Total Quality Management (TQM) - Deming (1982)

Theory Publication Information

Citation Information

Why Was the Model Created?

Source note:The project’s Zotero library does not contain a PDF of Deming (1982) or Deming (1986). The narrative below is drawn from widely documented secondary sources on Deming’s career and from the Deming Institute (2018). Specific textual claims about the books remain unverified at page level in this review.

Secondary accounts of Deming’s career (e.g. Walton, 1986; Neave, 1990) situate the 1982 book in the context of a perceived competitiveness crisis in U.S. manufacturing in the 1970s and early 1980s: Japanese manufacturers in automobiles, consumer electronics, and other categories were widely reported to be competing simultaneously on cost and on product reliability, at a time when prevailing U.S. manufacturing practice treated quality and cost as a tradeoff. The book was pitched at U.S. managers as a diagnosis of, and prescription for, that gap.

Deming had worked on statistical quality methods at the U.S. Census Bureau and later lectured in Japan beginning in 1950 under the auspices of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE). He is commonly credited in secondary sources with being one of several Western contributors - alongside Juran, Ishikawa, Shewhart’s legacy, and Japanese engineering organizations themselves - to the post-war quality practices that Japanese manufacturers refined. The 1982 book gathered the lectures, concepts, and examples that Deming had developed over decades into a single consultancy-oriented monograph aimed at U.S. management.

The book’s central argument, as commonly summarized in secondary sources, is that poor quality and high cost in U.S. industry were consequences of management practice rather than of worker effort or national character: reliance on final inspection rather than process control, short-term financial incentives, adversarial supplier relationships, and performance-appraisal systems that discouraged improvement. The remedy Deming offered was a set of management principles - later codified as the 14 Points (see below) - and statistical methods originating with Shewhart.

What Does the Model Measure?

Deming (1982) is a management-philosophy monograph, not a measurement model. It does not, by any account in the secondary literature, propose scales, latent constructs, or statistical operationalizations of “quality”, “leadership”, or “culture”. Its quantitative content is the statistical quality-control apparatus inherited from Shewhart; its normative content is a set of management principles, most prominently the 14 Points.

• Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts: Shewhart control charts (including X-bar, R, and p-charts) used to distinguish common-cause variation (inherent to the process) from special-cause variation (signals requiring investigation). Secondary sources describe SPC as the only formally quantitative piece of the framework.
• 14 Points for Management: A normative checklist for managerial practice, not a scale. Each point is a qualitative principle; there is no score, no weighting, no psychometric claim. Canonical wording from The W. Edwards Deming Institute (2018) is reproduced in Describe the Model below.
• Seven Deadly Diseases (secondary-source attribution):Deming is widely reported in secondary sources to have catalogued a set of “Seven Deadly Diseases” of Western management (e.g., Walton, 1986; Neave, 1990). The exact list wording varies slightly across accounts and is not verified verbatim against the 1982/1986 books on this page. Typical items named in those accounts include: lack of constancy of purpose, emphasis on short-term profits, evaluation of performance / annual review, mobility of management, running the company on visible figures alone, and (in U.S.-specific discussions) excessive medical and liability costs.
• Process and system diagrams used in the tradition:Flow diagrams, cause-and-effect (Ishikawa / fishbone) diagrams, and Pareto charts are commonly taught alongside the Deming philosophy. Fishbone diagrams are Ishikawa’s contribution (Ishikawa, 1985); Pareto charts predate both Deming and Ishikawa. The 1982 book’s specific use of these diagrams is not verified on this page.

Because the framework is not itself a measurement model, empirical work seeking to validate TQM has had to construct its own instruments (e.g., Saraph, Benson & Schroeder, 1989; Flynn, Schroeder & Sakakibara, 1994; Powell, 1995) rather than use scales supplied by Deming. The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria (established 1987) are often treated as a de facto operationalization but post-date the 1982 book.

