Biography

Juran was born in Braila, Romania, and in 1909 his shoemaker father left for America, to be joined three years later by his family. The young Juran excelled at his studies and was three years ahead for his age. Graduating in Electrical Engineering in 1924, he joined the progressive Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T at the enormous Hawthorne Plant, Chicago, and was assigned to the inspection department.

He did not meet Deming, the other quality guru at Hawthorne, until the 1940s, when they became good friends.

In 1937 he became head of industrial engineering at Western Electric's headquarters in New York. He was now at the centre of the "quality movement", and he developed the Lorenz Curve to identify centres of defects in manufacturing.

In 1951 he edited the Quality Control Handbook, where he proposed that "Total Quality" as a management philosophy could be applied to all aspects of business.

Always a free thinker, he believed that fear occasionally brought out the best in managers, and that luck played a part in people's success.

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