Limits of Total Quality Management
STRATEGY • MANAGEMENT • COMPETITION
Many of the problems associated with quality programs are the result of increased complexity. The half-life concept, a new tool, strives to make complexity more manageable. By doing
Are There Limits to
so, learning is accelerated and improvement becomes continuous.
TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT?
B Y A R T H U R M . S C H N E I D E R M A N
plateau. A diagnosis carried out by the 21-member executive group singled out the root cause as lack of demonstrated commitment to Total Quality Management (T.Q.M.) by this very same group. As vice president of quality and productivity improvement, I was expected to come up with possible corrective action. My solution was that each member of the group take the most critical issue facing him and apply T.Q.M. methods and tools for its resolution. The resulting success stories would dramatically demonstrate to the entire organization that top management practices what it preaches. My suggestion was met with universal skepticism. Although they all
A
FTER NEARLY FOUR
years
were unable to explain their opposition, the group members expressed their instinctive rejection of the idea. “My take is that that’s exactly the wrong thing to do,” one of them said. “I don’t have the time to waste on something that I know will not work,” another said. Such views were nearly unanimous. I had given them a standard T.Q.M. response, and they had emphatically turned it down. I knew that understanding what was behind their instincts to reject T.Q.M. was a key to returning us to our path of continuous improvement. Shortly after that, I was a guest at a two-day T.Q.M. training session held at a company that had won a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The instructor was an outside consultant from one of the largest and most prestigious T.Q.M. organizations in the
United States. During the final question-and-answer period, I asked the instructor whether he felt there were any problems that
Many of the problems associated with quality programs are the result of increased complexity. The half-life concept, a new tool, strives to make complexity more manageable. By doing
Are There Limits to
so, learning is accelerated and improvement becomes continuous.
TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT?
B Y A R T H U R M . S C H N E I D E R M A N
plateau. A diagnosis carried out by the 21-member executive group singled out the root cause as lack of demonstrated commitment to Total Quality Management (T.Q.M.) by this very same group. As vice president of quality and productivity improvement, I was expected to come up with possible corrective action. My solution was that each member of the group take the most critical issue facing him and apply T.Q.M. methods and tools for its resolution. The resulting success stories would dramatically demonstrate to the entire organization that top management practices what it preaches. My suggestion was met with universal skepticism. Although they all
A
FTER NEARLY FOUR
years
were unable to explain their opposition, the group members expressed their instinctive rejection of the idea. “My take is that that’s exactly the wrong thing to do,” one of them said. “I don’t have the time to waste on something that I know will not work,” another said. Such views were nearly unanimous. I had given them a standard T.Q.M. response, and they had emphatically turned it down. I knew that understanding what was behind their instincts to reject T.Q.M. was a key to returning us to our path of continuous improvement. Shortly after that, I was a guest at a two-day T.Q.M. training session held at a company that had won a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The instructor was an outside consultant from one of the largest and most prestigious T.Q.M. organizations in the
United States. During the final question-and-answer period, I asked the instructor whether he felt there were any problems that