Note on source availability: A PDF of Deming (1982) Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position, Deming (1986) Out of the Crisis, and Deming (1993) The New Economicsis not attached to the project’s Zotero library. Claims on this page about the content of those books are verified against two authoritative academic proxies: Anderson, Rungtusanatham, and Schroeder (1994) in Academy of Management Review(which reproduces Deming’s 14 Points verbatim from Deming, 1986: 23-24 in its Table 1 and articulates a formal theory of quality management underlying the Deming method), and Hackman and Wageman (1995) in Administrative Science Quarterly (which analyzes TQM as a philosophy and intervention package drawing on Deming, Juran, and Ishikawa). The Deming Institute (2018) one-pager is used as a secondary curated reference.

Core Concepts and Definitions

The concepts below are commonly associated with Deming’s writing in secondary sources. Because the book itself is not available for page-level verification on this page, definitions are phrased as widely-reported characterizations rather than as direct quotations.

• Quality (as Deming frames it in secondary accounts):Fitness for use from the customer’s perspective and predictable conformance with specification through reduced variation, rather than absence of defects under final inspection alone.
• Continuous improvement: Ongoing incremental improvement of products, processes, and services. (The Japanese term kaizenis sometimes applied as a synonym, but Deming did not use the term “kaizen” himself; the term was popularized by Imai, 1986.)
• Common-cause vs. special-cause variation:A distinction inherited directly from Shewhart (1931). Common-cause variation is inherent to a stable process; special-cause variation is a signal of an assignable, non-random source. Treating common-cause variation as if it were special-cause (or vice versa) is the classical Shewhart/Deming error Deming termed “tampering.”
• Process focus: Quality outcomes are a property of the process and the system, not of individual worker effort. A widely-quoted Deming estimate - reproduced in multiple secondary sources but not verified against the book on this page - attributes most variation observed in output to the system rather than to workers.
• Systems thinking: The firm is an interdependent system; optimizing parts in isolation can sub-optimize the whole. This framing aligns with general systems theory (Bertalanffy, 1968), though the page does not claim direct citation from Deming (1982) to Bertalanffy.
• Customer focus:Quality is defined in terms of use and customer needs, not solely in terms of internal specifications. (Deming’s emphasis on customers is widely reported in secondary sources.)
• Long-term orientation:Management attention to long-term improvement and survival rather than to short-term financial results. Point 1 of the 14 Points (“create constancy of purpose”) is the Deming Institute canonical statement of this principle.

Preceding Models or Theories

Total Quality Management drew on and synthesized previous quality management and organizational theories:

• Scientific Management and Taylorism (Taylor, 1911): Taylor’s scientific management is the background against which secondary accounts (Walton, 1986; Neave, 1990) position Deming’s critique of performance appraisal, numerical quotas, and individual-incentive compensation. The page does not assert verbatim text from Deming (1982) citing Taylor directly.
• Statistical Process Control (Shewhart, 1931, 1939): The most direct and widely-documented influence on Deming. Shewhart’s control-chart methods (Shewhart, 1931) supply the common-cause/special-cause framework Deming used throughout his career. Attribution of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle varies across secondary academic sources: Anderson, Rungtusanatham, and Schroeder (1994) consistently refer to “Shewhart’s (1931) PDSA cycle,” while other accounts point to Shewhart’s 1939 book Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Controlas the origin of the four-step named cycle. The exact formalization of PDCA is further variously attributed (to Shewhart, to Deming’s Japanese lectures, or to joint attribution); Deming himself later used “Study” in place of “Check” in The New Economics (1993). Deming worked with Shewhart at Western Electric / Bell Labs in the 1920s-30s and consistently credited him; secondary accounts describe the relationship as that of a younger collaborator and protege rather than formal student.
• Human Relations School (Mayo, 1933):Deming’s emphasis on worker psychology, fear reduction, and intrinsic motivation (Point 8, Point 12) is in the same tradition as the human-relations school that emerged from the Hawthorne studies. Whether Deming directly cited or built on Mayo is not established from primary source on this page.
• Systems Theory (Bertalanffy, 1968): Deming’s “Appreciation for a System” (later one component of Profound Knowledge in 1993) resonates with general-systems-theory framings. The page does not claim Deming directly cited Bertalanffy from the 1982 book; this is listed as a parallel intellectual context.
• Quality Management Literature (Juran, Crosby, Feigenbaum, Ishikawa):Deming operated as one of several post-war quality thinkers, not in isolation. Joseph Juran published in parallel and lectured in Japan; Armand Feigenbaum coined the term “Total Quality Control” (Feigenbaum, 1951); Philip Crosby argued that “quality is free” (Crosby, 1979); Kaoru Ishikawa organized the Japanese quality movement through JUSE and developed the cause-and-effect diagram. The distinctive emphases of Deming within this group are widely reported to include statistical reasoning about variation and an explicitly anti-blame, systems-view of worker performance.
• Taylorism as target of critique: Secondary accounts (e.g. Walton, 1986) describe Deming as explicitly repudiating certain Taylorist practices - particularly numerical quotas and management-by-objective for the workforce (14 Points #10 and #11). The page does not claim a specific direct textual reference from Deming (1982) to Taylor (1911).

