這篇 J. M. Juran的寶貴訪談錄，我在2002 年請寶成Nike 事業部李興文翻譯出來，供內部傳閱。一年之後，我轉林公孚先生。
*****
「諸位同仁，
下列文章摘錄於品質文摘網頁
（ http://www.qualitydigest.com/
sir 指示，翻譯全文如下。信中提到一個人Walter Shewhart，我在個人信箋上面有註解
（摘自鍾 sir網頁 http://www.deming.com.tw/
以上
李興文」
Joseph M. Juran is considered by many to be the greatest quality thinker of
the last century. His humble beginnings as an impoverished immigrant fueled
his drive for quality and led to countless accolades, honors and medals.
過去一個世紀以來， Joseph M. Juran一直被許多人認為是最偉大的品質思想家。
He began his career at Bell System's Western Electric in the early 1920s and
developed statistical tools still widely used today. While at Western
Electric, he worked with other quality luminaries such as W. Edwards Deming
and Walter Shewhart.
During World War II, Juran served as an assistant administrator for the
Lend-Lease Administration. But following the War, he decided that big
bureaucracies weren't for him. Instead, he became a freelance management
consultant. He spent much of his time lecturing, researching, writing and
consulting about quality. He also made numerous trips to Japan to help
rebuild its shattered economy.
二次大戰時， Juran擔任「物資租借局」助理行政官；
In the years that followed, Juran wrote numerous books, including Juran's
Quality Handbook, commonly considered to be the international quality
reference book, now in its fifth edition. He also founded the Juran
Institute and the Juran Foundation (now the Juran Center at the University
of Minnesota) and was instrumental in starting the Malcolm Baldrige National
Quality Award.
此後數年， Juran寫了許多書，
Although Juran retired from public life in 1993, he still occasionally
speaks, writes and is hard at work on his memoirs.Juran 在1993年退休，但他偶
而仍演講、寫作，以及撰寫他自己的「朱蘭回憶錄」。
In June, I interviewed Juran at his home in Rye, New York. Despite his 97
years, he's still physically strong and mentally sharp. Although sometimes
careful with his answers, he didn't fail to speak his mind. As with the
previous interviews I've conducted with him, Juran was polite, considerate
and humorous.
六月間，在 Juran位在紐約 Rye 的家中，我訪問了Juran。儘管已經 97歲高齡，他的身體仍舊硬朗，思考依然犀利。
QD: What do you think has been the greatest achievement in the quality world
during your lifetime?
QD （Quality Digest「品質文摘」之簡稱）：在您一生中，
Juran: That's easy: the Japanese quality revolution. Remember, Japan set out
to get a place in the sun by military means. Obviously, that didn't work, so
they set out to do it by peaceful means, through trade.
朱蘭：很簡單。日本的品質革命。記住，
As they undertook to do that, they found that trade requires you to import
materials, fashion them into goods and sell those goods. It's like the
British did a couple of centuries ago, becoming the most important power on
Earth. However, the Japanese had a big handicap: The stuff they had been
exporting prior to World War II was pretty shoddy. Although they had low
prices because their wages were very low, they had about the worst quality
reputation in the world.
當他們開始嘗試時，發現「貿易」需要進口原料、加工和出售成品；
When you can't sell your stuff and the reason is poor quality, that message
goes all the way to the top. They undertook to improve their quality and
improve their reputation. It took a long time, about 30 years or more, but
they were successful. Not only could they sell their stuff and get a large
market share; it brought them to the status of economic superpower.
高層完全同意下列訊息：「當你的品質差勁，你就無法賣出貨物。」
QD: How did the Japanese bring about this quality revolution?
QD ：日本是如何進行這場品質革命的？
Juran: They did a whole series of things. The top people took charge of
quality, which was pretty unusual. They undertook to train the entire
hierarchy in how to manage quality, which requires a lot of training. They
opened up the business plan to include goals for quality, which was
unprecedented. One of those goals was to get quality improvement every year,
year after year, at a revolutionary pace. The rest of the world was
improving quality at an evolutionary pace. These lines crossed, in my
estimate, somewhere around 1970.
