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A. Blanton Godfrey is chairman and chief executive officer of Juran Institute Inc. He leads the Juran Institute in the development of its ranges of services while maintaining the traditions of leadership and distinguished service established by its founder, J.M. Juran.

Prior to joining the Juran Institute in 1987, Dr. Godfrey headed AT&T Bell Laboratories' Quality Theory and Technology Department, which is responsible for applied research in the areas of quality, reliability and productivity.

Dr. Godfrey has master's and doctorate degrees in statistics and a bachelor's degree in physics. He is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University.

Dr. Godfrey is a Fellow of the American Society for Quality Control, a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an Academician of the International Academy for Quality and a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. He has also just been named a contributing editor for Quality Digest. His monthly column on quality will begin in January 1996.

QD: What's life like at the Juran Institute now that Dr. Juran has retired?

Godfrey: Dr. Juran's retirement is always grossly exaggerated. He has just switched to the next phase of his life. His is the most incredibly organized and carefully planned life I have ever known. He does things in steps, and they are not quantum leaps. I was trying to count the number of retirements he has had the other day, and I think it may be seven, depending on how you define things.

But in 1987, when I came to the Institute, he officially retired from the Institute. That just meant that he no longer had an office at the Institute, and I moved into his office. Since then he has worked out of his home.

Dr. Juran isn't a Juran Institute employee. But then again, he never was. He was the owner. He was the founder. But he never took a salary. And he never actually felt like he worked for the Institute. As a matter of fact, when he began to feel like he worked for the Institute, and people were coming to him for management decisions, he decided to bring me in because he really didn't want to manage a bunch of people doing a lot of different things. He wanted to teach. He wanted to write books. He wanted to lecture.

He, of course, is still the chairman of the Juran Foundation. He still is a member of the board of directors of Juran Institute. He still comes in about once a week, especially when we have distinguished guests. Dr. Juran has just published a quality history and is working on three other books. Last week, he turned in three chapters for the fifth edition of Juran's Quality Control Handbook, which I'm co-editing with him this time.

QD: Dr. Juran has told me that he thinks you are one of the most knowledgeable people in the quality world. How does it feel to be the heir to a quality legend?

Godfrey: It feels just great. Dr. Juran and I became friends while I was at Bell Labs. He feels comfortable discussing many things with me, and perhaps sometimes even arguing about things. There are many things that we don't see eye to eye on. I find a good, intelligent argument one of the greatest joys in life, where two sides have very different opinions yet respect the other side and often become convinced by the other side. It's been a relationship that I have treasured because I know he will give me his honest answer whether he likes or dislikes something I have done or written or said.

He's also become very intrigued with some of the new things we are doing at the Institute. In fact, he told me the other day that he'd be very interested in working with a client who's doing something very new and innovative.

QD: What do you see as the most significant quality trend?

Godfrey: I've thought about that a lot, and I keep coming back to the same answer: "mass customization" -- the customer side of quality. It's the idea, which seems so radical to so many people right now, that you can actually provide exactly what the customer wants, down to the individual level. It's being pioneered by a lot of companies. Levi Strauss is now taking orders in the store and making up to 2,400 different sizes. The clerk puts an order into the computer, which goes to the factory, which makes the jeans custom-fit.

So they can make custom jeans for only about $50. The custom-made jeans fit exactly and are exactly the color customers want, which also means no inventory, no waste, no discounts and no leftovers at the end of the year. It's incredibly efficient for the manufacturer. It's also incredibly efficient for customers because they get exactly what they want, when they want it.

It's happening now with bicycles. It's happening at General Motors and Toyota, which have both announced that by the turn of the century, they will be able to custom-make cars. Hyatt has announced that they think they can treat every customer as an individual. Of course, it's been a goal of The Ritz-Carlton for some time.

Companies can literally provide you with what you want and no more than you want, so that you don't pay for features you don't want.

QD: How is that going to affect quality? Is mass customization quality management or business management?

Godfrey: I see no real difference between quality management and business management. I see quality management as an integral part of business management, equal to and maybe even more important than financial management. The quality technology and the quality management that leads to the ability to do that requires an incredible focus on and understanding of customers. Customers don't necessarily want just what's on the shelf. It sounds so obvious, but it wasn't obvious for 50 years because no one else did it.

QD: Probably the hottest growth industry for the next decade is information technology. What kind of quality challenges will this new industry face?

Godfrey: Many companies depend on information for their success. Yet almost no company has the slightest idea how to measure the quality of their information. Because they have not measured it nor managed it, it is horrible. You'll find in hospitals, 30 percent of the critical information on medical records will be wrong; 99 percent of the medical records will have at least one error or more.

When AT&T looked at the error rates in access charges (the $13 billion a year that AT&T pays operating companies for local access), there was about a 3-percent error. Three percent of $13 billion is a huge amount of money. AT&T now has a quality manager who reports directly to the chief information officer to apply what he knows across all the information systems at AT&T. Most companies don't have a clue. The idea to have a quality manager report to the chief information officer had never occurred to anybody. As far as I know, he's the first one.

Any time we at the Juran Institute look at a company's information systems, we find huge opportunities for improvement, sometimes bigger than anything they ever dreamed of in manufacturing. When you look at companies that are completely dependent on information -- insurance companies, banks, airlines, publishers, almost anyone who relies on information to make their day-to-day business decisions -- you'll invariably find room for improvement.

QD: What do you think of ISO 9000?

Godfrey: I spent 10 years as a member of Technical Committee 176, which wrote ISO 9000. I happen to believe very much in international standardization. I spent a lot of my life in the standards world. But given all that, and given all the weeks of my life I spent in Paris and Rome and Stockholm and Copenhagen helping write standards, I sometimes feel almost guilty about what we did because of the misuse of ISO 9000, in the marketing of it as TQM and the marketing to CEOs that if you have a certificate, you've done quality.

The truth is that it's a 1970s understanding of quality because that's all the committee members would allow to be in it. To be sent as a delegate from your company or your country, you must have a lot of experience and a reputation. For a while, I was one of the youngest people on the committee. There were a lot of very senior people from very established companies. Basically, the standard was their definition of quality assurance from the 1970s.

Also, there was no intent by anybody on the committee to ever let anything get into the standard that their company wasn't already meeting. You'd be crazy to vote on something that would give your company a hard time. The only good thing was that most of the 100 delegates from the 44 countries came from good companies, so what they put in the standard was what their companies did, and they thought that everybody was doing it. It was a real shock when we found out that companies actually had to struggle in the United States to meet ISO 9000. I was assured in my own mind that any AT&T plant would walk through it in the first week.

I was shocked at how hard some companies had to work. I was so naive that I didn't know how bad some companies were. So in one way we created a very good minimal standard for companies who were doing nothing. ISO 9000 gave them a worldwide accepted definition of a quality system.

On the other hand, we did a lot of harm because some people thought it was a world-class quality system instead of a minimal quality system. And those companies that stopped when they got their certificate had a rude awakening when they found out that that didn't mean they were competitive.

QD: What do you think about ISO 14000, the proposed new environmental standard? How will it affect the quality world?

Godfrey: It will have a huge effect on the quality world. For many companies, the environment is critical to their future success. Managing pollution and waste, and interacting better with the environment will be critical success factors. The chairman of Toyota in North America has suggested the "green" car may be the next dimension of quality that will determine the winners and losers. Whoever can make the most pollution-free, environmentally friendly automobile will be the winner.

One multinational corporation has even renamed its quality council at the corporate level the "quality and environmental council." I know of other smaller companies that have also changed the name of their quality council to quality environment council.

QD: I know that you've worked closely with many leading senior executives all over the world. Have you noticed any changes in their attitudes toward quality the last few years?

Godfrey: Very much. First of all, many of the senior people now understand that quality is a business issue and that it needs to be integrated into the business plan. Forty percent of the people surveyed by the Business Roundtable a few years ago said that the No. 1 issue facing them was the integration of quality with business management. And I see that trend continuing.

QD: Dr. Juran's latest book is on the history of quality. There's the famous quote: "Those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them." What lessons are we forgetting today?

Godfrey: Every chapter of A History of Managing for Quality is full of things that we're teaching today as if they were new. Customer-supplier relationships is a big thing.

The book talks about the Phoenicians building ships and working with farmers to grow the trees, which they tagged from the beginning so they could never be cut for anything else. The trees had to be grown in a certain way, and after they were 68 years old, the farmers would cut them down and age them in sea water for 10 years. This relationship went on for 500 years. They had similar relationships with hemp growers to make the right rope.

When you see the intensity with which they managed their suppliers, you start to think maybe Toyota isn't so great after all. We just think they're the best managers of their suppliers now, but they haven't even gotten to where the Phoenicians were.

All these chapters on history reinforce many things we think of as modern quality management now. Of course, we have added some new things, but far fewer new things than we thought. When you read A History of Managing for Quality, it's almost like reading a new book by Tom Peters on the search for excellence.

"Companies" literally created entire industries, whether it was silk in China, ships in Venice, crystal in Czechoslovakia or beer in Bohemia. They created something better than anyone else in the world, and many times they dominated that product for 500 years or more. Looking at how they created that kind of market domination and how they managed, and realizing how much of it was what we call quality management is a sobering lesson.