RE: Juran's physical state and Pareto's Peas

["Kuang, Ken" <Ken.Kuang@kyocera.com>]

2) A few web sites talk about Pareto observing that 20% of his peapods
gave
80% of his peas, but I cannot find anything in the online versions of
Pareto's (or Juran's) writings to support this.  Is it made up?

Pareto effect was first pointed out by Dr. Juan in 1930s. The follow
article by Dr. Juran himself mentioned the story behind Pareto
Principle. Hope this helps.

Ken Kuang


**********
The Non-Pareto Principle; Mea Culpa

J.M. Juran

The "Pareto principle" has by this time become deeply rooted in our
industrial literature. It is a shorthand name for the phenomenon that in
any population which contributes to a common effect, a relative few of
the contributors account for the bulk of the effect.

Years ago I gave the name "Pareto" to this principle of the "vital few
and trivial many." On subsequent challenge, I was forced to confess that
I had mistakenly applied the wrong name to the principle.1 This
confession changed nothing - the name "Pareto principle" has continued
in force, and seems destined to become a permanent label for the
phenomenon.

The matter has not stopped with my own error. On various occasions
contemporary authors, when referring to the Pareto principle, have
fabricated some embellishments and otherwise attributed to Vilfredo
Pareto additional things which he did not do. My motive in offering the
present paper is in part to minimize this tendency to embroider the work
of a distinguished Italian economist. In addition, I have for some time
felt an urge to narrate just how it came about that some early
experiences in seemingly unrelated fields (quality control,
cryptanalysis, industrial engineering, government administration,
management research) nevertheless converged to misname the Pareto
principle.

It began in the mid-1920s when as a young engineer I observed (as had
many others before me) that quality defects are unequal in frequency,
i.e., when a long list of defects was arranged in the order of
frequency, a relative few of the defects accounted for the bulk of the
defectiveness. As I moved into quality management posts in the late
1920s and the 1930s, I observed (as had many others before me) that a
similar phenomenon existed with respect to employee absenteeism, causes
of accidents, etc.

During the late 1930s I moved out of the field of quality control to
become the corporate industrial engineer for Western Electric Company.
In this capacity, one of my responsibilities was to visit other
companies to exchange experiences in industrial engineering practices.
One of the most exhilarating of these visits was to General Motors
Corporation's headquarters. There I found an uncommonly competent team
of managers facing up to the then new problems of collective bargaining.
As an incidental tool, they had put together an assortment of data
processing machinery to enable them to compute the cost of any new labor
union proposal. This they did by programming the machines and then
running the (punched) employee record cards through the program. It was
an ingenious concept, and their system was quite advanced for those
days. However, the electro-magnetic machinery then in use took hours and
even days to process those hundreds of thousands of cards, so that the
managers often found themselves waiting for the machines to grind out
the results.

It is a part of our chronicle that these General Motors managers were a
keen, inquisitive lot, and were ever on the alert for anything new.
Thus, when it happened on one occasion that the card readers were
producing gibberish, the managers not only found the cause to be a
miswired plug board; they also realized that they had stumbled onto a
means for creating messages in cipher. As a form of comic relief from
the grueling hours to which they were often subjected, they used some of
the waiting time to dig further into this enciphering system. The more
they got into it, the more convinced they became that they had evolved a
cipher system which could not be broken.

During the relaxation of a luncheon, they told me of this unbreakable
cipher system, and I laughed at them. As it happened, I was no slouch in
such matters, since my work in the Signal Corps Reserve was precisely on
this subject. Naturally, one thing led to another, and before the day
was done I had rashly accepted their tender of an enciphered message to
break. Break it I did, though it took until three o'clock in the
morning. (Thereafter my sleep was short but blissful.)

They were stunned by the news that the unbreakable had been broken, and
for the rest of the visit the agreeable aura of a miracle man followed
me about. As a by-product, some hitherto secret doors were opened up to
me. It was one of these doors which led me, for the first time, to the
work of Vilfredo Pareto. The man who opened that door was Mr. Merle
Hale, who presided over the executive salary program of General Motors.

Hale showed me a research he had conducted by comparing the executive
salary pattern prevailing in General Motors with one of the mathematical
models which Pareto had once constructed. The fit was surprisingly
close. I registered the incident in my memory along with the fact that
Pareto had made extensive studies of the unequal distribution of wealth,
and had in addition formulated mathematical models to quantify this
maldistribution.

