Joseph Moses Juran (December 24, 1904 – February 28, 2008) was a Romanian-born American engineer, management consultant and author.

[3] In deciding to leave Romania the family avoided becoming victims of The Holocaust, as most of the Jews of Gura Humorului were detained and transported to Nazi concentration camps.

Rebecca (Betty), Charlotte and Minerva, who earned a doctoral degree and had a career in education, film and art director Nathan Juran and Rudolph (Rudy) the founder of a municipal bond company.

In 1924, Juran joined Western Electric's Hawthorne Works where his first job was troubleshooting in the Complaint Department.

[5]: 79  In 1925, Bell Labs proposed that Hawthorne Works personnel be trained in its newly developed statistical sampling and control chart techniques.

[5]: 204–205 He soon joined the faculty of New York University as an adjunct professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering, where he taught courses in quality control and ran round table seminars for executives.

He also worked via a small management consulting firm on projects for Gillette, Hamilton Watch Company and Borg-Warner.

After the firm's owner's sudden death, Juran began his own independent practice, from which he made a comfortable living until his retirement in the late 1990s.

The end of World War II compelled Japan to change its focus from becoming a military power to becoming an economic one.

Despite Japan's ability to compete on price, its consumer goods manufacturers suffered from a long-established reputation of poor quality.

The first edition of Juran's Quality Control Handbook in 1951 attracted the attention of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), who invited him to Japan in 1952.

For Juran, human relations problems were the ones to isolate, and resistance to change was the root cause of quality issues.

Juran credits Margaret Mead's book Cultural Patterns and Technical Change for illuminating the core problem in reforming business quality.

Juran's concept of quality management extended outside the walls of the factory to encompass nonmanufacturing processes, especially those that might be thought of as service related.

Sales managers say they face problems such as "It takes us too long...we need to reduce the error rate."

During his 1966 visit to Japan, Juran learned about the Japanese concept of quality circles, which he enthusiastically evangelized in the West.

Their mission statement is to "Create a global community of practice to empower organizations and people to push beyond their limits."

His activities during the second half of his life include: In 1924, Juran met his future wife, Sadie Shapiro, when his sister Betty moved to Chicago.