality
In 1924, Juran graduated with a BS in electrical
engineering and took a job with Western Electric. He was assigned
to the Inspection Department of the vast
Hawthorne Works in Chicago, where 40,000 people worked, more than five
thousand of them in inspection alone. Juran
was intoxicated with this life characterized by steady work and steady
pay, and despite a complete ignorance of
inspection or quality plunged into his work with vigor. The Hawthorne plant
spread out before him like a giant, three-dimensional
chessboard, bristling with opportunities for investigation and
learning. With his capacious brain and
indefatigable memory, Juran soon developed what he calls "an encyclopedic
knowledge of the place." It would have
been impossible for Hawthorne's managers to miss Juran's intellectual and
analytic gifts, and he quickly moved through
a series of line management and staff jobs. In 1926, a team from Bell
Laboratories made a visit to the Hawthorne
factory. The team was made up of some of the pioneers of quality
control - including Don Quarles, Walter
Shewhart and George Edwards - and their intention was to apply some of
the
tools and methods they had been developing
in the laboratory to operations in the Hawthorne plant. Working in
collaboration with Walter Bartky, an eminent
professor from the University of Chicago, the team established a
training program at the factory. Juran
was selected as one of the twenty trainees, and then as one of two engineers
for the nascent Inspection Statistical
Department. It was one of the first such departments established in industry
in
this country. In retrospect, the greatest
significance of this department may have been that it set Juran firmly
on the
path toward his life's work. But, although
honored to be chosen for the department, Juran felt uncomfortable in his
new role as middle manager. Once again,
he experienced vicissitudes similar to those of the school playground -
youthful, green and sharp-tongued managers
can be the natural prey of envious colleagues. Juran took this
experience as evidence that his talents
did not lie in people management. Nevertheless, he persevered. In 1928,
Juran authored his first work on the subject
of quality, a training pamphlet called Statistical Methods Applied to
Manufacturing Problems, which explored
the use of sampling in analyzing and controlling manufacturing quality.
It
became the basis for the well-known AT&T
Statistical Quality Control Handbook, still published today. During the
Depression, Juran witnessed a shrinking
of the workforce at Hawthorne that would rival any of the "downsizing"
and
"rightsizing" adjustments made during the
1980s and early '90s. The factory population shrank from 40,000 to about
7,000. Some 33,000 people who had imagined
their jobs secure and lives in order found themselves jobless and
without any of the compensations we are
accustomed to today: pensions or parachutes, extended benefits or
unemployment insurance. As a hedge against
his own dismissal, Juran took advantage of his shortened work hours
to earn a law degree from Loyola University.
Although he did not lose his job, the Depression experience certainly
demonstrated to him that, ultimately, no
position is secure - a realization that was to encourage him to try his
hand as
an independent some years later. In 1937,
Juran found himself as the head of Industrial Engineering at Western
Electric's corporate headquarters in New
York. During this period, he became a kind of in-house consultant, visiting
and exchanging ideas about industrial engineering
with many U.S. companies. It was on one such visit, to General
Motors in Detroit, that he first conceptualized
the Pareto principle. This intensive, first-hand exposure to the working
realities faced by managers in a variety
of industries formed the basis of Juran's extraordinary mental database
on
quality management issues. In December
of 1941, Juran took a "temporary" leave of absence from Western Electric
to serve in Washington as an assistant
administrator with the Lend-Lease Administration, which managed the
shipment of goods and material to friendly
nations deemed crucial to the war effort. Here, Juran first experimented
with what today might be called "business
process reengineering". He led a multi-agency team that successfully
eliminated the paper logjam that kept critical
shipments stalled on the docks. The team redesigned the shipment
process, reducing the number of documents
required and significantly cutting costs. Juran's temporary assignment
stretched to four years.
J.M. Juran seated
at table with other
members of the
Board of Directors
for the Bundy
Corporation,
Norwalk,
Connecticut.
top
Launching a Canoe
On September 1, 1945, Juran left Washington
and, at the same time, disembarked what he called the "ocean liner"
of Western Electric and launched his untested
and unproven "canoe" as an independent. He would, he had decided,
devote the rest of his life to the subject
of quality management. His plan was to do it all: philosophize, write,
lecture
and consult. After more than twenty-one
years with Western Electric, Juran had concluded that he didn't belong
there
any more; in his own estimation, he was
"too individualistic." In his letter of resignation, Juran wrote, "It is
mainly
because the road of opportunity has recently
seemed for me to be approaching a barricade that I have concluded I
should take another road." Later in the
same letter, referring to deeper personal motivations, he adds, "The problem
which confronted me has its roots in the
dim past, long before there was any Bell System. For that problem, there
will
be, even in my century, no complete solution."
Juran, with a growing family to provide for, was far too practical a man
to set off down this new road without prospects.
