Donald Petersen served as CEO of ford-motor-company from 1985 to 1990, but his most consequential decision came earlier: in 1981, as president of Ford, he brought W. Edwards Deming in to help transform the company (see ford-motor-company-engagement-begins). Ford was near bankruptcy at the time, losing billions of dollars and hemorrhaging market share to Japanese competitors — particularly toyota-motor-corporation — whose quality advantages were becoming impossible to ignore.
Petersen's decision to engage Deming was not merely a consulting hire but a commitment to fundamental cultural change. Deming insisted on working with top management, not just quality departments, and demanded that Ford's leadership understand and accept his philosophy before implementing specific methods. Petersen became Deming's most prominent American champion, personally attending Deming's seminars and pushing the transformation through Ford's bureaucratic resistance.
The most visible product of the Ford-Deming engagement was the Ford Taurus, developed in the mid-1980s using cross-functional teams and quality methods influenced by Deming's teachings. The Taurus became America's best-selling car and demonstrated that American manufacturers could compete on quality, not just price. The car's development process — which broke down traditional departmental silos and emphasized statistical understanding of manufacturing variation — became a case study in Deming's methods applied at scale.
The Ford turnaround was instrumental in bringing Deming to mainstream American attention. After the 1980 NBC documentary "If Japan Can, Why Can't We?" introduced Deming to a broad audience, the Ford success story provided concrete evidence that his methods worked. Petersen's willingness to stake his career on Deming's philosophy made the case that systemic transformation, not incremental improvement, was the path forward for American industry. brian-joiner and peter-scholtes later helped translate these lessons into frameworks accessible to other organizations.