Quality on Trial: Is Your Quality Initiative Paying Off?

QUALITY ON THRIAL is for every business executive who has ever, in the midnight of the soul, had doubts about the contribution of his or her company's quality initiative to bottom-line results.

Amid all the hyperinterest in Total Quality Management, the authors, officers of the Quality Institute International, remind us that not every company succeeds with this approach. Their "reason" cited is a lack of complete focus on meeting customer needs. Their "solution" to this problem is the "quality review," a practical, organized process of "designing a system backwards" based on what customers want. Even with this clear design of a business to meet customer needs, some companies still fail with the quality commitment for a lot more reasons than presented here. A commitment to quality by management is probably the most significant, traumatic change ever experienced, and this is the key to the success or failure with quality. See Tom Peters's Liberation Management ( LJ 11/1/92) or Daryl Conner's Managing at the Speed of Change ( LJ 12/92) for more thorough coverage of this subject.
- Dale Farris, Groves, Tex.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.