Deming Prize

In 1965, a Japanese tire company published a study.

Bridgestone had gone looking at the companies that had won the Deming Prize, Japan's highest honor for quality, and asked a simple question.

How do the best-run companies decide where they're going, and how do they get everyone moving there? The practices they documented got a name, Hoshin Kanri, roughly direction management.

The idea is simple to say and hard to do.

And basically what I started looking at was what are some of the best companies doing? And that's when the quality movement came in and they called it TQM in those days.

The Deming Award in Japan was real popular.

But what happened was the car manufacturers started adopting good operating principles.

But then all of a sudden I looked at it and said, hey, wait a minute, the technology is going to work.