Joseph Moses Juran was a Romanian-born American engineer, teacher and management consultant whose career centred on improving quality in organisations. After earning an electrical engineering degree from the University of Minnesota in 1924, he joined Western Electric, where he worked with emerging methods of statistical quality control. He later taught industrial engineering at New York University and developed a wider managerial approach to quality.

Juran described quality as fitness for use and argued that it should be treated as a responsibility of management, not simply as factory inspection. His influential Quality Control Handbook first appeared in 1951. In 1954, he travelled to Japan at the invitation of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers, giving seminars to managers on quality leadership. He also promoted the Pareto principle for identifying the “vital few” causes of problems and developed the Juran Trilogy of quality planning, control and improvement.

In 1979, he founded the Juran Institute to spread these methods through training and consultancy. He remained active for decades and died in 2008, aged 103.