Describe The Model

Total Quality Management proposes that sustained competitive advantage comes from organizational commitment to quality, continuous improvement, and customer satisfaction enabled through statistical process control, system optimization, and worker engagement. Rather than viewing quality as cost or burden, TQM argues that quality is source of competitive advantage. Organizations reducing variation, improving processes, and exceeding customer expectations simultaneously reduce costs and increase customer loyalty. Deming rejected the assumption that quality and cost were tradeoffs; superior quality and lower costs were simultaneous achievements through process excellence.

Deming’s 14 Points for Management

Two authoritative renderings of the 14 Points are used on this page as ground truth. The 1986 version of the list as reproduced in Anderson, Rungtusanatham, and Schroeder (1994), Academy of Management Review, Table 1 (which quotes Deming, 1986: 23-24 verbatim) is the primary source used below, and is the version supplying sub-parts (a)/(b) for Points 11 and 12. The later-curated one-pager by The W. Edwards Deming Institute (2018), which the Institute attributes to “Dr. Deming’s seminal book, Out of the Crisis” (the 1986 edition), is a well-known reformatted version that sometimes merges the sub-parts and shortens phrasing. Because no PDF of Deming (1982) or (1986) is attached to the project’s Zotero library, Anderson et al.’s (1994) Table 1 is used for primary verification below, with Deming Institute divergences noted where they occur.

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs. Long-term commitment to improvement rather than quarterly results.
2. Adopt the new philosophy. Abandon tolerance for commonly accepted levels of delays, mistakes, defective material, and workmanship.
3. Cease dependence on mass inspection to improve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag alone. Instead, minimize total cost. Move toward a single supplier for any one item, on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust. Establish long-term supplier relationships based on loyalty and trust rather than on price.
5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs. Continuous improvement of every activity in the system, not only production.
6. Institute training on the job. Train workers on the job to standard, as part of the process of doing the work.
7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job. Supervision of management is in need of overhaul, as well as supervision of production workers.
8. Drive out fear. Create psychological safety so people can raise problems, suggest improvements, and ask questions.
9. Break down barriers between staff areas. Research, design, sales, and production must work as a team to foresee production and service problems.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the workforce.
11. (a) Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership. (b) Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numeric goals. Substitute leadership. Anderson, Rungtusanatham, and Schroeder (1994) reproduce Point 11 from Deming (1986: 23-24) with these two explicit sub-parts; some later curated versions (including the Deming Institute one-pager) present the idea as a single merged statement. Both distort process behavior and become substitutes for leadership.
12. (a) Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his or her right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. (b) Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means, inter alia, abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective. Anderson et al. (1994) likewise reproduce Point 12 from Deming (1986: 23-24) with two sub-parts addressing hourly workers and management separately; later curated versions often merge them.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement. Continuous learning is an investment in the enterprise, not a cost. Anderson et al. (1994), reproducing Deming (1986: 23-24), state Point 13 without a closing “for everyone”; some curated one-pagers add that phrase.
14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody’s job.

