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hen I started working on this story, I had an idea in mind. Based on a report that Quality Digest Daily ran in October, “Shifts in Consumer Spending and Saving to Usher in a New Economic Era,” I wanted to investigate whether less consumer spending would, in some way, pose an opportunity for companies to focus more on quality. My initial thought was that with money being tighter, consumers would tend to give more importance to the quality of products and services. In other words, would an era of less spending mean a preference for quality over price?
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In addition, as the economy slowly recovers, would consumers become a lot more aware of their past wasteful spending, and thus begin to value high-quality over low-quality products and services?
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Comments
Six Sigma making us Statisticians?
This is a very interesting interview. I'd like to know more about Harrington's assertion that "Some things like customer relationship management (CRM) and other IT systems have done more to improve quality than ISO 9001."
I strongly agree that we should be change agents; should have been, all along. Somewhere along the line, that's been lost, as references to the Deming Philosophy and Juran have become fewer and farther between, and resistance to change (or at least, to the idea of being a "change agent") has become almost an ideology in business. I'm not so sure that Six Sigma has created statisticians; many of the Black Belts I've met are a result of Rule Four of the funnel (worker training worker).
My own feeling is that as long as Quality is seen as a function rather than as a system interacting with the larger system, and executives continue to practice Deming's Deadly Sins, we will continue to see programmatic, "small-q" initiatives rise while they are tried as a curiosity and fall (even if successful) as resistance overcomes them or the sponsoring managers move on.
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