1.5
More than any one 
man, Deming was 
responsible for the 
economic miracle of 
Japan in the years that 
followed the second 
world war. His 
revolutionary ideas had 
been ignored in the US, 
but Deming found an 
audience among 
Japanese business 
leaders when in 1950 
he was assigned by the 
Allied Supreme 
Command in Tokyo to help rebuild Japan's war-torn 
economy. Deming advocated secure employment for 
workers, an end to the divide between management and 
the factory floor, and above all an emphasis on quality. 
"We didn't really believe him" said one executive, "But we 
did what he said in order not to lose face." Japanese 
companies soon began achieving enormous success, and 
Deming became the best-known American in Japan after 
General MacArthur. Yet he remained almost unknown at 
home. But by the late Seventies the US electronics industry 
had been almost destroyed by such Japanese brands as 
Sony and Panasonic, and it dawned on some US companies, 
among them Ford and Xerox, that Deming might be right. 
Under his guidance they eliminated cherished 
management perks - private dining rooms and special 
parking spaces - because Deming said workers found them 
offensive. They were hard lessons to learn, but when they 
bore fruit the western world, like Japan before, began to 
listen. At the age of 80, Deming found himself deluged 
with demands to act as consultant to the largest companies 
in America. In 1987 President Reagan awarded him the 
National Medal of Technology, which was presented in the 
Rose Garden of the White House. It was a late vindication 
for this curmudgeonly, frugal man who had for so long 
been a prophet without honor in his own country
@
2.2
Politically and economically Japan has so far been in an 
indeterminate and perhaps unrealistic frame of mind. She 
has been living in a dream world of neutralism, cushioned 
against the shocks of international events by the presence 
of American "security forces" and by continued dollar aid. 
The Korean war, fought on her doorstep, meant no more to 
Japan than a chance to earn money by supplying goods 
and services to the United Nations forces. The present 
armistice is considered mainly in terms of the 
opportunities it presents for making money out of the 
reconstruction of Korea. Relations between Japan and 
Korea remain as bad as ever, with disputes in progress 
about fishing rights, property claims and the island of 
Takashima. 

Meanwhile, 85 million people, their number increasing by 
more than a million a year must make a living in four 
small islands which only a century ago supported no more 
than 30 million. This pressure of population is the biggest 
single factor in Japan's economic instability to-day; in the 
past it was the driving force in her expansion. Because of 
the mountainous nature of the land, only one sixth of the 
total area is arable. Yet the people are so skilled in 
cultivation that they produce four-fifths of their normal 
food supply. Japan cannot produce much more food; the 
alternatives are to import or to starve, large-scale 
emigration being out of the question. The prime task 
before the Japanese statesmanship is clearly to encourage 
birth control by every legitimate modern means. Only 
when Japan's population is stabilized will she cease to be a 
menace to her neighbours.

The nation's greatest asset to-day, which accounts for the 
rapid recovery from the moral and material devastation of 
defeat in the last war, is the frugal and hard-working 
nature of the people. Used to simple living, most of them 
are content with little more than a wooden shack, the 
minimum of clothing and a diet of rice, vegetables and fish. 
(By contrast, in the cities there has been much rich living 
and extravagance since the war.) Because of their capacity 
for hard work, the Japanese live better than any other 
Asian people and are as well off as some European ones. 
The Japanese farmer or factory hand will work longer and 
harder for less reward than his opposite number 
anywhere in the world. The advent of trade unionism since 
the war has made some difference to this but has not yet 
seriously impaired it.

It is hard to say how deep anti-American feeling runs 
among the Japanese. Certainly some people, such as 
farmers and fishermen whose livelihood is affected by the 
proximity of American bases, and families whose morals 
are also affected by this, are critical of the need to 
maintain an American garrison under the security pact. 
Left-wing politicians and university students take 
advantage of this and lead the clamour of "Yankee Go 
Home!" But on the whole the sentiment of most Japanese is 
more one of natural pride in their newly regained 
independence than of active hostility to Americans.

