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. 

J.M.Juran seated on a camel with the pyramids of Cairo in the background.

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." 

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. 

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.

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."