朱蘭：他們進行了一連串的動作。高層負責處理品質異常的問題，
They then went beyond the revolutionary approach to improvement. They did
something else that nobody in the West has managed to do: They made it
possible for the workforce to participate in improvement through something
called "QC Circles."
然後，他們在革命的路上進行改善。
QD: After decades of improvement, why is the quality of U.S. products and
services below that of the Japanese?
QD ：經過數十年的改善後，為何美國產品與服務品質會位居日本之下？
Juran: With relatively few exceptions, the United States is still below the
Japanese as far as quality is concerned. In fact, that's true for the West,
generally. Why? We have a lot of know-how about how to achieve high quality.
We even have a few role-model companies that did the same thing in pretty
much the same way. The approach is common for all the successful companies.
朱蘭：因為一些例外，美國目前在品質方面的水準仍舊低於日本。
We have a strange situation: We know how to do it, but our companies don't
do it. Here are some of my theories why they don't: A lot of companies have
tried to improve quality, and it didn't work. They listened to consultants
and spent a lot of time trying things out. Most of the time was spent
learning what not to do, what doesn't work. So a lot of companies gave up.
Bear in mind, mediocre quality is still saleable. People want the services
that new products bring. They buy them and take the chance that they are not
going to get a lemon.
但我們有個奇怪的情形：我們知道怎麼做，但我們不做。
A lot of companies think that their businesses are different. They are
different; they have different technology, different markets, different
culture and so on. But I found when I got into consulting many years ago
that every one of those different companies had common quality problems. To
diagnose those problems, I used certain diagnostic tools. To find remedies,
I used certain remedial tools. To hold the gains, I used certain common
control tools. I was going through the same sequence of events in company
after company, even though they were certainly different. So there is a body
of know-how there that is common and heading toward a science of managing
for quality.
許多公司都認為他們的行業別不同。他們很不同，
A lot of companies believe that getting certified to ISO 9001 solves their
quality problems. That simply is not true. ISO 9001 has some value in trying
to minimize the number of assessments that are made. But the ISO 9000 series
was pitched at a mediocre level. The various ingredients that the Japanese
did differently are not a part of ISO 9000. We've been taken in by the
standardization people coming up with a standard that's not at the
excellence level but at the mediocre level. That's inherent in the way
standards are set. There has to be a consensus. The different members from
companies of different standardization bodies are not going to agree to
standards that their companies are not able to meet. They are starting to
change the standards, but that's at a glacial pace. It takes a long time to
change an international standard.
很多公司相信通過 ISO9001就能夠解決品質問題。這種簡單的想法不對。ISO
Some people think that higher quality costs more. That confusion exists in
many different companies. The word "quality" has two very different
meanings: One meaning is the features of the product that enable it to sell.
There, higher quality generally costs more. It takes more product research,
more product development and so on. People don't even call it a cost; they
call it an investment, which will bring back higher returns. That's quality
on the marketing side or the income side.
有些人認為追求高品質會使成本增加，
Quality on the cost side is quite different. The cost of failure, the
internal failures--scrap, rework, slow deliveries, failure to deliver on
time--and the external failures--field failures, lawsuits, safety problems.
成本面的品質則非常不同。失敗成本：內部失敗成本如報廢、重工、
A lot of CEOs believe that they are too busy to lead the quality charge, and
so they delegate it. That hasn't worked very well. Leadership by the top
people is an essential ingredient in getting out of that steep slope.
多數首席執行官都相信他們過於忙碌而無法主導品質；
QD: You talked about ISO 9000. Are you surprised by its success and
widespread acceptance?
QD ：您談到ISO9000，你會為它的成功與被普遍接受而驚訝嗎？
Juran: I was astonished that it took off like it did. I am still surprised.
