Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

By the late 1970s and early 1980s Japanese manufacturers were outselling the West on price and on reliability, and the United Kingdom became a net importer of finished goods for the first time since the Industrial Revolution. In 1980 an NBC documentary asked bluntly, If Japan Can, Why Can’t We? Western firms began digging up quality control methods developed by Western thinkers over the previous 50 years. The name total quality management has murky origins, possibly a 1983 UK Department of Trade and Industry campaign, with roots in the work of Armand V. Feigenbaum and Kaoru Ishikawa.

The spark in the United States came from the Navy. In spring 1984 a Navy office asked civilian researchers about statistical process control, and was pointed to W. Edwards Deming, the statistician revered in postwar Japan. By 1985 the Navy called its effort Total Quality Management, and the Department of Defense, Army and Coast Guard followed, pushing contractors to adopt it. The episode covers the PDCA cycle, cross-functional teams, the 1987 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, and why TQM faded after peaking around 1993 while Six Sigma, lean manufacturing and ISO 9000 carried its ideas forward.

• Even the Environmental Protection Agency mandated TQM principles for its underground storage tanks program.
• The Baldrige Award judged organizations on seven categories, from leadership and strategy to workforce, operations and results.
• Joseph M. Juran said the Baldrige criteria became the most widely accepted description of what TQM meant.
• The U.S. Federal Quality Institute was shut down in 1995 amid the Clinton administration’s push to streamline government.
• The European Center for Total Quality Management had closed by 2009.