The unpopularity of rearmament stems from the revulsion 
of feeling caused by the losses of the last war, and 
especially the use of the atom bomb, and from the pacifism 
preached by the MacArthur regime in its early days. Yet 
to-day Japan is being urged to rearm by the United States, 
which is offering between $100m. and $150m, in aid in 
condition that Japan enlarges her army.

If Japan is ever to regain economic stability she will have 
to correct her present industrial shortcomings, among 
them, too high costs, outdated production methods and 
inflationary finance, and then find markets in Asia. Like 
the rest of the free world, she will have to reach a modus 
vivendi with China. That she will be a competitor of the 
United Kingdom is inevitable; that she will undercut prices 
as severely as she did before the war is unlikely. At the 
moment she is struggling to reduce her export prices to the 
level of world prices.

The Japanese people, faced with ideological and practical 
problems as great as any in their long history, are striving 
to safeguard their future. Notwithstanding Communist 
blandishments, they are beginning to make up their minds 
that their future lies with the free world. Their Emperor, 
no longer a divine figure but still held in great respect, has 
given them a sound lead. Right-wing diehards and former 
military men have gained some ground lately, and may yet 
prove a bigger menace than the Communists. But the 
people have shown in two recent elections that they prefer 
to follow the middle course in politics.

Their future depends upon whether their political leaders 
can match the common sense of the voters with their own 
foresight and moderation. Of these qualities the last 
session of the Diet showed little evidence, being give over 
to party manoeuvring, personal quarrels, and even 
physical violence. At present there is much talk of a 
possible coalition between the Liberal and Progressive 
parties, but personal rivalry stands in the way. If a 
coalition comes about it will make for greater political 
stability in the coming years. But unless and until Japanese 
leaders can show as much sense as the voters the future of 
democracy in these islands remains doubtful.
@
2.3
Rousing company songs, physical jerks before the 
production line starts up, bowing good morning to the 
foreman ... these are some of the details which make the 
Japanese way of work so extraordinarily different. But 
there are differences which go much deeper than this. 
Professor Ronald Dore and a team of British and Japanese 
economists and sociologists have made the first detailed 
analysis of these differences with a point-by-point 
comparison of two Japanese factories and two British ones 
making similar products - the Furusato and Taga factories 
of Hitachi and the Liverpool and Bradford factories of 
English Electric. 

Work begins at 8am at Furusato. The whistle blows at 
7.50am as the last stragglers come running in - office 
workers and operatives indistinguishable in white, short 
sleeved shirts, carrying their lunches in tins wrapped in 
Japanese furoshiki cloth. Most people are already at the 
bays where they work and have changed into working 
overalls. Each has a badge on his breast-pocket giving his 
department, his name and a very revealing number. 
Number 580003 means the wearer was the third new 
entrant to be registered in 1958. He belongs to the 1958 
intake, say his managers, when discussing his promotion, 
and whether he is moving ahead faster or slower than the 
seniority norm.

Loudspeakers have been playing Liszt's Hungarian 
Rhapsody. Suddenly this gives way to rhythmic piano 
physical jerk music. With lesser or greater enthusiasm 
everyone joins in five minutes of swinging, swaying and 
bending. Afterwards they gather round their foreman, 
bowing to each other and simultaneously chorusing "Good 
Morning." The foreman offers the day's ration of 
reminders, tips and hints destined to keep people up to the 
mark, to remind them where things can go wrong if they 
are not careful. Then comes work allocation. The foreman 
remarks on the absence of one of his team. A readjustment 
is made.

At Bradford and at Liverpool work begins more gradually. 
Hourly rated men and staff are clearly distinguishable. 
Manual workers generally wear boiler suits. The collars 
and ties belong to office workers or foremen. Fifteen 
minutes before the Liverpool hooter blows a good many 
people are at their benches. There is an air of relaxation. A 
few men are cleaning their tools, most are reading a 
newspaper, chatting. A small group of women is brewing 
the day's first cup of tea. After the hooter the pace of 
movement increases; the noise level rises as machine after 
machine is switched on, but it may be still some time 
before things are fully under way. At 8.30 am the foreman 
takes stock. Eleven of his 45 workers are missing.