I must say that there are indications that the people who are paying for
those assessments are getting fed up. I remember in my astonishment I used
to ask companies: "What are you going into this for? What you're doing is
already much stricter than the criteria that are set out in ISO 9000." The
answer was: "We know that. But we don't think, from a marketing standpoint,
that we can be in a position where our competitor is certified and we are
not. We'd be at a marketing disadvantage."
對於它的發展我很震驚，我仍然很驚訝。我必須說，
There was a stampede that started out with Admiral D.G. Spickernell, the
head of the British Standards Institution. He persuaded the British military
to use the defense standard in assessing defense contractors. The standards
organization urged the standard on civilian buyers. It was all voluntary;
there was no compulsion to be certified. That began to take hold and be
strongly propagandized by the standards organization. And then, little by
little, whoever got themselves certified advertised the fact that they were
certified. The public didn't realize that they were being certified to a
mediocre standard. The idea that the standard was pitched at a mediocre
level has never been properly brought out.
英國標準局長 Admiral D.G. Spickernell開啟了一個大動作。
QD: Do you think that ISO 9000 has actually hindered the quality movement?
QD ：您認為ISO9000事實上阻礙了品質運動？
Juran: Of course it has. Instead of going after improvement at a
revolutionary rate, people were stampeded into going after ISO 9000, and
they locked themselves into a mediocre standard. A lot of damage was, and
is, being done.
朱蘭：當然。不在革命的路上追求改善，人們胡亂去追求 ISO9000；然後他們就陷入了二流標準之中。
朱蘭：當然。人們不以革命的速度來追求改善，而胡亂去追求 ISO9000，他們就陷入了二流標準之中。
QD: What do you think of Six Sigma?
QD ：您對六標準差的看法如何？
Juran: From what I've seen of it, it's a basic version of quality
improvement. There is nothing new there. It includes what we used to call
facilitators. They've adopted more flamboyant terms, like belts with
different colors. I think that concept has merit to set apart, to create
specialists who can be very helpful. Again, that's not a new idea. The
American Society for Quality long ago established certificates, such as for
reliability engineers. Right now there are more than 100,000 certificates
issued by ASQ.
朱蘭：就我所見，這是品質改善的基本版本，它並無特殊之處。
Most people don't even understand what Six Sigma means. It is a goal. A goal
of very few defects, down to defects per million. We used to think in terms
of percent defective. For example, 1 percent defective is 10,000 defects per
million units, a far cry from three or four. Basically, the concept is
perfectly good, but there is nothing new.
多數人甚至不知道六標準差所指為何。它係指一個目標。
It originally started with Bob Galvin, the former CEO of Motorola and a very
ardent pursuer of excellence in quality. Some years ago, he gave his
organization the job of improving quality and reducing the defect level by
an order of magnitude. Now, to reduce it from a few percent defective to
three per million, that's four orders of magnitude.
「六標準差」
The name Six Sigma comes from a measure of what we call process capability,
measuring the inherent uniformity of the process. One of the things that is
inherent in tools used to achieve improvement under the label of Six Sigma
is the concept of process capability. Now, to my knowledge, that concept of
process capability goes back to 1926, when I was a young engineer at Western
Electric. I got into a problem, and I ended up discovering that every
process can be quantified in terms of its inherent uniformity. That can be
compared with the tolerance limits to see whether the process is up to doing
the job. In addition, you can also see whether the process is capable but is
being misdirected. I am the inventor, if not the reinventor, of that
concept.
六標準差之名來自於對制程能力的測量，量測流程中固有的一致性。
如果不是再創者，我是這個觀念的發明者。
QD: There is a lot of marketing hype around Six Sigma, just as there was
with ISO 9000. How do you feel about that?
QD ：有許多以六標準差之名進行的市場宣傳，就如ISO9000一樣
Juran: I am in favor of improving quality by whatever means. Right now, I
think that what has really caused the spread of Six Sigma is GE. They went
into quality improvement, urged, I think, by what Bob Galvin had done at
Motorola. Jack Welch personally went into this. Then he went public with the
results to huge acclaim and huge savings running into the billions of
dollars. That got a lot of press and was pretty hard to ignore.
