The History of Total Quality Management

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 24, 2026

In 1950 quality control was not yet a movement. The Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) brought W. Edwards Deming to Tokyo that year. He taught a course on quality control at the Japan Medical Association auditorium in Kanda-Surugadai. A course for top management followed in Hakone. The audience was executives, managers, engineers and researchers in a country whose industry was rebuilding. What they heard was the basics of statistical quality control.

Total Quality Management (TQM) took shape in Japan between 1950 and the 1970s. Engineers at JUSE and American teachers such as W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran turned statistical quality control into a way of running a whole company. The throughline is simple. Quality moved upstream, from inspecting finished goods to controlling the process, and then to making everyone in the company responsible for it.

The statistics came earlier, from Walter Shewhart's memorandum of May 16, 1924 proposing the control chart. The name came later: ASQ says "total quality management" was first a term coined by the Naval Air Systems Command in the US Navy to describe a Japanese-style approach to quality improvement. The Hakone course lasted one day. What the audience did with the basics over the next thirty years became the thing American firms later tried to copy.

For the concept itself, see Total Quality Management. For the larger story it belongs to, see the history of management.

Timeline at a Glance

The Mark and the Gauge (1300-1923)

Guilds stamp quality on goods, armories gauge it

Picture a London goldsmith's shop around 1300. A silver cup sits finished on the bench, but it cannot leave. The statute of Edward I says no vessel of silver may depart the workers' hands until it has been marked with the leopard's head, and the Assay Office London records that the "Guardians of the craft" went from shop to shop to test the work. Silver had to be of sterling standard, 92.5% pure, and gold of the "touch of Paris," 19.2 carats. In 1363 an ordinance of Edward III added the maker's mark, so a piece of plate identified the goldsmith responsible. The Goldsmiths' Company, whose first royal charter dates to 1327, carried that duty for centuries.

This was a precursor, not TQM. A guild mark tested a finished product against a fixed standard and put a name on it. Nobody was improving the process, and nobody called it quality management. But two habits that TQM later depended on were already there: a written standard, and a mark that tied each piece of work to the person who made it.

The next precursor came with machines. At Springfield Armory, the National Park Service says, new machines of the mid-nineteenth century, coupled with a system of gauges developed by armory employees such as Cyrus Buckland and Erskine Allin, produced the first fully interchangeable machine-made weapons. A gauge is a physical standard that every worker can check a part against. It moved quality from the inspector's eye to a shared measurement. It also created a new problem: a factory could now make thousands of parts, and checking each one was slow and expensive. Someone would have to find a way to judge a process without examining every piece.

What this means for teams today: Written standards and clear ownership are old tools, and they still work. But they check the output. The rest of this history is about learning to check the process.

The Control Chart Years (1924-1949)

Shewhart finds a way to see variation

The man who answered the problem of the gauge was Walter Shewhart. ASQ's biography says he was an engineer at Western Electric from 1918 to 1924, and then worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1925 until he retired in 1956. His writings were held inside Bell Laboratories, and one of them was the historic memorandum of May 16, 1924, in which he proposed the control chart to his superiors. The idea was that a process has natural variation, and that a chart can show when something outside the normal pattern has happened. Instead of sorting good pieces from bad at the end, a team could watch the line. In 1931 he published Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product, which ASQ calls a complete exposition of the basic principles of quality control.

Another future quality leader sat close by. Joseph Juran joined the Bell System as an engineer in 1924, and two years later was one of three people assigned to a new department formed to carry out what is known today as statistical quality control. For the method itself, see statistical process control.

War turned the method into a standard. In December 1940, at the War Department's request, the American Standards Association started a project on applying statistical methods to quality control. The committee was chaired by H.F. Dodge of Bell Telephone Laboratories, and W. Edwards Deming of the Bureau of the Census was a member. The revised drafts of Z1.1 and Z1.2 received approval on May 27, 1941, and Z1.3 followed in 1942. A control chart was now something a defense contractor could be told to use. Compare the earlier factory-efficiency movement in the history of scientific management: Taylor's engineers studied the worker, while Shewhart's studied the variation in the work.

What this means for teams today: Watching a process over time tells you things that checking a single result cannot. A trend on a chart is a conversation starter before the customer complaint arrives.