The day is not typical because it is a Monday, there is a 
bus strike and it is raining. In all probability, says the 
foreman, those who have been walking to work since the 
strike looked out in the wet half-light of the morning and 
asked themselves if they really needed a full wage packet 
the following week, said "Oh, sod it" and went back to bed.

There is a lot to be said for the reasonableness, mutual 
consideration, co-operativeness and orderliness with which 
the Japanese manage their affairs, but they pay a heavy 
price in the sacrifice of individuality, of independence and 
of those other enjoyments besides pride in work which can 
bring happiness. The British manage to preserve these 
virtues better, but in preserving them they too pay a 
heavy price in suspicion and bad-tempered obstinacy, in 
inertia and in a shifting mixture of complacency and 
national self doubt.

One of the most striking characteristics of the Japanese 
employment system is lifetime commitment: the fact that 
almost the only way to get into big firms, the elite half of 
the industrial structure, is at the beginning of one's 
working life. Once in a worker expects to stay until 
retirement, whereas entering English Electric involves a 
much less permanent commitment with a relatively high 
rate of job mobility for both workers and managers. 
Hitachi is a typical big Japanese firm: low labour turnover, 
wages determined more by seniority than by function, and 
its workers belonging to the same house, or enterprise 
union.

It is the sort of firm which has given rise to the popular 
assumption by westerners (as well as some Japanese) that 
the Japanese are only suffering from a slightly prolonged 
form of industrial immaturity - that sooner or later they 
will shed their abberations and become like us. 
Paternalism, runs the argument, is characteristic of labour 
relations in immature economies more marked to Japan 
because a fully fledged feudal past was so recent; which is 
why it has persisted to a more advanced stage in the 
country's development.

Eventually therefore, it is bound to give way to a kind of 
system of the Anglo-American kind - impersonal, market 
determined, fluid, where the concept of loyalty has little 
place and the notion that it should override material 
interests has none; a system which is achievement-based 
and which ignores such irrelevant characteristics as an 
employee's age; a system in which workers are committed 
to a craft, a way of life, a labour market and not over-
committed to a single firm; a system in which trade union 
loyalties transcend corporation boundaries.

Dore believes the theory is at fault in assuming that the 
market-orientated forms of work organisation developed 
in the early industrialising countries are permanent, part 
of a state of modernity which, once reached, is never likely 
to be abandoned. He argues that they are giving way to 
organisation-orientated forms where conditions of 
employment are less and less influenced by consideration 
of the price a worker might get from another employer in 
the external market, more and more fitted into an internal 
structure of relative rankings peculiar to the enterprise 
and predicated on the assumption of stable long-term 
employment. In short there are signs that the British 
system is getting more like the Japanese, instead of the 
other way about. 

Late starters, of course, do have some advantages - Japan 
in ship-building after the Second World War, her yards 
destroyed and unencumbered with the 19th-century 
machinery which cluttered Clydebank. There is also a late 
development benefit in social technology - educational 
systems, and methods of personnel management. 
Furthermore ideologies which, although originally the 
consequences of an advanced stage of industrialisation in 
the societies in which those ideologies first appeared, can 
have an independent life and force of their own when 
diffused to those just beginning industrialisation. By this 
process late developing countries can get ahead - can show 
in a more developed form, patterns of social organisation 
which in the early starters, are still emerging, still 
struggling to get out from the chrysalis of 19th-century 
institutions.

The gap which remains between the British and Japanese 
employment systems after a decade of rapid growth and 
increasing labour shortage is large enough, and the union 
structure and the pattern of company welfare seems 
sufficiently firmly entrenched, to hazard a guess that in 
1990, Japanese workers will still be hired, promoted, paid, 
trained and socialised in a distinctively Japanese way.

Such as is enshrined, for instance, in a document called the 
"Guiding Spirit of Hitachi" which sets down the company's 
key principles to its employees as: sincerity of heart and 
mind, a spirit of forward looking positivism and a spirit of 
harmony.