Deming explicitly framed the 14 Points as applied Profound Knowledge: “My 14 Points for Management follow naturally as application of the System of Profound Knowledge for transformation from the present style of management to one of optimization” (Deming, quoted on the Deming Institute one-pager). Note that this framing is retrospective - Profound Knowledge was introduced in Deming (1993),The New Economics, whereas the 14 Points appeared earlier in the 1986 Out of the Crisis (per the Deming Institute) and in earlier form in the 1982 Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position.

System of Profound Knowledge (added by Deming, 1993 - not in the 1982/1986 books)

Secondary sources and the Deming Institute (2018) describe the System of Profound Knowledge as a later Deming formulation introduced in The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993), not in Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position (1982) or in Out of the Crisis(1986). It is included on this page because it is frequently taught alongside the 14 Points as part of Deming’s mature philosophy, and because the Deming Institute one-pager quotes Deming connecting the two: “My 14 Points for Management follow naturally as application of the System of Profound Knowledge.” The four bodies of knowledge commonly listed in secondary treatments (and not verified verbatim against the 1993 book on this page) are:

• Appreciation for a system: Commonly summarized as the idea that an organization is an interacting system whose parts must be managed jointly rather than independently optimized.
• Knowledge about variation: Commonly summarized as the distinction between common-cause and special-cause variation, inherited from Shewhart.
• Theory of knowledge:Commonly summarized as the epistemological claim that knowledge rests on prediction, testing, and learning. Secondary sources cite C. I. Lewis’s Mind and the World Order as one acknowledged influence; this page does not independently verify that attribution from primary source.
• Psychology: Commonly summarized as attention to intrinsic motivation, dignity, and the role of management systems in shaping worker behaviour.

Key Mechanisms

• Plan-Do-Check-Act Cycle (PDCA) - later Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA): Organizations continuously cycle through planning improvements, implementing changes, checking / studying results, and acting on learning. The cycle is attributed to Shewhart in secondary sources; Anderson, Rungtusanatham, and Schroeder (1994) cite Shewhart (1931) as the source of the PDSA cycle, while other accounts attribute the four-step named cycle to Shewhart’s 1939 book Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control. Deming adopted and popularized the cycle in his management work; he later used “Study” in place of “Check” in The New Economics (1993). Both forms are widely used.
• Statistical Process Control: Using statistical tools to monitor process performance, identify variation sources, and distinguish common cause variation (part of process) from special cause variation (requiring investigation and correction).
• Worker Engagement and Empowerment: Workers closest to processes possess valuable knowledge about improvement opportunities. Engaging workers in improvement generates ideas and ensures implementation success.
• Cultural Transformation: Quality improvement requires fundamental cultural change from command-and-control to cooperation, from blame to problem-solving, and from short-term optimization to long-term system improvement.

Main Strengths

• Addresses root causes of poor quality: Shifts focus from worker blame to process improvement, addressing actual sources of quality problems.
• Practical and implementable: Provides concrete tools (statistical process control, PDSA cycle) enabling organizations to systematically improve quality and reduce variation.
• Integrates quality with cost reduction: Argues that quality improvement and cost reduction can be compatible rather than purely traded off, because variation reduction eliminates rework, scrap, and warranty cost. Secondary sources describe this as a reframing of the quality-cost relationship; independent empirical validation is mixed.
• Widely attributed practical success:Secondary sources commonly link post-war Japanese manufacturing performance to adoption of Deming-style quality methods among other factors, and U.S. manufacturers’ later TQM programs to Deming’s influence. Rigorous attribution of firm-level performance improvements specifically to TQM (as opposed to lean practices, the Toyota Production System, broader operational-excellence programs, or market conditions) is contested in the academic literature; see Powell (1995) for one empirical treatment.
• Holistic organizational framework: Addresses systems, processes, people, and culture rather than isolated quality programs.
• Focus on customer satisfaction: Emphasizes customer needs and expectations as driving force for organizational improvement and quality definition.

