It was only after the war, however, that Juran moved into the arena for which he is most famous.

ECONOMIST: Guru: Joseph Juran | The

Juran, an electrical engineer, had also gone to Japan after the second world war and begun to teach middle managers about quality.

ECONOMIST: Guru

Juran always emphasised the difference in approach between himself and Deming.

ECONOMIST: Guru: Joseph Juran | The

Juran focused more on the human-relations aspects of quality, while Deming's approach involved demonstrating that all business processes are vulnerable to a loss of quality through statistical variation.

ECONOMIST: Guru

It gave Americans some solace at the time to discover that behind the Japanese quality miracle had been two Americans that few of them had heard of: Joseph Moses Juran and W. Edwards Deming.

ECONOMIST: Guru

He said that Deming was more focused on the statistical analysis of quality whereas he, Juran, was more concerned about the human input, teaching people how to introduce what he called CWQM (company-wide quality management).

ECONOMIST: Guru

Even Joseph Juran, one of the two American post-war germinators of the quality idea (the other was W. Edwards Deming), considered that quality circles were pretty useless if the company's management was not trained in the more general principles of total quality management.

ECONOMIST: Idea