It also appears in the Hitachi Song (the firm's, not the 
union's) which goes:

Over hill, over valley, each calls and each responds.
We are united and we have dreams,
We are Hitachi men, aroused and ready
To promote the happiness of others.
Great is our pride in our home-produced products.
Polished and refined our skills.
@
2.4
In Hitachi the foreman's role is intended to be much more 
like that of any army sergeant's than like that of a British 
foreman.  He is usually referred to as "the old man" (oyaji 
is also a common way of referring to one's own father).  He 
is the natural person for a young man to ask to be a 
ceremonial go-between at his wedding or to play an even 
more important role and actually find a bride for a young 
man.  He would be the natural person to ask to be master 
of ceremonies at a parent's funeral if one did not have any 
convenient uncles.

Similarly, as paterfamilias, the foreman presides over the 
team's communal leisure activities - outings and drinking 
parties for the spring cherry-blossom viewing, a mid-
summer "cool-in" (an evening river-bank party, preferable 
with municipal fireworks display, farewell parties for 
someone going to erect a generator abroad, victory parties 
when the group's team wins a soft-ball competition, 
celebrations of some notable work achievements or just 
straightforward "social parties."  Apart from such 
occasions, bachelors may make up a group of three or four 
to buy a bottle of rice-wine and go to "assault" the foreman 
at home - i.e. boisterously demand that he invite them in 
to share their (and subsequently, in larger measure, his) 
wine.

To be a foreman, as to be the patron in any kind of patron-
client relationship in Japanese society, is not in-expensive.  
This is recognised by the firm in a little something extra on 
the mid-summer and year-end bonuses; otherwise the 
only other compensations are the flattery the system 
offers his ego, and the gifts he may receive from his 
subordinates when they come to pay their new year 
respects.  New year is a time for a hectic round of gift-
giving, calling particularly on anyone - superior or 
colleague - on whose goodwill one depends.  The standard 
greeting formula is; "during the last year you have been 
very good to me.  I hope I can count on you again this 
year."
@
3.2
I have learned from experience that if an organisation is to 
commit itself to the quality process, the senior 
management must commit to it just as rigorously as the 
rest of the company, W Edwards Deming, a leading 
authority on total quality, is unequivocal when he states 
that quality is made in the boardroom.

Quality is not a public-relations exercise, nor is it some 
kind of training programme provided by the human-
resources department.  Total quality means a 
transformation of the whole philosophy of the company. It 
is a measurable process; it makes individuals accountable 
and, by definition, it is unforgiving.  This is often 
underestimated.  A process that forces a company to 
scrutinise and improve such functions as management and 
leadership, strategic planning, employee involvement and 
recognition, the quality of its products and services and 
customer satisfaction is no facile commitment.  It demands 
different attitudes and approaches.

Executive management must explain to an organisation 
that the quality process will mean a shift upwards in 
standards, and that performance is going to be measured 
against those standards.  Once they understand what total 
quality means to the organisation, executive management 
has begun to do its job.

It is management's responsibility to be accountable for the 
success or failure of total quality.  If the process does go 
wrong, it is executive management that has to listen and 
take action.

All too often, I hear examples of companies making 
excuses.  "After all," they will say, "didn't we make several 
fine presentations to our people about quality; didn't we 
talk to them seriously about it and surely they read the 
booklets and brochures we supplied them?  But why is it 
they didn't get the message, why is it we are not making 
progress; not improving?"  The answer is often executive 
management.

Executive management may be committed to good internal 
communications.  It may have agreed to some training.  It 
may well have invested a little money in the exercise and 
it will almost certainly have hired a consultant or two.  
What executive management has not done is commit itself 
wholeheartedly to being the foundation on which the 
whole company's quality approach is built.  Executive 
management has the responsibility to communicate, to 
lead by example and to put the quality process in place.  It 
must also be accountable for the end result.  But there are 
many examples of good practice, where leadership from 
the top is clear and unambiguous.