In December 1941, the month in which the United States entered World War
II, I took a "temporary" assignment as a federal government
administrator. The original six weeks stretched into four years and as a
by-product gave me an insight into the problems of managing the federal
government. Of course, the principle of the vital few and trivial many
had wide application. At the end of the war (1945) I embarked on a
career dedicated to the field of management: research, writing,
teaching, consulting, etc. By the late 1940s, as a result of my courses
at New York University and my seminars at American Management
Association, I had recognized the principle of the "vital few and
trivial many" as a true "universal," applicable not only in numerous
managerial functions but in the physical and biological worlds
generally. Other investigators may well have been aware of this
universal principle, but to my knowledge no one had ever before reduced
it to writing.

It was during the late 1940s, when I was preparing the manuscript for
Quality Control Handbook, First Edition, that I was faced squarely with
the need for giving a short name to the universal. In the resulting
write-up2 under the heading "Maldistribution of Quality Losses," I
listed numerous instances of such maldistribution as a basis for
generalization. I also noted that Pareto had found wealth to be
maldistributed. In addition, I showed examples of the now familiar
cumulative curves, one for maldistribution of wealth and the other for
maldistribution of quality losses. The caption under these curves reads
"Pareto's principle of unequal distribution applied to distribution of
wealth and to distribution of quality losses." Although the accompanying
text makes clear that Pareto's contributions specialized in the study of
wealth, the caption implies that he had generalized the principle of
unequal distribution into a universal. This implication is erroneous.
The Pareto principle as a universal was not original with Pareto.

Where then did the universal originate? To my knowledge, the first
exposition was by myself. Had I been structured along different lines,
assuredly I would have called it the Juran principle. However, I was not
structured that way. Yet I did need a shorthand designation, and I had
no qualms about Pareto's name. Hence the Pareto principle.

The matter might well have rested there had there been a less than
enthusiastic response to the universal. Instead, the new universal
became the subject of wide use and reference. I contributed to this
dissemination by coining and popularizing the term "vital few and
trivial many" in the widely read "universals" paper,3 and in the moving
picture film I prepared for American Management Association on the
"breakthrough" process. The resulting wide usage also brought me some
challenges (from Dorian Shainin and others) as to the attribution to
Pareto. These challenges forced me to do what I should have done in the
first place - to inform myself on just what was it that Pareto had done.
It was this examination which made clear to me what I had seen only
dimly - that Pareto's work had been in the economic sphere and that his
models were not intended to be applied to other fields. To make matters
worse, the cumulative curves used in Quality Control Handbook, First
Edition, should have been properly identified with Lorenz.4

To summarize, and to set the record straight:

1.	Numerous men, over the centuries, have observed the existence of
the phenomenon of vital few and trivial many as it applied to their
local sphere of activity.

2.	Pareto observed this phenomenon as applied to distribution of
wealth, and advanced the theory of a logarithmic law of income
distribution to fit the phenomenon.

3.	Lorenz developed a form of cumulative curve to depict the
distribution of wealth graphically.

4.	Juran was (seemingly) the first to identify the phenomenon of
the vital few and trivial many as a "universal," applicable to many
fields.

5.	Juran applied the name "The Pareto Principe" to this universal.
Juran also coined the phrase "vital few and trivial many" and applied
the Lorenz curves to depict this Universal in graphic form." 5


References

1	Juran, J.M., "Pareto. Lorenz, Cournot Bernoulli, Juran and
Others," Industrial Quality Control, October 1950, p. 25.

2	Juran, J.M., Editor, Quality Control Handbook, First Edition,
McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1951, pp. 37 to 41.

3	The first published use of this term was likely in my paper,
Universals in Management Planning and Controlling." The Management
Review, November 1954.

4	Lorenz, M.O., Methods of Measuring the Concentration of Wealth,
American Statistical Association Publication, Vol. 9 (1904-1905), pp.
200-219.

5	See also, Juran, J.M., Editor, Quality Control Handbook Third
Edition McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1974, pp. 2-16 to 2-19.



Dr. J. M. JURAN, Dean of American consultants on quality control, was a
pioneer in the development of principles and methods for managing
quality control programs. He is a veteran of over four decades of
international experience in management at all levels. His clients have
included industrial giants as well as small companies and government
departments. He has conducted several hundred courses in all pans of the
world, not only on QC management but on other managerial subjects as
well. Dr. Juran is the author of ten books including 'Quality Planning
and Analysis', (with F. M. Gryna), 'Managerial Breakthrough' and 'The
Quality Control Handbook', which has been translated wholly or partly
into several languages and which has become the international standard
reference work in the field of QR. (1973)