朱蘭：我贊成用各種方法來改善品質。眼下，
I don't like the hype, and I don't think the hype is going to last.
Something that is as successful as the improvement process gets label after
label after label. Those labels come and go, but the basic concept stays.
There will be some marketer that finds a new label, finds a way to make that
a fad and off he'll go, doing the same thing we did before under a new
label.
我不喜歡這種噱頭，而且我也不認為這種噱頭可以持續下去。
QD: You were very involved with he development of statistical methodology in
quality. Can you tell us about the development of statistics in quality?
QD ：您在利用統計方法改善品質方面投入大量精力。
Juran: The use of statistical methods in quality dates back to 1903, when
the Bell System faced a problem designing its central offices. A subscriber
takes the phone off the hook and gets a dial tone. That means he's connected
to a line that goes to the central office. The question was, "How many of
those lines do you need?" Theoretically, every single subscriber could take
his or her instrument and start to use it, so you'd need a line for every
subscriber. Actually, subscribers don't do any such thing. Only a few
percent at one time are using it. So you need on average only a few percent
as many lines as you have subscribers. Now, the question was, "Are we
willing to operate at the average?" No, there'd be too many cases of a
subscriber not getting a dial tone. So how many lines should you provide?
That took statistical analysis. They took data: What's the rate of busyness
day by day, hour by hour? Based on that, they identified when the traffic
was busiest, how many lines that required, and that enabled them to make a
managerial judgment as to how many trunk lines to provide. That was the
earliest application of statistics in the Bell System.
朱蘭：統計方法在品質中的應用，可以回溯於比爾電氣 1903年所遇到，一個關於設計交換中心的問題。
Bell Labs thought that these tools might have application in the factory. In
1926 a delegation from the Bell Labs came to Western Electric's Hawthorne
factory, where I was employed as a young engineer. They met with the chief
inspector and some of his people. They formed a joint committee on
inspection, statistics and economy, and they agreed to meet a couple of
times per year.
貝爾實驗室認為這些工具可以應用在工廠中。 1926年從比爾實驗室調來一個代表團到西方電氣的Hawtho
The head guys in Western Electric soon discovered that nobody in the place
knew anything about statistics, so they brought in a professor from the
University of Chicago to give a course. About 20 managers and engineers
attended that course, and I was one of those engineers. Then to help the
committee in dealing with the statistics, they set up a little department
with a boss and two engineers called the inspection statistical department.
I was one of those engineers. As the committee met and got into scientific
sampling, they soon discovered the control chart, which was an invention of
one of the Bell Labs' mathematicians, Walter Shewhart. Although he was a
brilliant mathematician, he had a limitation: His knowledge of the factory
was nil. He was a very poor communicator as far as lay people were
concerned. He needed an interpreter, so I was asked to pilot him around the
factory.
西方電氣的大頭們很快發現，沒有人瞭解統計。
I had the job of selling some of this stuff to the inspection supervisors,
but I very seldom made a sale. They had empirical ways and they stuck to
them. So there was almost a state of dormancy there until World War II. At
that time, the War Production Board, whose job was to harness the civilian
economy to the military machine, set up a department to help improve quality
in the military. As luck would have it, they appointed two professors to
head that department. They concluded that in order to improve quality, we
should teach the factories statistics.
我有賣出一些東西給檢核幹部的責任，但我賣的很少。
Eugene Grant of Stanford University went around the country giving these
courses for free. A lot of companies sent their young engineers. Now, these
courses didn't affect who won the War, but they had a tremendous effect on
the people who attended those courses. They were meeting people from other
companies for the first time in their lives. It was wonderful to be able to
exchange information. They formed a bunch of quality societies in different
cities around the country. Those finally became the ASQ. They created a
journal that at the outset contained nothing but statistics. It took a long
time for the idea that managing for quality is the important thing, and
statistics is a part of that. They resisted that. To them, statistics was
everything.