Main Weaknesses

• Slow implementation timeline: Cultural transformation and continuous improvement require sustained effort over years. Organizations seeking quick fixes find TQM unsatisfying.
• Difficult organizational change: TQM requires fundamental management philosophy change that many organizations find threatening. Established power structures and management practices are challenged.
• Resistance from middle management: Middle managers may resist TQM because it reduces their command-and-control authority and emphasizes systems thinking over individual authority.
• Limited applicability in some contexts: TQM emerged from manufacturing contexts. Applicability to service organizations, professional services, or knowledge work remains less developed.
• Statistical process control complexity: Some organizations struggle with statistical tools required for process control and variation analysis. Technical capability required may exceed some organizations.
• Measurement and attribution difficulties: Isolating TQM benefits from other organizational changes and attributing performance improvements specifically to TQM implementation can be challenging.
• Over-emphasis on statistics: Critics argue Deming over-emphasized statistical methods while under-emphasizing strategic positioning and competitive dynamics.

Key Contributions

Contributions widely attributed to Deming (1982) in the strategic-management and operations-management literatures:

• Reframing of quality as a management problem:Deming’s argument that poor quality is primarily a consequence of management practice rather than worker effort was an influential reframing of the quality problem in Western management thinking, widely credited in secondary sources.
• Popularization of statistical process control in management practice: Deming helped move SPC from a specialist engineering technique into a management vocabulary. The underlying statistical apparatus originates with Shewhart; Deming’s contribution was wider diffusion and managerial framing.
• The 14 Points as an influential management checklist: The 14 Points have become one of the most frequently cited normative lists in quality management and operations research (canonical text: Deming Institute, 2018).
• Quality-cost relationship: Deming is commonly credited with articulating the argument that quality and cost need not be traded off, through reduction of rework, scrap, and variation. Whether his frameworkproved this claim is contested; it provided a framing that shaped subsequent operational-excellence work.
• Supplier relationship reframing: Point 4 of the 14 Points (minimize total cost by working with single suppliers on long-term, trust-based relationships) is an influential alternative to the price-based multi-sourcing model prevalent in U.S. manufacturing before the 1980s.
• Long-term orientation:Point 1 (constancy of purpose) is commonly credited as an early managerial articulation of what later literatures called “long-termism” in response to short-term financial performance pressure.
• Influence on later frameworks:Secondary sources describe Six Sigma (Motorola, mid-1980s), Lean Manufacturing (Womack, Jones & Roos, 1990; Womack & Jones, 1996), the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (1987), and ISO 9000 as building on, or being partly shaped by, the Deming tradition - though each has distinct antecedents and is not solely derivative of Deming.

Internal Validity

Deming (1982) is a practitioner-oriented management monograph rather than an empirical study, so “internal validity” here is assessed as logical coherence and fidelity to the statistical and managerial traditions the book draws on:

• Logical consistency: The framework is internally consistent: improved process design reduces variation, reduced variation improves both quality and cost, and worker engagement supports process improvement. These propositions are widely reported as logically coherent, though not independently tested within the book.
• Fidelity to Shewhart: The statistical-control content is a faithful extension of Shewhart (1931, 1939). The common-cause/special-cause distinction, the control-chart methodology, and the PDCA cycle are inherited rather than invented.
• Principle-level rather than theorem-level:The 14 Points are normative principles. They are not derived from formal models or empirical studies within the 1982/1986 books themselves. Secondary sources describe them as distillations of Deming’s decades of consulting experience.
• Consistent with observable organizational phenomena: The prescriptions align with well-documented organizational phenomena (worker disengagement under heavy monitoring, process-performance effects of variation, coordination costs across silos). The alignment is argued, not formally tested.
• Known internal-validity limitations:The book does not present hypothesis tests, no effect sizes, no control comparisons. Strong claims about managerial practice rest on case illustrations and the author’s authority, not on statistical inference - a weakness acknowledged in later empirical TQM research (Saraph et al., 1989; Flynn et al., 1994; Powell, 1995).

