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Variation
A one-page control-chart memorandum inside Western Electric grew into Walter Shewhart's 1931 account of when factory variation warrants intervention and when intervention will make a stable process worse. The chart is its memorable instrument; the deeper achievement is to connect prediction and action to a particular system of causes.
A 1980 television documentary helped make W. Edwards Deming newly visible during a U.S. manufacturing crisis that managers had described chiefly through foreign competition and worker productivity. The seminars and 1982/1986 book that followed relocate responsibility: quality, cost, employment, and learning emerge from a system managers design, though workers do not automatically gain authority merely because blame moves upward.