Joseph M. Juran

Joseph Moses Juran (December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) was a Romanian-born American engineer, management consultant and author.

He was an advocate for quality and quality management and wrote several books on the topics.

He was the brother of Academy Award winner Nathan Juran.

Juran was born in Brăila, Romania, one of six children born to Gitel and Jakob Juran; they later lived in Gura Humorului.

His family was Jewish and as part of the Jewish community in Romania, were subjected to oppression by the authorities and their Romanian gentile neighbors.

Escaping antisemitism, his father emigrated to the United States in 1909 with the rest of the family following in 1912.

The Juran family settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In deciding to leave Romania the family avoided becoming victims of The Holocaust, as most of the Jews of Gura Humorului were detained and transported to Nazi concentration camps.

Juran had three sisters and two brothers.

Rebecca (Betty), Charlotte and Minerva, who earned a doctoral degree and had a career in education, film and art director Nathan Juran and Rudolph (Rudy) the founder of a municipal bond company.

He attended Minneapolis South High School where he excelled, especially in mathematics.

He graduated from high school in 1920.

He was a chess champion at an early age, and later was dominant in chess at Western Electric.

He graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering.

In 1924, Juran joined Western Electric's Hawthorne Works where 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 visible position in the company accelerated Juran's career.

Juran was promoted to department chief in 1928, and the following year became a division chief.

As a hedge against the uncertainties of the Great Depression, he enrolled in Loyola University Chicago School of Law in 1931.

He published his first quality-related article in Mechanical Engineering in 1935.

He graduated in 1935 and was admitted to the Illinois bar in 1936, though he never practiced law.

During the Second World War, through an arrangement with his employer, Juran served in the Lend-Lease Administration and Foreign Economic Administration.

Just before the war's end, he resigned from Western Electric and his government post, intending to become a freelance consultant.

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 Gillette, Hamilton Watch Company and Borg-Warner.

In 1937, he moved to Western Electric/AT&T's headquarters in New York City, where he held the position of Chief Industrial Engineer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

During his life, he made ten visits to Japan, the last in 1990.