I met a close friend of W. Edwards Deming (the most famous American Quality Guru called by General MacArthur to rebuild Japan’s Industries) - who also translated some Deming’s books in French - a dozen years ago when I was still a student in charge of organizing a serie of conferences for 5 engineering schools on the themes: Production and Quality Management.What I learnt from him during a few days was totally different from what my teachers have been telling me. In fact I was very skeptical that “Real” Quality could be so far from the lessons I was attending in classroom or from the books / Magazines I was reading. For example he was harsh against Quality Circles or the famous Slogan of “Zero Defaults” which were very fashionable in the 1980s (since Quality Circles have indeed lost their ground; as for the “Zero Defaults” read the future article “the true origin of Zero Defaults Slogan and its negative consequences”). As President of the AFCIQ (French association for industrial control and quality) he was asked to participate in the Quality ISO Standards but he refused because he said that these standards do not reflect the fundamental spirit of Quality. He also forecasted that Japan would plunge (at that time Nikkei was at its highest) because Japenese Business Managers weren’t taught by the seven Sage of Quality anymore but would go to the American Business Schools returning with short-term sighted view of Stock Market Dividends.

Today only do I really understand why, as professional experiences demonstrated that he was right indeed, that most quality discourses in big enterprises are just “window dressing” (Deming used this expression himself) without the managers even realizing it because they have been trained to believe wrong concepts since school like I used to myself. One of the thing I was taught was this: quality costs and there was an optimal. That’s still the case for most people:

“Americans firmly believed that to increase the reliability of their appliances would have required an increase in cost. And until Deming’s way showed that this was false, they had no choice but to believe the myth. By and large they still do.”

– Myron Tribus in “The Deming Way“