In an increasingly competitive world, following the 
principles of quality makes sound economic sense.  I am 
not deterred by the fact that total quality is so difficult to 
implement.  In fact, I am grateful that it is.  Were it easy, 
everybody would have it in place.  The fact that it is so 
difficult presents considerable competitive and commercial 
advantage to those companies that persevere and achieve 
it.

I recall the story of a leading Japanese industrialist asked 
to comment on whether the numbers of American firms 
rushing to introduce TQM would pose a commercial threat 
to Japanese companies.  His reply was that it would take 
American companies 10 years to get the process working 
properly, by which time Japan would have zero-defects 
management in place and be 15 years ahead again.  That 
really is competitive advantage.  Viewed in those terms, 
total quality makes hard commercial sense and if it 
becomes an integral part of the longer-term strategic-
planning process, along the lines of the Japanese 
experience, it will clearly have a positive impact on a 
company's bottom line
@
3.3
In the past three years I have visited 70 British companies 
and had long talks with another 80. The experience has 
filled me with optimism. This is mainly because of the 
"total quality" movement, which is transforming the way 
business is done.

In total quality, people "learn through the job" to do 
everything better all the time. "Continuous improvement" 
is the watchword. It is no longer a question of "We've 
always done it this way", but rather, "There must be a 
better way."

I went on to study quality in depth and continued seeing it 
in practice in companies where I had first seen its power. 
In the old days, and still in some places, people came to 
work to do as they were told. They were supposed to park 
their brains at the factory gate. Thinking was for 
management.

What could I say that would bring total quality to a wider 
public as well as being of some use to those responsible in 
companies?

Reflecting on my tour of British industry and reading the 
works of the gurus, W Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, 
Philip Crosby and others, it became obvious to me that this 
quality business is no mere technique for making better 
goods and providing better services.

It is nothing less than a revolution in the management of 
business. It is bound to be if quality means "fitness for 
use" (Juran) or "delighting the customer" (Deming). Surely 
there are no other aims for businesses that want to 
succeed. But it does mean turning things upside down, a 
new mindset and death to a lot of traditional attitudes. It 
means:

- liberation to people at work whose talents are recognised 
and utilised: restoring pride in workmanship.

- involving everyone in the search for continuous 
improvement in everything by everybody, individually 
and collectively.

- banishing fear of using initiative; eliminating 
management by blame.

- teaching all employees basic statistical process control, so 
they can build quality into the job first time.

Getting rid of status divisions, such as different 
arrangements for pensions, car-parking, eating and sick-
pay and everything else that implies that some people are 
superior and others are subordinates (at Bosch in Cardiff, 
two words are banned: "semi-skilled" and "unskilled").

Self-directed work teams, which run their own day-to-day 
affairs, with coaching from a team leader who is trained to 
listen.

Breaking down departmental barriers that waste so much 
time because people look after their own patch and don't 
see the total picture.

Organising work on the basis of a co-operative chain of 
suppliers and customers, both externally and internally: 
everyone is a customer awaiting results from a supplier; 
everyone is a supplier too; all depend ultimately on 
satisfied end-customers.

Working in partnership with outside suppliers, not trying 
to screw them down on price or continually changing them.

Recognising that quality exceeding customer expectations 
gives competitive edge and saves money, especially if you 
take into account all the indirect administrative costs and 
paying people for doing the same job twice.

Training people who are face to face with customers, 
especially with external ones, on how to win their loyalty 
and meet their problems with courtesy and understanding.

Above all, quality means co-operation instead of 
confrontation; it means respect for suppliers, customers 
and employees in place of treating them essentially as 
means to your own ends; it means the ability to stand in 
others' shoes and act accordingly.

You see why I say this quality business is a revolution. It 
changes everything we do when we focus on delighting the 
whole chain of customers, not least the consumer at the 
very end.

It's happening. The quality revolution is changing 
everything in some organisations. It's a matter of doing 
what Deming said: "Put everybody in the company to work 
to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is 
everybody's job."