Idea 46 - Total quality management If management is a science, as some have argued, it is an imprecise one and one which encourages an endless flow of management ideas that surface and then, as often as not, sink. Where there has been truly impressive progress is in the realm of quality, where science and maths feel quite at home. Much of the science has come from Americans. But there has been a lot of human insight too, and that has often come from Japan. This powerful combination first reached many Western companies during the early 1980s in the form of 'total quality management' (TQM). This was a synthesis of different ideas and tools that had evolved in Japan since the Second World War. One of its principal architects was a former US census statistician called W. Edwards Deming, who was summoned to Japan in 1947 by the Supreme Command of the Allied occupying powers. They wanted him to do something about the poor levels of Japanese quality - all too apparent in the