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94 PCB007 MAGAZINE I FEBRUARY 2020 This column continues the series of install- ments, each highlighting one of the seven founding fathers of quality (as selected by the author). It is important to understand and ac- knowledge their revolutionary contributions that still form the foundation of modern qual- ity practices. Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa (1915–1989) Dr. Ishikawa was revolu- tionary in that he wanted to change the way people think about work. His vision was one of company-wide, total quality management, and argued that an over-reliance on the quality professional would limit the potential for improvement. Ishikawa believed that by em- powering all personnel with quality, responsi- bility would result in a synergy not possible with the typical silo approach to quality. He urged management to resist becoming content with simply improving product quality, teach- ing that quality improvement can always go one step further by using statistics to drive pro- cess improvement. Dr. Ishikawa is perhaps best known for his cause and effect diagram, also known as a fishbone or Ishikawa diagram. Ishikawa's vi- sion with this tool was not to merely address the symptoms, but to drive issues to root cause by pinpointing problems from the bot- tom up. Ishikawa also started the quality cir- cles movement, which is still used today by many companies in the form of quality im- provement teams. Dr. Ishikawa was the first quality pioneer to emphasize what he termed the "seven basic quality tools" as a foundation for any quality system (Figure 1). My favorite Ishikawa quote is, "Quality control which can- not show results is not quality control. Let us The Founding Fathers of Quality: Ishikawa and Shewhart The Right Approach by Steve Williams, THE RIGHT APPROACH CONSULTING Figure 1: Seven basic quality tools.