Ed Deming went to his grave believing statistics is everything. If you make
use of statistics, everything gets resolved. Of course, he never managed
anything. He didn't know about managing.
史丹佛大學的 Eugene Grant免費全國巡迴授課，許多公司都派遣了年輕工程師參與。
一個個社團，這些最終成為了「美國品質協會」。
QD: Obviously, you've achieved tremendous success in your lifetime. To what
do you attribute that success and your drive for achievement?
QD ：很明顯，在您的生命中，您已獲得了巨大的成就。
Juran: I'm surprised that it happened. I've kept a pretty low profile. I
keep the publicity people at the Juran Institute on a pretty short leash. I
don't like flamboyant statements about myself. I started out like any other
recruit in a big company. I was recruited out of engineering school, I did
some useful things for my bosses and I got promoted. That was a mistake.
They took a pretty good analyst and made a lousy manager out of him. At the
end, I found that my weaknesses in human relations had caught up with me,
and I was finished. I knew I wasn't going to go any higher in the
organization.
朱蘭：我很驚訝這竟然發生了。我一直保持著低調。
When World War II came along, I was appointed the assistant lend lease
administrator for the Foreign Economic Administration.
當二次大戰開始，我被指派為國外經濟管理局的助理借貸行政官。
At the end of the War, I had to figure out what I was going to do. I
realized I had gotten to be kind of a misfit in these big bureaucracies, and
I opted to become a freelance consultant. I wanted to be more than a
consultant: research, consult, philosophize, write, lecture, the works. Of
course, there wasn't any ready-made job like that. I had to piece one
together, and it worked out wonderfully.
戰爭結束時，我必須為未來將做些什麼有所打算。
I also had an urge to write. It was an itch I had for a long time. So I
wrote a great deal. Every month I wrote articles for the journals of the
ASQ, the American Management Association and others. Those were read by a
lot of people. Also, while I contemplated making that change, I had in mind
preparing a comprehensive work on the subject, which came to be known as the
Quality Control Handbook, which is now in its fifth edition. That brought me
to the attention of a lot of people in the field. So one thing seemed to
follow another. In fact, at the time I became a freelance individual, I
didn't want any kind of organization. I didn't want to be a boss, and I
didn't want to be a subordinate. Things seemed to grow naturally. All of
those medals and honors were just byproducts of that.
我也有寫作的動力。因為長久以來我一直手癢，所以我大量寫作。
QD: Which of your achievements are you the most proud of?
QD ：這些成就中，您最感到驕傲的是什麼？
Juran: I'd be pretty hard put to answer that. I am not even sure that I am
proud. I am an immigrant, and I came from a pretty impoverished family. I
lived in a neighborhood where everyone else was poor. Your outlook is very
different when you start out that way. My goal in going into higher
education was just getting away from all of that. I discovered in all the
different jobs I held in those days that the employers favored someone who
was going for an education. It seemed to be the passkey to getting out of
poverty. You learn some pretty useful habits if you have to live in those
circumstances. You're not afraid of long hours or hard work.
朱蘭：這問題不好回答。我甚至不確定我有所自豪。是個移民，
QD: What advice would you give to someone just starting out in quality
today?
QD: 對於今日有志於從事品質工作者，您有什麼忠告？
Juran: I would start out by saying, "Are you lucky!" Because I think the
best is yet to be. In this current century, we are going to see a lot of
growth in quality because the scope has expanded so much. We used to think
that it was a factory problem. No more. It has expanded from the factory to
the offices to the warehouses and away from manufacturing to all the other
industries, including the giants: health care, education and government.
朱蘭：我想先說：「你們很幸運！」我認為最好的還沒到。
About the Author
關於作者 Scott M. Paton is Quality Digest's editor in chief. Letters to the editor
regarding this piece can be e-mailed to letters@qualitydigest.com
史考特 M派頓是品質文摘的主編。任何想與作者聯絡的信件請電郵至
