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): Creating the quality mindset among senior managers. Summary: Current trends in corporate management call for the development of quality mindset among senior managers. As competition among business enterprises becomes more intense, the need for total quality management (TQM) becomes more apparent. Senior managers must be perceptive enough to incorporate TQM principles in their plans and emphasize total quality control in products and services at all times. Their effort to introduce organizational reforms and enhance their company's competitive edge would be meaningless if they do not consider the integral areas of total quality. National Productivity Review p313(3) Summer 1993 v12 n3 DESCRIPTORS: Corporate officers_Practice Total quality management_Analysis Quality control_Analysis FILM NUMBER: 72N2985 The quality mindset has become particularly central to competitive leadership in the 1990s, which is becoming so staggeringly different and so much more demanding an era for quality--and for business in general--than the 1980s. The new doctrine of the 1990s is that the best way to make products and services quicker and cheaper is to make them better, and that the best way to manage is to encourage the abilities and know-how of everyone in the organization. To be a senior manager in this environment, one must have 1. A clear and detailed understanding of what and how consumers and companies buy in today's international markets; 2. A thorough grasp of the kind of total quality strategy that provides the business foundation for satisfying these customers; and 3. A hands-on management know-how for creating the necessary company environment for quality and quality leadership. In quality professional terms, this competitive discipline requires emphasizing the two integral areas of total quality: * Total quality control in products and services--that is, the increase in things gone right for the customer, not merely a reduction in the number of things gone wrong; and * Total quality management--that is, world-class quality of the organization itself, because making quality better anywhere in the organization makes quality better everywhere in the organization. Only recently has this total quality objective begun to be understood and seriously accepted as either realistic or necessary by many company managements. Their quality approach to date might be best described as a "best efforts" kind of quality program. It reacts to customer quality requirements--sometimes much too slowly--instead of leading these requirements, which is what competitive advantage is really all about. It has been based on the policy that "We'll always fix or replace products for the buyer." Though honorable and important, this policy is essentially an after-sales service policy, one I describe as quality failure-driven or partial quality control. Business processes have been structured this way in these companies; managers have been trained this way and were promoted if they were good troubleshooters and trouble-fixers; and workers have been fully aware of this lack of genuine fundamental interest in first-time quality. In the 1980s the quality role of the senior manager in these companies was to be the number one quality speechmaker--in essence, a cheerleader. In these companies, business leadership primarily meant production, finance, or marketing emphasis; quality was thought of as a sales promotion job. Detailed executive attention to a subject like quality raised eyebrows at the boardroom level where the directors wondered whether they had a technician on their hands as senior executive instead of a businessperson. In these companies, quality was not a mainline activity in development and engineering, where innovation was thought of as the primary drumbeat for technology and quality work an unconnected and much less challenging task. Nor was quality a mainline activity in the finance organizations of these companies--even though accounting miscodes and billing mistakes create more customer ill will than even product returns. Nor was it mainline in marketing, where quality was thought of as what you have to sell to the customer even though the engineers and production people may not be doing it right. In such companies, quality was not fully integrated with productivity improvement, particularly when productivity was conceived primarily in terms of the traditional measure of "more product and service output per unit of resource input." This created very deep business quality problems because, under this scheme, products that couldn't readily be sold because they had defects, or that would have to be recalled because they are unreliable or unsafe, or that would frequently have to be returned for product service, could be included as satisfactory production outputs. There is no greater waste of resources for companies. To correct this situation, many companies around the world are using a new and very different form of productivity approach. They are replacing the traditional measure with a new measurement of more saleable, good-quality output per unit of input. This approach recognizes that in today's international marketplace, a poor-quality product or service is of negative business value to the company that offers it, no matter how "productively efficient" the production process may have measured in the traditional sense. It is more good product or service that is the meaningful national and international measure for productivity. The result of this change in productivity approach and measurement is significant. In the case of manufacturing, for example, we find that the many production operations throughout the world that were thought in the 1980s to be highly efficient in terms of the old non-quality-oriented measurement--some 90 percent or more productively efficient, for example--are, in fact, at least one-third lower in true productive efficiency--approximately 60 percent productively efficient--when evaluated according to more accurate and more realistic customer- and market-oriented productivity measurements. And in the case of some service organizations today, only one or two work products out of ten goes through error-free without additional attention. While much of the widely publicized increase in service employment has come about through market growth, some has been created by these do-the-job-over quality problems that have been a principal cause behind the minimal productivity increase, persistent upward trends in costs and expenses, and poor international showing of American services in recent years. FROM MAKE-IT-QUICKER-AND-CHEAPER TO MAKE-IT-BETTER The quality role of the senior manager today is far more important and far more performance-driven than it ever was before. Leading an organization from a make-it-quicker-and-cheaper past to a make-it-better future in an acceptable period of time is the single most demanding task before many managers. Tackling this task requires not only quality awareness but also, and perhaps more important, personal managerial know-how for leading in quality improvement with the same sureness of touch that the managers have in the areas of production, sales, and finance. The quality role of the modern senior manager is to have the international quality market understanding and the quality strategic point of view to develop his or her company's quality program and be its principal leader. This requires management's recognition of the fact that quality must be defined in customer, not producer, terms; that its achievement depends on a clear and effective organization-wide program, rather than on a single department or a few specialists; that accomplishing this is very hard work; that it depends on the application of rigorous and systematic methods; and that the key is relentless, long-term, detailed implementation throughout the entire organization. President of General Systems, Inc., in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Armand V. Feigenbaum, Ph.D., is the originator of total quality control. He is also founding chairman of the International Academy for Quality, past president of the American Society for Quality Control, and the first American to receive France's Georges Borel Prize for preeminence in quality.