Bob Todd
Bridgeport, CT

Hooray, Mr. Balestracci, for again pointing out that simply paying lip service to quality has not worked, and won't work, no matter how loudly the cheerleaders cheer.

There are two "Fundamental Axioms" of business, each with an obvious corollary, that are apparently still unknown despite 20 years of teaching. They are:

A1: Quality (of product, service, employees, management, processes) is a CAUSE of success in business. Quantity (of revenue, sales, market share, stock price) is an EFFECT of success in business.
C1: Management attention should be directed more to causes than effects.

A2: People pay professional attention to what is measured and rewarded.
C2: If you want your people to pay attention to important things, you must measure and reward important things.

Why do you suppose this is so hard to understand?

I got out of the quality business after tiring of busting boundaries and making improvements for bosses who neither understood nor cared what I was doing. The good part was that people almost always responded cheerfully, sometimes hungrily, to constructive change, although in one company almost all of the people violently resisted change.

TQM wasn't the first initiative to fail and it won't be the last. Deming saw SPC wither after WW II. My observation is that TQM did not die so much as it moved underground. Many Quality professionals snicker at Six Sigma with its 1.5 Sigma Shift, etc.
I was involved in establishing TQM and metrics programs, in the 1980s and 90s, at several corporations. Some succeeded and some failed. In hindsight, Deming had it right. The problem was management. All the pieces for success were there: Need – dire need; metrics plan; documentation; pilot program success results; training; programmer buy-in. The missing piece in those programs that failed was project management, and/or higher, buy-in.
Pointing fingers is useless. FMEA and root cause analysis would work to discover "why" but if management does not want to hear the answer (they already know) then leave it. At one company in north Florida in the 90s, I was asked to come up with more accurate estimating methods. I looked at past projects data and did the usual statistics and modeling. I discovered that all the projects that John managed were severely under-estimated. I told him the findings and before I could offer a fix, I was “fixed”.
Lawyers have a saying about trials, “Never ask a question that you don’t already know the answer to.” The same common sense applies to metrics or TQM or whatever Flavor-of-the-Month program is reported. Managers already know. If you want TQM to succeed then you have but one course of action. Find out who is the "resister" and either win them over to your side, or neutralize their criticism, or find a way around the obstacle, or set things up to comprise their demise, or walk away. There is seldom any other way.
TQM failed not because the theory or math was bad…it failed because of the reasons spoken by Dr. Kanter and quoted by Davis. TQM, as it was originally conceived by the Navy or Armand, was a systemic method…a disease cure. TQM as it was practiced by quacks and hacks was symptomatic. Fixing symptoms is necessary but not sufficient to cure the disease. Unlike most human diseases, corporate diseases usually kill the host – GM or Chrysler anyone? To carry the medical metaphor one step further, effective doctors take a good, comprehensive history; "...a medical history is 90% of the diagnosis." When we undertake a TQM program, or metrics project, or Six Sigma project, or LEAN initiative we need to take a good, thorough, comprehensive patient history. That will diagnose the corporate disease...okay, throw in a couple of statistics tests. Undertaking the cure -- appropriate choice of words -- is another matter. Is there a doctor in the House?
Thank you, Davis, for an entertaining and informative article.
Claire

These are all salient points. Having served as a Director of TQM for a major healthcare organization, and having been previously part of a very successful TQM effort in manufacturing (the healthcare effort was successful also), I can affirm that the critical factors in all successful implementations was that Senior Management...
- 'got it',
- lived it,
- invested heavily in promoting it,
- took part in the training,
- pushed decision making down the hierarchy,
- were relentless in their pursuit of understanding their organization as a system (a la Peter Senge and others),
- admitted that they did not have all the answers,
- lead by example (even when they failed at something),
- went on a journey of self-transformation (and made their efforts public),
- and above all, drove fear out of the workplace

'Get It' OR 'Get Out'...
My one piece of advice to all Quality professionals is that if your Senior Leaders, after much exposure to the principles of TQM, still refuse to 'get it', then you need to 'get out' and join another company (a competitor?), that lives these principles. Heck even start your own company! Life is too short and too precious to surrender it to others who are only interested in seeking glory and reward in short term results, at the expense of longer term success..

Thank you Davis for such an informative article.

Brian Ward
Principal, Affinity Consulting
http://www.affinitymc.com

Bob,

Truly great observations. My only response to your inquiry: "Why is this so hard to understand?" I can only reply that there is a strong tendency toward lag indicators in almost all aspects of our lives, and EFFECTS fall firmly into that. When most companies create KPIs and metrics, they are almost entirely rear-view perspectives; perhaps this is because we are far more confident when we espouse on what has happened compared with what will happen.

"Be the change you want to see in this world."
Gandhi