Armand Feigenbaum: The Forgotten and Rarely Mentioned ‘Quality Guru’

       As I write this PIP, it was slightly more than a week ago the last of the post-World War Two ‘quality gurus’, Armand Feigenbaum, passed away.  You didn’t know that?  I didn’t read or hear about it either shortly after it happened.  Unfortunately I saw some brief mentions of his passing in the social media groups but may have missed others.  I can’t believe this and this is a disservice to a man who made monumental contributions to our profession. 

We deify W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, or Phillip Crosby.  All of them made significant contributions to the quality profession and I’m not denying that.  Feigenbaum, who made many contributions to our profession, made his mark in the United States, so he never got the press and the lemming like worship as those gurus above.  Maybe he was even more ahead of his time than they were. 

Feigenbaum made his mark in the United States right after World War Two when someone who took the approach he advocated was ignored, or worse, by nearly all companies.  I’ve never been able find out why.  Maybe it was because he did not seek the same level of publicity or have an entourage of individuals who sought to profit from his wisdom as the other quality gurus.  He was the first ‘quality guru’ I studied.  While I learned a lot from the other gurus above, as I read their wisdom they repeated many of the concepts Feigenbaum had already mentioned and advocated.

Feigenbaum contributed far more to today’s quality and process improvement movement than most in the profession now understand.  He advocated the concept of ‘Total Quality Control’ which was the title of his landmark work published more than fifty years ago.  The idea of a ‘hidden plant’?  Yep, that’s his.  But in my view his most significant contribution was to focus on quality costs, a core concept.  That approach was later adapted to six sigma which lead to its wider adaptation by business where previous quality and continuous improvement methodologies ran out of gas or fell on their face.

Finally what company did Feigenbaum work for when he applied these principles?  What company is noted as the one which really made six sigma a core part of business?  General Electric and I don’t think that is a coincidence.