Thoughts on Dr. Juran
Tell us how Dr. Juran made a difference in your professional or personal life. Were you fortunate enough to take one of his classes? Did you hear him speak? Take a moment to reflect on his accomplishments and honor his memory.
What Others Have to Say
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I have known many scholars in my life, some of them geniuses. But, in this rarified group, Dr. Juran stands as unique. I have never known anyone else like him.
I owe my acquaintance to my colleague and friend, A. Blanton Godfrey, whom I first met when Blan was at AT&T Bell Laboratories in the seat once held, in effect, by Walter Shewhart, himself. Shortly after Blan and I began collaborating on adapting modern quality management methods to health care, he left Bell Labs to become the Chief Executive Officer of the Juran Institute, where he asked me to accept a seat on the Institute?s tiny Board of Directors. Quarterly Board meetings at the Institute became for several years thereafter a recurrent highlight of my annual schedule, and, in Dr. Juran?s presence, an instructive delight. My health got better at those meetings, with Dr. Juran?s careful selection of food and snacks on offer. Living to the century mark was not an accident, in my view, for Dr. Juran; he designed it.
To me, he was an inveterate and generous mentor. His teaching came to me first, of course, through his books ? each a trove of useful models and ideas, and, in the case of the magisterial Handbook, the most useful reference on quality in the world. Happily, being on the Board gave me the chance for face-to-face interactions with him, as well. Our time together would include in equal measure his analyses of the state of the quality movement and emerging techniques, his luscious reminiscences and recollections about great figures and turning points in the field, and his ambitious and exciting plans for what could happen next. He was eloquent. I once asked him how he thought the quality movement in health care was doing. He answered, ?It seems to me that health care has one long leg in the quality of technology and one short leg in the quality of processes, and therefore it is walking in circles.?
Dr. Juran had a story and a technique for every challenge. He would return, I sensed, time and again to the basics, though, as any true scholar must. If he mentioned the Pareto Principle to me once in our meetings, he must have mentioned it a thousand times, as a physicist might refer to the Law of Gravity. At a Board meeting I mentioned my concerned that so few clients represented so large a fraction of the total work. What followed was a close to a sneer as I ever saw from this Old-World-gracious man. ?What, exactly do you expect?? he asked, ?That?s always the way.? And I snapped out of it, reminded by the Master of a pattern approaching natural law.
Dr. Juran seemed always to have a book in process. His method was characteristic of his orderly, planful mind. The book outline would become a collection of physical folders, arranged in logical order, into which he would insert relevant papers, notes of thoughts, and stories as they came to him. A few months or a year or two later, the collections were ready to assemble ? voila! ? into a finished book. The ?voila,? of course, is shorthand for enormous discipline and hard work, relying, I always thought, on Dr. Juran?s confidence in method as the key to progress. His commitment to order, process, and method were intimidating as examples to those of us with less discipline in our lives.
Dr. Juran?s discipline, however, was never of the joyless type. He laughed often and readily, and I did not see him once lapse into fretting or negativity when things went wrong. I heard him utter a complaint only once in the years I knew him: at his 100th birthday celebration, joined by scores of the world?s experts in quality, he mentioned in his cordial speech that he had come to answer the question, ?How do you like being 100 years old?? with the answer that it was ?no picnic.? He was the soul of graciousness to me ? a model of how to treat others with respect, even while teaching them what mortals without his wit and will could have discovered on their own.
Donald M. Berwick, MD, MPP
President and CEO
Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Cambridge, MA
dberwick@ihi.org
Donald Berwick, 28-May-2008