Deming in Japan (1950-1979)

American statistics become Japanese management

After the war, Japan's engineers wanted the methods. In 1950 JUSE invited Deming, and as the JUSE account of the Deming Prize tells it, his lectures made a deep impression and gave great impetus to quality control in Japan, which was still in its infancy. A transcript of the eight-day course was compiled from stenographic records and sold. Deming donated his royalties to JUSE. In appreciation, JUSE's managing director Kenichi Koyanagi proposed using the money for a prize, and the board voted unanimously to create it. The first Deming Prize ceremony took place on September 22, 1951. For the man himself, see W. Edwards Deming's leadership profile and the PDCA cycle that carries his name in many textbooks.

Two other Americans filled out the picture. ASQ lists Armand Feigenbaum's Total Quality Control among the forerunners of today's TQM, published in 1951. The Feigenbaum Foundation says he first introduced the concept in an article in 1946 while working at General Electric, and that the 1951 book was written while he was a doctoral student at MIT. The foundation lists among his principles that managing quality is managing the business and that quality is a continuous process of improvement, not a quick fix. For the cost side of the argument, see the cost of quality. Juran's Quality Control Handbook was also first published in 1951, and in 1954 JUSE invited him to Japan. ASQ quotes Kaoru Ishikawa on what followed: Japanese managers had shown little interest when young quality researchers explained QC to them, but Juran, with his worldwide reputation, was more persuasive. His visit marked a shift in Japan's quality control from factory technology to concern for the entire management. The line from Deming and Juran to "total quality control" runs through that change.

Then the shop floor took over. JUSE says QC Circle activities began in Japan in April 1962: small groups of first-line employees who continually control and improve the quality of their own products and services. JUSE's profile of Kaoru Ishikawa credits him with inventing QC circles to promote humanity-centric management, and says the first International Convention on QC Circles was held in Tokyo in 1978. Simple charts such as the cause-and-effect diagram, collected in the seven quality tools, suited teams like these. The Japanese idea of continuous small improvement also fits with kaizen, though kaizen has its own history.

By the end of this era the Japanese method was company-wide: executives owned quality, specialists supplied the statistics, and ordinary workers ran improvement projects. JUSE's name for it was Total Quality Control. The Deming Prize had become an examination of an organization's whole quality system.

What this means for teams today: The teaching only stuck when top management was in the room. Training the front line without the people who set priorities usually produces posters, not change.

The Wake-Up Call (1980-1987)

America rediscovers its own teachers

On June 24, 1980, NBC broadcast a special program in prime time called "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?". The Deming Institute, which now streams it with NBC's permission, describes the message as management practices focused on delighting customers, respecting and involving employees, and using data and statistical tools to improve continually. The same page quotes Deming's book Out of the Crisis: "The greatest waste in America is failure to use the ability of people." That book appeared in 1982 and set out his 14 points for management.

The label came out of the military. ASQ's account says the term "total quality management" began as a term coined by the Naval Air Systems Command to describe its Japanese-style management approach to quality improvement. JUSE describes the same journey from the other side: Total Quality Control, developed in Japan, was re-imported to the United States in the 1980s and contributed to the revitalization of its industries. While the term TQC was used in Japan, it was translated as TQM in western nations. ASQ lists Philip Crosby's promotion of zero defects among the teachings that paved the way for quality improvement in many companies.

Two institutions then made quality official. On August 20, 1987, President Reagan signed Public Law 100-107, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Improvement Act, to create a national program recognizing US organizations that "practice effective quality management." NIST says the award was named for the Secretary of Commerce who died in July 1987 and who had championed quality as a key to US prosperity. In the same year ISO published the ISO 9000 series. The NIST report on the standard traces it to the US Department of Defense's quality program of 1959, NATO's 1968 adoption of that program, and the British Standards Institution's 1979 BS 5750, the first commercial quality management system standard. ISO formed Technical Committee 176 in 1979 to produce a common standard. A US company also showed the circle closing: in 1989 Florida Power & Light became the first foreign winner of Japan's Deming Application Prize. For the standard itself, see ISO 9001.

What this means for teams today: A good idea can sit unused at home while it is studied abroad. When a competitor keeps beating you on a measure, find out how they work before you debate why.

