Knowing Japan's poverty, Deming refused any payment for his 1950 lectures and JUSE used the proceeds from reprints to create the Deming Application Prize, a prestigious award given annually since 1951 to companies with outstanding total quality programs, following a rigorous audit of their operations, and the Deming Prize, an award given to outstanding individuals. At the suggestion of a faculty member at American University in Washington, she looked up Deming in his basement office in American University Park. She was amazed to find a man who seemed to know the answer to the program's provocative question living and working about five miles from the White House. Best of all, from the viewpoint of a TV producer in search of an exclusive, virtually nobody outside the rather arcane world of quality control had ever heard of him. The final 15 minutes were devoted to Deming and his consulting work at Nashua Corporation, a New Hampshire manufacturer of carbonless paper.
American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan.
But they don't know what to copy. The show was one of the most successful business documentaries ever, and it turned Deming into a celebrity literally overnight. The next day, his office was bombarded with phone calls. Deming's message was a wake-up call for American industry. Across the nation, the best senior executives heard the alarm.