qualityview

An Interview With Deborah Hopen


by Scott Madison Paton


Deborah Hopen is president of the American Society for Quality Control and a principal in the firm Center for Strategic Business Solutions.

She has served in a number of positions within the ASQC, including chair of the Society's membership committee and Quality Press Editorial Review Board; deputy regional director; and treasurer of the Quality Management Division.

Hopen is an ASQC-certified quality engineer and has a bachelor of applied science degree in pulp and paper technology. She is the first woman to be elected president of the ASQC.

How does it feel to be the first female president of the ASQC?
It feels great. Being president of such a large organization is very exciting. I don't know that I found it different as the first woman president than I would have under any other circumstances except everybody keeps reminding me of that.

Why do you think it took 50 years to elect a woman?
For one reason, there just weren't that many women in ASQC. Ten years ago, less than 15 percent of ASQC's membership was female. I've been in ASQC since 1978, and I can remember going to meetings where there were only two or three women.

When you look statistically at the number of people who have the time to volunteer and the amount of effort it takes to work your way up to be president, if you only have a pool of 15 percent of the total to start with, it's going to weed people out pretty rapidly.

And, frankly, women weren't credible in the engineering fields, and quality had to go through a transition from being primarily an engineering field to a field that covers engineering, anthropology, sociology and psychology. It's really become a total business field now. As that happened, more women got into the quality arena, became interested in it and became actively involved.

Do you feel that as president and as a member of ASQC, you've been treated any differently because you're a woman?
I would say that from the day I became a member of ASQC, I've been welcomed, and I've been active. I never felt different. I noticed that sometimes I was the only one around, but in my career, I was also the only woman most of the time. What I did find in ASQC that was different was that somewhere around the time I got active at the national level, women started to come up to me and say, "You're getting prominence at the national level, so we expect you to do this differently."

For instance, when I was on the constitution revision committee about five years ago, I had people come up to me and say, "We don't want to see chairmen of the board anymore."

I had never thought of that as a role for myself until women said we expect it of you. I don't want to be remembered just because I was the first woman president. It's been something that people have said to me regularly and I've been aware of constantly. I've considered it a responsibility but not a threat. I didn't say I can't make a mistake because I'm a woman. I can't worry that because I'm the first woman, everything I say will be criticized or will be looked at differently. So, I managed to get past that psychological barrier.

How do you feel about ISO 9000?
My opinion, and I think it's shared by many people in ASQC, is that life is built one step at a time. ISO 9000 is a very, very useful tool for taking that first step-for having a piece that you can see results, that you can set as a goal, that starts to introduce the practice of quality as a means and that you can have as celebration, which is so important when you get there. The sad part is stopping there.

I see ISO 9000 as the first step; I see industry-enhanced standards, such as QS-9000, as a second step on that continuum. It's great when you can take the standard and then say, in our industry, we look for more than that. And then I see it going beyond that and into the Baldrige Award because I view the ISO 9000 standard as largely a subset of the Baldrige Award. Obviously, the Baldrige Award goes more intensively into the leadership of the planning and human resources areas, which are touched on superficially in ISO 9000. We can then get into rigorous, prescriptive-type evaluations, like the Deming Prize. We also now have corporate standards. At Xerox, we had the Xerox management system, which is the Xerox corporate culture standard laid out well beyond their Baldrige Award.

How do you feel about the way the Baldrige Award has been adopted by U.S. industries, in comparison with ISO 9000?
I think it's the free-enterprise system at work. I think the Baldrige Award has been adopted as a self-assessment tool, as a standard that is well-accepted in companies, particularly in mid-size and larger companies. And it's become a framework for U.S. business. There's hardly anybody that I ever meet that doesn't know about it and hasn't glanced at the criteria. To me, that's an ideal world.

However, it's not market-driven to become a Baldrige winner. It is market-driven to become an ISO 9000-certified company, and so as long as the market drives, more companies will prove and put their effort behind ISO 9000 certification.

Do you think anything should be done internally in the Baldrige process to make it more market-driven?
I think for some people this is a debate. Should it be more like ISO 9000, where it becomes a measurement system that you measure against a target that's close to competing against each other? There are pros and cons on that, but I will say this: We already have a system that helps there-the state, county and community quality awards. ASQC is trying to help with that. One way we're trying to help is by asking our members to help. If you went out and looked at the state and community quality awards, you'd see that they're largely populated by ASQC members giving their volunteer time.

What is the greatest challenge facing the ASQC in the future?
In general, being prepared for the future. We've spent a lot of time during the past year really fretting about it. The greatest challenge is how we can prepare people to embark on one of two paths: Either assimilate quality into the everyday work force and be prepared to have quality be the meat and not a side course, or take the risk of continuing to specialize so that we can continue to bring new technologies into the field in the future.

How will the ASQC do that?
One way we'll do it is by working a strategic plan that develops competencies within our members and within our system that will allow us to be better prepared. We're going to tap into technology at a whole new level. We will have to be out there sensing the environment much more regularly. Yes, we do it annually, but we will have to monitor it constantly. We have begun to put those antennas out in a way that we've never done before.