Deming became a business school professor in 1946 and was brought to Japan in 1947, where he taught statistical process control. That was extremely important but Deming functioned more as a conduit for work Walter Shewhart and others had done than anything else. A man with degrees in electrical engineering and mathematical physics with less than two years of experience in a business school before transforming Japanese manufacturing by teaching them about techniques developed for the American war effort by statisticians does not seem a great example.
> Deming edited a series of lectures delivered by Shewhart at USDA, Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control, into a book published in 1939. One reason he learned so much from Shewhart, Deming remarked in a videotaped interview, was that, while brilliant, Shewhart had an "uncanny ability to make things difficult." Deming thus spent a great deal of time both copying Shewhart's ideas and devising ways to present them with his own twist.[16]
> Deming developed the sampling techniques that were used for the first time during the 1940 U.S. Census, formulating the Deming-Stephan algorithm for iterative proportional fitting in the process.[17] During World War II, Deming was a member of the five-man Emergency Technical Committee. He worked with H.F. Dodge, A.G. Ashcroft, Leslie E. Simon, R.E. Wareham, and John Gaillard in the compilation of the American War Standards (American Standards Association Z1.1–3 published in 1942)[18] and taught SPC techniques to workers engaged in wartime production. Statistical methods were widely applied during World War II, but faded into disuse a few years later in the face of huge overseas demand for American mass-produced products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming