Note: This file was downloaded from the Montgomery County (Maryland) Public Library electronic bulletin board and is presented as received. AUTHOR(s): Feigenbaum, Armand V. TITLE(s): An "F" for quality. (American education fails to focus on the quality revolution) (Commentary) Summary: The US is competing with, and appears to be lagging behind, other industrialized countries in terms of the basic quality infrastructures that shape work skills and attitudes. America is failing to catch up with the quality revolution because its educational system considers quality as nothing more than a mere footnote to mainstream education. In contrast, professors of quality in Japan, Germany and other countries serve as valuable quality education resource. To push America to the forefront of the quality revolution, its colleges and universities should focus on generating meaningful research that will broaden the teaching and practice of quality in the country. Total quality should also be integrated with such basic courses as economics, engineering and behavioral science. More importantly, learning institutions should provide leadership and commitment for education in quality. Across the Board p14(2) April 1993 v30 n3 DESCRIPTORS: Total quality management_Study and teaching Universities and colleges_Evaluation American education flunks when it comes to understanding what the quality revolution is all about. We Americans recognize our visible competition in the global economy--it shows up in the fit and finish of foreign automobiles and the sharpness of imported video pictures. But we must start focusing on the invisible, and far more important, competitor: the thought process that produces those high-quality products. Hard to define and measure, this is a far more powerful rival than a particular automobile or electronics design. But ultimately, the United States competes with the basic quality infrastructures of other industrial nations in the development of work skills and attitudes. That's where American education must come in. Unlike other countries with which we compete, the United States has treated quality as, at best, a footnote to mainstream education. U.S. universities have produced little serious leadership for education in quality. By contrast, the head of Japan's quality educational movement was president of a major Japanese university; a close colleague served as faculty dean of another leading university. Full professors of quality at the University of Berlin, as well as in Holland and the United Kingdom, long have been a major quality educational resource in their countries. And we are the only industrial nation in whose educational process being called a perfectionist can be a put-down. In Japan and Germany it can be a high compliment, reflecting an entirely different attitude toward quality in those countries. How these educational issues affect the United States' competitive objective to offer essentially perfect products and services--which is what our competitors are doing and what today's market demands--remains something that we must confront and consider. These issues are among the basic challenges facing the U.S. quality process. In the 1980s, business schools taught students that companies should make products and offer services quicker and cheaper, finance them cleverly, sell them hard, provide a safety net for buyers to deal with quality failures, and manage all this in a way that gets the ideas out of the boss' head and into the hands of the workers. This has been, of course, one of the past decade's leading false business doctrines in the United States. It completely misses the explosion in the global marketplace of buyers' expectations that products be made with high quality to begin with. How to Think Because of that explosion, today's business schools must deal with a new premise: that the best way to make products and services quicker and cheaper in a global economy is to make them better, and the best way to manage is to encourage the abilities and know-how of everyone in the organization. Still, the old mentality remains in many cases. The field of economics continues to be taught with an emphasis on price as the key to business activity and touches on quality--if it is noted at all--as an amorphous factor, instead of the fundamental component of economics education it should become. Moreover, manufacturing-related fields too often approach quality as a narrow specialty instead of as an integral partner of innovation. Anyone interested in education about quality in engineering today is likely to be directed to a narrow course in reliability. And quality teamwork in new-product development is usually thought of as an educational "soft topic" rather than an essential factor in today's technology. Moreover, the importance of an international outlook as a modern fundamental of engineering education remains the exception rather than the rule, even though a new technology concept is sure to surface almost simultaneously in Tokyo, Poughkeepsie, Paris, and Frankfurt these days. These issues are not primarily questions of inserting a few quality courses somewhere. They are issues of how to think about the intensely competitive world in which Americans now reside. The eyes of some policymakers in education, government, and business begin to glaze over when quality comes up as a serious consideration because it is still often viewed as a technician's field, rather than as an American economic and social policy determinant in the 1990s or a corporate strategic foundation. Three imperatives are crucial to transforming our attitudes and knowledge about the quality concept in the United States: Take quality seriously. We must recognize that quality leadership has become crucial--not merely peripherally useful--to U.S. economic and social strength. In the 1990s, the lifestyles of consumers in this country and the work processes of companies now depend almost entirely on the reliable operation of products and services, with little tolerance for the time and cost of any failures. Apply Murphy's Law globally. For competitive survival, American industry and education must become international in their quality outlook--strategically different from being a business with some export divisions that can discuss, say, the ISO 9000 European quality program, or an educational institution that has some international programs. If you apply Murphy's Law internationally, it says that if you can get foreign competition, you will. Operating in world-leadership terms is the only way for an American business to grow with Murphy rather than be eroded by him. But this has been a difficult strategic principle for many American companies to understand, let alone implement, though it is an essential principle for their viability. It's also been a huge demand upon the government and industry partnerships that should support this strategy, including our country's trade policies, which continue to resemble a log floating down a river with 10,000 ants, each of which thinks it's steering. Don't underestimate what's required. U.S. business has to realize that transforming an organization from a make-it-quicker-and-cheaper-with-a- quality-safety-net past to a make-it-better future is the single most demanding task of leaders in most organizations today. Quality in Education If we agree on the principles involved, we must emphasize four primary areas in educating about quality: 1) Meaningful research is a major key today to gaining attention, understanding, and credibility for the quality concept in education, business, and government. This research would make available information that could be used to broaden and deepen the teaching and the practice of quality in many areas. We should also recognize that as centers of quality research and of quality resources, American universities should hire research-oriented full professors of quality to help accelerate our progress in achieving quality goals in the 1990s. 2) We must integrate total quality as a fundamental element of higher education in such fields as economics, behavioral science, engineering, and technology. Education in quality should not be approached as a single university department that is run primarily as a program of quality courses, but as an interdisciplinary body of knowledge. 3) The quality-education result we urgently need will come about only through the leadership and commitment of American universities themselves, particularly at senior levels through the personal leadership of university presidents, deans, and faculty. Business and government can and must help, but major progress on quality in higher education today depends on leadership within the university community itself. 4) We should not encourage a cold-turkey approach to add some attention to statistics or to quality behavior in our educational structure--or some additional quality programs to the way we do business. We need nothing less than unabashed emphasis on the pursuit of excellence at all levels of our quality process in universities, industry, and hopefully in government. That's the drumbeat to which our competitors march, and one to which we must learn to outmarch them in this decade. ________________________________________ ARMAND V. FEIGENBAUM is president and CEO of General Systems Co. Inc., a Pittsfield, Mass.-based engineering firm.