External Validity

External validity considerations concern generalizability of TQM across diverse organizational and industry contexts:

• Manufacturing origin and applicability: TQM emerged in manufacturing contexts with strong applicability to manufacturing. Applicability to service industries, professional services, or knowledge work is less developed and more contested.
• Organizational culture and readiness: TQM requires significant cultural change and management commitment. Organizations with resistant cultures, short-term focus, or hierarchical resistance may struggle with implementation.
• Industry variation: TQM applicability may vary by industry. Industries with stable processes and clear customer requirements may benefit more readily than industries with rapidly changing conditions or ambiguous requirements.
• Organizational size variation: TQM frameworks developed primarily in large manufacturing organizations. Applicability to small organizations or startups remains less developed.
• Geographic and cultural context: TQM was adapted into Japanese manufacturing and later American manufacturing. Applicability to different cultural, economic, or governance contexts requires investigation.
• Time horizon challenges: TQM requires sustained long-term commitment that organizations operating under pressures for short-term results may struggle to maintain.
• Measurement and attribution: Isolating TQM benefits from other organizational changes remains methodologically challenging. Empirical research establishing clear causality is limited.
• Knowledge work applicability: Statistical process control and variation analysis work well for manufacturing processes but may be less applicable to creative knowledge work or professional services.

Relevance to Technology Adoption

Deming (1982) is a quality-management monograph, not a theory of technology adoption. The material below is an applied extrapolationof the Deming philosophy to the organizational challenge of adopting new technology, rather than a direct summary of the book’s content. The 14 Points, the common-cause vs. special-cause distinction, and the emphasis on constancy of purpose and drive-out- fear leadership offer natural hooks for thinking about adoption; but this section’s specific claims are interpretive rather than textual.

On that reading, the Deming-style frame suggests that organizations treating technology adoption as a one-time project often fare worse than those treating it as an ongoing process requiring statistical monitoring, worker engagement, training, customer feedback, and long-term leadership commitment. The barriers and leadership actions below are organized along those lines.

Barriers to Technology Adoption Identified

• Lack of process focus: Organizations may view technology as substitute for process redesign, expecting technology alone to improve performance. Technology requires supporting process redesign.
• Insufficient worker engagement: Workers closest to processes possess valuable information about technology requirements and implementation barriers. Excluding workers from technology decisions creates implementation problems.
• Absence of continuous improvement orientation: Organizations treating technology adoption as one-time project fail to engage in ongoing refinement and optimization.
• Inadequate training and education: Workers require training in technology use and in new processes enabled by technology. Organizations underfunding training struggle with adoption.
• Lack of measurement and monitoring: Without metrics monitoring technology performance, implementation success, and impact, organizations cannot identify problems and adjust implementation.
• Short-term performance focus: Organizations focused on short-term results may abandon technology adoption before benefits materialize if implementation requires extended timeline.
• Blame culture: Organizations with blame cultures where workers fear reporting problems inhibit honest feedback about technology implementation challenges.

Leadership Actions the Framework Prescribes

• Treat technology adoption as process improvement: Frame technology adoption as opportunity to redesign processes, not as technical project. Engage process redesign rigorously.
• Engage workers in technology adoption: Include workers in requirements definition, design, testing, and refinement. Workers provide crucial insights on implementation barriers and improvement opportunities.
• Invest in training and education: Provide comprehensive training in both technology use and in new processes enabled by technology.
• Establish measurement and monitoring: Define metrics monitoring technology performance, implementation success, user adoption, and business impact. Use metrics to guide ongoing refinement.
• Create psychological safety: Ensure workers feel comfortable reporting implementation problems and challenges. Drive out fear of technology change and reporting problems.
• Commit to continuous improvement: After implementation, establish continuous improvement processes for ongoing refinement and optimization.
• Adopt systems perspective: Recognize that technology success requires integrating technology with process redesign, worker capability, organizational structure, and culture.
• Maintain long-term commitment: Sustain leadership commitment to technology adoption through extended implementation timeline. Avoid abandoning adoption due to short-term challenges.

Following Models or Theories

The Deming tradition is one of several intellectual streams that shaped subsequent quality and operations frameworks. The works listed below share concepts and practices with Deming (1982) but have distinct independent origins; simple “Deming→X” descent claims overstate the historical picture.