He had already identified a temporary harbor for his newly-launched
canoe at New York University, where he
served as Chairman of the Department of Administrative Engineering. But
he had a vision of a much broader life,
and he deliberately began piecing it together - building a consulting practice,
writing books, developing his lectures
in quality management for the American Management Association. The
seaworthiness of Juran's canoe was proven
decisively in 1951, with the publication of his Quality Control Handbook.
The Handbook established Juran's reputation
as an authority on quality and became the standard reference work for
quality managers throughout the world.
On the strength of the book, Juran found himself in great demand as a
lecturer and consultant, and its reputation
extended well beyond the borders of the United States. In 1954, the Union
of Japanese Scientists and Engineers and
Keidanren invited the celebrated author to Japan to deliver a series of
lectures. These talks about managing for
quality were delivered soon after another American, W. Edwards Deming,
delivered his lectures on statistical quality
methods. Taken together, the visits represent the opening chapter of a
story that every business manager in every
country in the world knows by heart - Japan's remarkable ascent from its
prewar position as a producer of poor-quality,
manufactured goods for export to its current reputation as a world
paragon of manufacturing quality. Although
Juran downplays the significance of his lectures there, the Japanese
themselves do not. Nearly thirty years
after his first visit, Emperor Hirohito awarded him Japan's highest award
that
can be given to a non-Japanese, the Order
of the Sacred Treasure. It was bestowed in recognition of his
contribution to "the development of quality
control in Japan and the facilitation of U.S. and Japanese friendship."
Traditional
Japanese dancer
with parasol.
With the publication of Managerial Breakthrough
in 1964, Juran's sphere of influence broadened further still and he
became a trusted authority to general managers
- in addition to quality managers - who came to rely on him as a
source of knowledge and guidance. Gradually,
Juran became recognized as a insightful analyst of developments
and trends throughout the field of management
theory and practice. As early as 1966, Juran warned Western
business that "The Japanese are heading
for world quality leadership, and will attain it in the next two decades."
In
1969, he noted the growing dependence of
the technological society on effective quality control. He has often
referred to the "quality dikes" which serve
as our best protection against such catastrophic breaches of quality as
the Chernobyl and Bhopal disasters. In
1973, he argued that the "scientific management" model first espoused by
Frederick Taylor in 1911 was antiquated
and needed replacement. In the same year, he began to advocate that
quality concepts are equally as applicable
to service activities as they are to manufacturing. In 1979, after
twenty-eight years of what Juran calls
a "blissful life as an international author, lecturer and consultant,"
he changed
course once again. Overcoming his reluctance
to create an institution - which he feared would become his master
rather his servant - he founded The Juran
Institute. The immediate purpose of The Institute was to provide a
continuity of Juran's ideas through an
emerging form - video programs. The video series, Juran on Quality
Improvement, met with great success and
the proceeds served to fund a host of other activities. Juran found himself
back aboard an ocean liner, albeit a small
one, and in a position he had intentionally abandoned some thirty-four
years earlier: manager. Even with the responsibilities
of this new role - which never ceased to be a burden to Juran,
despite the Institute's success - he continued
to write, lecture and consult. In 1986, Juran expanded his analysis of
the role managers must play in the quality
process with publication of The Quality Trilogy. Also in that year, he
helped
with the creation of the Malcolm Baldrige
National Quality Award, testifying before Congress and serving on the
Board of Overseers. In 1987, Dr. Juran,
with a sigh of relief, relinquished his leadership of The Juran Institute.
After a
triumphant series of lectures in 1993-94,
"The Last Word" tour, he ceased all public appearances in order to devote
his time to writing projects and family
obligations.
A Final Contribution to Society
As a result of the power and clarity of
Joseph Juran's thinking and the scope of his influence, business leaders,
legions of managers and his fellow theorists
worldwide recognize Dr. Juran as one of "the vital few" - a seminal
figure in the development of management
theory. Juran has contributed more to the field and over a longer period
of
time than any other person, and yet, feels
he has barely scratched the surface of his subject. "What I want to do
has
no end," he writes, "since I am on the
endless frontier of a branch of knowledge. I can go on as long as the years
are
granted to me." Today, Juran focuses his
attention on a new mission: repaying the debt he feels he owes this
country for providing him great opportunity
and exceptional success. The sourness and the grudge he felt toward his
life as a boy have long since been replaced
with an abiding gratitude and affection. Juran has established The Juran
Foundation to explore the "impact of quality
on society" and make his contributions in the field and those of others
available to serve society in a positive
way. "My job of contributing to the welfare of my fellow man," writes Juran,
"is
the great unfinished business."
An unknown worker in a shoe factory,
circa 1920's. Joe Juran's father, Jacob
was a shoe maker in Bukovina, Romania,
but had trouble finding work in America
where shoes were made in factories.