Recently, Industry Week (IW) announced the 10 inductees to its 2010 Manufacturing Hall of Fame, a “lineup of industrial superstars whose collective careers have had an immeasurable impact and influence on U.S. manufacturing.”

Included in the list of IW’s manufacturing “dream team,” alongside businessman and author Larry Bossidy and computer magnate Michael Dell, is Norman Bodek, a name that those of us in the quality world have long been familiar with. Bodek is co-founder of the Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence and is responsible for bringing scores of books and articles on kaizen blitz, single-minute exchange of dies (SMED), total productive maintenance, quality function deployment, hoshin kanri, poka-yoke, and the visual factory to a U.S. audience. And as anyone who has ever listened to Bodek speak can attest, he is as entertaining as he is informative.

In an interview with Quality Digest Daily, Bodek tells us what the Industry Week honor means to him and his views on the future of the quality profession.

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