William Conway served as President and CEO of Nashua Corporation, a New Hampshire-based manufacturer of photocopiers, labels, and specialty paper products. In 1979, Conway invited Deming to consult at Nashua, making it one of the first — and for a brief period, the only — American company systematically applying Deming's management methods. Conway's decision to engage Deming was taken before the nbc-documentary-if-japan-can-why-can-t-we made Deming famous and before the ford-motor-company-engagement-begins brought a major automaker into the picture.
How Conway Found Deming
Conway's path to Deming ran through a contact at juse-union-of-japanese-scientists-and-engineers and through awareness of Japanese quality practices that was beginning to circulate in American manufacturing circles in the late 1970s. Conway was already concerned about quality and productivity at Nashua and was actively looking for approaches that could address them systematically. Engaging Deming in 1979 was an act of genuine initiative — there was no mainstream precedent for an American CEO doing this, no network of peer companies that had tried it, and no guarantee it would work.
The NBC Documentary and National Attention
Nashua's early adoption made it a natural subject for the 1980 NBC documentary nbc-documentary-if-japan-can-why-can-t-we. When journalist Lloyd Dobyns and producer clare-crawford-mason were building the documentary around Deming, Nashua was the American success story — the evidence that Deming's methods were not exclusively suited to Japanese culture or Japanese industry. Conway appeared in the documentary, presenting Nashua as proof of concept for a domestic audience that might otherwise have dismissed Deming as relevant only to Japan.
The documentary transformed the situation. Within months of broadcast, Deming's seminar schedule was overwhelmed with demand, and companies including Ford began seeking him out. Conway's willingness to appear publicly and describe what Nashua had done helped catalyze the broader american-revival-and-legacy-1980-1993.
Significance as First Mover
The significance of Conway's decision is partly about timing. By engaging Deming two years before ford-motor-company-engagement-begins, Conway created an American track record — however modest compared to what Ford would eventually demonstrate — that made Deming's American applicability concrete rather than theoretical. Without a domestic success story, the NBC documentary would have been entirely backward-looking (Japan's success) with no evidence of American replicability.
Conway later developed his own consulting practice focused on what he called the "right way to manage," extending Deming's principles into his own framework. His post-Nashua work represented the typical trajectory of Deming-influenced executives who became advocates and practitioners in their own right — similar in structure, if not in scale, to the way kaoru-ishikawa extended Deming's ideas within the Japanese context.
Relationship to nashua-corporation
Conway and Nashua Corporation are analytically distinct: Conway made the decision to engage Deming, while Nashua is the organizational case study. The connection to Lloyd Nelson at Nashua — who inspired elements of the-funnel-experiment — represents the specific technical implementation that emerged from Conway's leadership decision. Conway provided the organizational permission and top-management commitment that Deming always insisted was a prerequisite for transformation; Nelson and others provided the statistical implementation.