The Backlash (1988-2000s)

Adoption races ahead of understanding

Once awards and a standard existed, quality became a program with outside scrutiny. GAO, at a congressional request, examined the impact of formal total-quality-management practices on selected US companies, and its report was published May 2, 1991. The attention was real. So was the doubt.

The best-documented doubt is academic. Thomas Powell's 1995 paper in Strategic Management Journal reviewed the evidence and ran its own study. It found that most features generally associated with TQM, such as quality training, process improvement and benchmarking, do not generally produce advantage by themselves. What did produce advantage were tacit, behavioral features that rivals struggle to copy: open culture, employee empowerment and executive commitment. In other words, the tools could be bought by anyone. The commitment could not.

That finding explains how the label wore out. ASQ now says TQM, as a term, is not as widely used in the United States as it once was, with most of its concepts, principles and methodologies subsumed under the term quality management. Business process reengineering, covered in the history of business process reengineering, competed for the same executive attention in the early 1990s with a more radical message, and the statistical branch that grew into its own discipline is told in the history of Six Sigma. Measurement frameworks such as the one in the history of the balanced scorecard took further executive attention. TQM did not disappear. It lost its brand.

What this means for teams today: A quality program fails when it is treated as a kit of tools. Ask what in your culture would make the tools work, and what would make people stop using them.

The Quiet Legacy (2000s-present)

The name fades, the machinery stays

Much of what TQM built continues under other names. JUSE's Deming Prize rules replaced the term TQC with TQM in 1999, to follow what it calls internationally accepted practice, and renamed the Deming Application Prize simply the Deming Prize in 2012. ASQ places TQM's successors in quality management systems, ISO 9000 standards, and award programs such as the Deming Prize and the Baldrige Award. The Baldrige program itself widened: NIST says its scope was expanded to health care and education organizations in 1999 and to nonprofit and government organizations in 2007.

You can see the older layers in modern work. The control chart remains part of the standard process-improvement kit, and ISO 9001 is still a current standard. The customer focus, employee involvement, process approach and fact-based decisions that ASQ lists as TQM's core principles now appear in how teams talk about service, operations and software delivery. The history also gives a caution. When a method gets a label, a certificate and a consulting industry, the label can survive while the practice thins. The teams that kept the practice kept the questions: what does the customer need, where does the process vary, and who owns the fix.

What this means for teams today: You do not need the name to use the method. Start with one process, one chart and one improvement team that includes the people doing the work.

Key People

Key Facts

Key Facts: Total Quality Management

• The control chart was proposed in Shewhart's memorandum of May 16, 1924.
• The first Deming Prize ceremony was held on September 22, 1951.
• JUSE says QC Circle activities began in April 1962.
• NBC aired "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" on June 24, 1980.
• The Baldrige Act, Public Law 100-107, was signed on August 20, 1987.
• ISO published the ISO 9000 series in 1987, based largely on BS 5750.

The Pattern Behind the History

We call this the Upstream Pattern. It is our synthesis of the timeline above, not a research finding.

1. Quality moves upstream. Guild marks and armory gauges checked finished goods. Shewhart's chart watched the process, and TQM extended that to the whole company.
2. Top management must be taught. Ishikawa's account of Juran's 1954 visit shows that Japanese executives listened to a well-known outsider when they would not listen to their own young engineers.
3. The people doing the work own the fix. QC circles put improvement in first-line teams, not in a quality department.
4. Prizes and standards spread it, and freeze it. The Deming Prize, the Baldrige Award and ISO 9000 carried the method to thousands of firms. They also let firms collect the badge without the culture.
5. Tools copy easily, culture does not. Powell's 1995 finding is the reason the label faded while the practices stayed.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Check the process, not just the result. Plot your key measure over time before you react to one bad week.
• Get the leader in the room. Training aimed only at staff leaves the priorities untouched.
• Give the improvement work to the people who do the job. A small team with a clear problem beats a program with a binder.
• Treat standards as a floor. A certificate says you have a system. It does not say the system works.
• Protect the culture behind the tools. Open discussion of problems and visible leadership commitment are what Powell's study found hard to copy.

For how this fits among rival ideas about running organizations, see the management theory timeline.

The long view is that TQM was less a single invention than a series of handoffs: from guild to armory, from armory to statistician, from statistician to Japanese engineer, and back across the Pacific. What lasted was the habit of asking where the process varies and who owns the fix.