I enclose several short background articles on Deming and the Quality movement. These include short articles from newspapers or magazines. Other articles of this type are included in the Chance bibliography.
Longer references that are useful are: (1) Mary Walton's The Deming Management Method (Putnam, 1987), (2) W. Edwards Deming's own Out of the Crisis, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Center for Advanced Engineering Study, 1986), (3) Kaoru Ishikawa's Guide to Quality Control, (Asia Productivity Organization, 1982), and Ronald Snee's longer paper (included), ``Statistical Thinking and its Contribution to Total Quality'', The American Statistician , May 1990, Vol. 44, 116-121). Walton gives an excellent, non-technical introduction to Deming. It indicates the importance of statistical tools without going into too many technical details and concentrates on the management philosophy. Deming's book is long and a bit rambling but a good source of more examples and clarification of points encountered in Walton. I would recommend it as a reference book (for students and instructor), but not as a required text. Ishikawa's book is reputed to be the best selling book on QC in the world. It is a practitioner's guide to the basic statistical tools of QC, given in simple, easy language. A student interested in learning how to do things like control charts would find it here, although without theoretical justification for the procedures. Snee's article is also non-technical and places the importance of statistical thinking in the quality movement.
Video materials exist. PBS has shown a couple of videos. One is called ``Quality or Else''and is hosted by news commentator Lloyd Dobyns. This is a 4-part series that seems to be quite interesting and shows a number of success stories of the Deming method, even to a high school in Alaska. It is apparently based upon the book Quality or Else: The Revolution in World Business , by Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason (Houghton-Mifflin, 1991). This source was unknown to this author at the first iteration of Chance and the availability of the tape is currently unknown as well. Another one hour program by PBS is called ``The Deminig of America'' and is hosted by Priscilla Petty. A copy of this tape exists in the Chance library. It is an hour tape at a non-technical level, with plenty of interviews of Deming and CEOs of major corporations. Finally, the 30 minute video 18 in the Annenberg series ``Against All Odds'' discusses control charts in a couple of settings (such as the oil content of chips on a Frito-Lay assembly line) and includes interviews with Deming, so that it gets past the mere technical statistics of control charts and into Deming's management philosophy as well.