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Many people on this side of the ocean have greeted the hullabaloo over Japan's miraculous achievements in manufacturing over the last decade with a yawn. ‘So what else is new?’ they say. ‘Deming said this years ago.’ W. Edwards Deming is the godfather, if not the real father, of plant productivity. He was mainly responsible for instituting in plants the statistical control procedures that the Japanese have so adroitly adopted. This article describes the Deming approach to productivity and quality: because only management has the authority to change the production system to eliminate them, product defects are a managerial responsibility. To change the system, management first needs to distinguish abnormal from normal variation. It also needs to specify operationally what the system is supposed to produce. With these controls in hand, the organization can predict performance, costs, and quality levels, and managers can communicate effectively with customers and people on the shop floor. And this is most important, for when management sees the system and not the worker as the cause of problems, many of the morale-sapping results of poor decisions, targets no one believes in, and motivating slogans that implicitly blame workers disappear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]