• Six Sigma (Motorola, 1986): Bill Smith at Motorola developed Six Sigma as a statistical methodology targeting defect rates of 3.4 per million opportunities; subsequently deployed at Allied Signal and scaled by General Electric from 1995. Inherits the common-cause/special-cause framing via the Shewhart/Deming lineage but is its own methodology with distinct training certifications and project structures.
• Toyota Production System (TPS) / Lean Manufacturing (Womack & Jones, 1996): Developed within Toyota by Taiichi Ohno, Eiji Toyoda, and others from the 1940s onwards. Deming’s 1950 lectures in Japan influenced the broader Japanese quality context; TPS itself has distinct origins in just-in-time production,jidoka(automation with human judgement), and waste reduction, and is not simply a reapplication of Deming. Later branded as Lean by Womack, Jones & Roos (1990) and Womack & Jones (1996).
• Kaizen:A Japanese term and tradition of continuous improvement popularized in Western management by Imai (1986). Distinct from Deming’s terminology (Deming did not himself use “kaizen”) but organically compatible with Point 5 of the 14 Points.
• Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (1987):U.S. national quality award established by Congress in 1987; its criteria draw on multiple quality-management traditions, including the Deming tradition, but are not solely based on Deming’s work.
• ISO 9000 Quality Management Standards (1987, revised 2000, 2015): International documented quality-management standards with origins in British BS 5750 and military procurement standards (MIL-Q-9858). ISO 9000 and the Deming tradition developed along related but distinct lineages; the 2000 revision aligned more closely with process-orientation views of the kind Deming advocated.
• Lean Six Sigma: Integration of Lean and Six Sigma methodologies, typically for combined waste reduction and variation reduction. Popularized from the early 2000s.
• Business Process Management (BPM) / Business Process Reengineering (BPR): BPR (Hammer & Champy, 1993) is often contrasted with TQM - BPR emphasizes discontinuous redesign where TQM emphasizes continuous improvement - but both traditions have influenced modern process-management practice.

References

1. Deming, W. E. (1982). Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position. MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study. ISBN 0-911379-00-6.
2. Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the Crisis. MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study. (Expanded reissue of the 1982 book under a new title.)
3. Deming, W. E. (1993). The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education. MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study. (Introduces the System of Profound Knowledge; uses “Study” in place of “Check” in the Plan-Do-Study-Act form of the cycle.)
4. The W. Edwards Deming Institute. (2018). Deming’s 14 Points for the Transformation of Management [One-page canonical statement]. https://deming.org/fourteen-points/. PDF: One-Pager-14Points.pdf. Used as the ground-truth canonical text for the 14 Points on this page, since no PDF of Deming (1982) or Deming (1986) is attached to the project’s Zotero library.
5. Shewhart, W. A. (1931). Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product. D. Van Nostrand Company.
6. Shewhart, W. A. (1939). Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control. Graduate School, U.S. Department of Agriculture. (Cited in some accounts as the origin of the four-step Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle; Anderson et al. (1994) instead attribute the PDSA cycle to Shewhart, 1931.)
7. Taylor, F. W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper & Brothers.
8. Bertalanffy, L. V. (1968). General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications. George Braziller.
9. Womack, J. P., & Jones, D. T. (1996). Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation. Simon & Schuster.

Further Reading

1. Juran, J. M., & Godfrey, A. B. (1999). Juran’s Quality Handbook (5th ed.). McGraw-Hill.
2. Crosby, P. B. (1979). Quality is Free: The Art of Making Quality Certain. McGraw-Hill.
3. Imai, M. (1986). Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success. Random House.
4. Ishikawa, K. (1985). What Is Total Quality Control? The Japanese Way. Prentice-Hall.
5. Feigenbaum, A. V. (1951). Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration. McGraw-Hill. (Origin of the term “Total Quality Control”.)
6. Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective. Addison-Wesley.
7. National Institute of Standards and Technology. (2023). Baldrige Excellence Framework. U.S. Department of Commerce.
8. International Organization for Standardization. (2015). ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management Systems. ISO.

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