"Juran began his career—and paid his professional dues—on the manufacturing floor of a factory that has attained a legendary status in industrial history. Western Electric's Hawthorne Works, in addition to its primary role as manufacturer of equipment for AT&T, became a kind of working laboratory for inquiry into the emerging issues of the large industrial organization at the beginning of the twentieth century. What is the most effective organizational structure? What methods should we use to control the manufacturing quality of precision parts? How should we handle the human issues and problems that arise in an industrial culture?

W. Edwards Deming, too, worked at Hawthorne, during the summers of 1925 and 1926, while attaining his PhD at Yale. "On arrival on the fifth floor," Deming recalled, "Mr. Chester M. Coulter, whom I reported to, made it clear to me as most important—don't get caught on the stairway when the whistle blows. Those women would trample you to death: there would be no trace of you. There were 46,000 people that worked at the Hawthorne plant, and I think that 43,000 of them had high heels. I did not get caught." In actual fact, there were more like 43,000 people at Hawthorne (at its peak in the late 1920s), about 30 percent of whom were women. (The percentage of those who wore high heels is not known.) The young, spidery inspector Juran and the tall graduate student Deming did not come in contact at Hawthorne and did not meet until the World War II years."