Juran's Biography

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.

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