Joseph M. Juran

Sadie and he celebrated their 81st wedding anniversary in June 2007. They were both 102 at the time. Juran died of a stroke on 28 February 2008, at age 103, in Rye, New York. He was active on his 103rd birthday and was caring for himself and Sadie, who was in poor health, when he died. Sadie died on 2 December 2008, at age 103. They were survived by their four children, ten grandchildren, and ten great-grandchildren. Juran left a book that was 37% complete, which he began at age 98.

In 2004, at age 100, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. A special event was held in May to mark his 100th birthday.

Juran's concept of quality management extended outside the walls of the factory to encompass nonmanufacturing processes, especially those that might be thought of as service related. For example, in an interview published in 1997 he observed:

Juran began writing his memoirs at 92. They were published two months before he celebrated his 99th birthday. He gave two interviews at 94 and 97.

He soon joined the faculty of New York University as an adjunct professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering, where he taught courses in quality control and ran round table seminars for executives. He also worked via a small management consulting firm on projects for Gilette, Hamilton Watch Company and Borg-Warner. After the firm's owner's sudden death, Juran began his own independent practice, from which he made a comfortable living until his retirement in the late 1990s. His early clients included the now defunct Bigelow-Sanford Carpet Company, the Koppers Company, the International Latex Company, Bausch & Lomb and General Foods.

Juran founded the Juran Institute in 1979. The Institute is an international training, certification, and consulting company that provides training and consulting services in quality management, Lean Six Sigma management and business process management, as well as Six Sigma certification. The institute is based in Tysons Corner, Virginia. Their mission statement is to "Create a global community of practice to empower organizations and people to push beyond their limits."

During his 1966 visit to Japan, Juran learned about the Japanese concept of quality circles, which he enthusiastically evangelized in the West. He also acted as a matchmaker between U.S. and Japanese companies looking for introductions to each other.

Juran is widely credited for adding the human dimension to quality management. He pushed for the education and training of managers. For Juran, human relations problems were the ones to isolate, and resistance to change was the root cause of quality issues. Juran credits Margaret Mead's book Cultural Patterns and Technical Change for illuminating the core problem in reforming business quality. His book Managerial Breakthrough, published in 1964, outlined the issue.

Working independently of W. Edwards Deming (who focused on the use of statistical process control), Juran—who focused on managing for quality—went to Japan and started courses (1954) in quality management. The training began with top and middle management. The idea that top and middle management needed training had found resistance in the United States. For Japan, it would take some 20 years for the training to pay off. In the 1970s, Japanese products began to be seen as the leaders in quality. This sparked a crisis in the United States due to quality issues in the 1980s.

The end of World War II compelled Japan to change its focus from becoming a military power to becoming an economic one. Despite Japan's ability to compete on price, its consumer goods manufacturers suffered from a long-established reputation of poor quality. The first edition of Juran's Quality Control Handbook in 1951 attracted the attention of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), which invited him to Japan in 1952. When he finally arrived in Japan in 1954, Juran met with executives from ten manufacturing companies, notably Showa Denko, Nippon Kōgaku, Noritake, and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company. He also lectured at Hakone, Waseda University, Ōsaka, and Kōyasan. During his life, he made ten visits to Japan, the last in 1990.

In 1941, Juran came across the work of Vilfredo Pareto and began to apply the Pareto principle to quality issues (for example, 80% of a problem is caused by 20% of the causes). This is also known as "the vital few and the trivial many." In later years, Juran preferred "the vital few and the useful many" to signal that the remaining 80% of the causes should not be totally ignored.

As a hedge against the uncertainties of the Great Depression, he enrolled in Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 1931. He graduated in 1935 and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1936, though he never practiced law.

Juran was promoted to department chief in 1928, and the following year became a division chief. He published his first quality-related article in Mechanical Engineering in 1935. In 1937, he moved to Western Electric/AT&T's headquarters in New York City, where he held the position of Chief Industrial Engineer.

In 1926, he married Sadie Shapiro. Joseph and Sadie met in 1924 when his sister Betty moved to Chicago, and Sadie and he met her train; in his autobiography, he wrote of meeting Sadie, "There and then I was smitten and have remained so ever since." They were engaged in 1925, on Joseph's 21st birthday. Fifteen months later, they were married. They had been married for nearly 82 years when he died in 2008.

In 1924, with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota, Juran joined Western Electric's Hawthorne Works. His first job was troubleshooting in the Complaint Department. In 1925, Bell Labs proposed that Hawthorne Works personnel be trained in its newly developed statistical sampling and control chart techniques. Juran was chosen to join the Inspection Statistical Department, a small group of engineers charged with applying and disseminating Bell Labs' statistical quality control innovations. This highly visible position fueled Juran's rapid ascent in the organization and the course of his later career.

When he began his career in the 1920s, the principal focus in quality management was on the quality of the end, or finished, product. The tools used were from the Bell system of acceptance sampling, inspection plans, and control charts. The ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor dominated.

Juran was born in Brăila, Romania, one of six children born to Jakob and Gitel Juran; they later lived in Gura Humorului. His family was Jewish and as part of the Jewish community were subjects of oppression by the authorities as well as their gentile neighbors. Because of the injustice the family has experienced they decided to leave to the USA: first his father - in 1909, and then the rest of them in 1912. As turns out it was hard but very smart and even fateful decision – during the WW2 most of Jews of Gura Humorului were rounded up, shipped to the concentration camp where significant part of them if not most of them, perished. He had three sisters: Rebecca (nicknamed Betty), Minerva, who earned a doctoral degree and had a career in education, and Charlotte. He had two brothers: film and art director Nathan Juran, and Rudolph, known as Rudy. Rudy founded a municipal bond company. In 1912, Joseph Juran emigrated to America with his family, settling in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He excelled in school, especially in mathematics. He was a chess champion at an early age, and dominated chess at Western Electric. Juran attended Minneapolis South High School where he graduated in 1920.

Joseph Moses Juran (December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) was a Romanian-born American engineer and management consultant. He was an evangelist for quality and quality management, having written several books on those subjects. He was the brother of Academy Award winner Nathan Juran.