Why Quality Principles Matter
Organizations commonly focus on quality tools to achieve improvements. Tools are important, but understanding the underlying principles for achieving quality excellence is critical.
Most organizations registered to ISO 9001 are familiar with the eight quality management principles that form a basis for the ISO 9000 series:
 Customer focus
Leadership
Involvement of people
Process approach
System approach to management
Continual improvement
Factual approach to decision making
Mutually beneficial supplier relationships
The list represents a mid-1990s consensus. More recently, Charles A. Cianfrani and I re-examined these principles. We reviewed the criteria for quality awards and current Japanese theories on quality principles. The results of our study are summarized in the five directional and seven operational principles that follow:
1. Focus on customers. Customers establish the requirements for products and services and provide the revenues that enable an organization’s continued existence. Focusing on meeting customers’ needs and expectations is therefore essential for organizational survival.
2. Focus on other stakeholders. Owners, employees, other interested parties and society at large all have a stake in an organization’s performance. Focusing on the needs of other stakeholders is important to sustain an organization over time.
3. Focus on results. Organizations must achieve positive, measurable results in all key areas of performance to maintain a viable future. These include results in financial performance, customer satisfaction, quality improvement and environmental performance.
4. Focus on agility. Flexibility and a rapid response to events are critical to organizations faced with changing external conditions. This goes beyond achieving operational agility to achieving an organizational mindset that embraces rapid change.
5. Focus on the future. A forward-looking vision helps an organization better manage its own destiny.
1. Provide leadership, vision and purpose. Leaders establish an organization’s purpose, its objectives and its vision of the future. Management should build an environment where all employees can contribute to meeting the organization’s objectives.
2. Establish and align objectives. Aligning objectives in all areas of the organization enhances the ability to meet goals and achieve results.
3. Manage a system of interrelated processes. Managing activities and resources together as a process improves the ability to meet process output needs. Treating the interactions among the processes as a system enables an organization to meet objectives more effectively and efficiently.
4. Manage with facts supported by credible data. Decisions should be made using facts and data tempered with experience and intuition.
5. Innovate, learn and improve. Organizations achieve excellence by learning, innovating and improving. An organization’s people drive learning and innovation.
6. Develop and involve people. People are the essence of an organization, and when they’re fully engaged in their work and involved in improving it, the organization is better equipped to meet its objectives.
7. Develop suppliers, partners and other stakeholders. Active development of suppliers, partners and other stakeholders helps them create value together.
Developing principles is more important than creating and sustaining a management system or the tools used in that system. Organizations must own their principles.
But why go to the trouble? Many people will argue that developing a management system using ISO 9001 guidelines or Baldrige Award criteria is sufficient. However, they’re mistaken. When an organization bases its actions on a standard or model, it must trust that the principles of that model fit the organization and its culture. Although it’s tempting to adopt principles from a standard, quality award scheme or another organization, they’re certain to fail because each organization is unique. No single model is likely to focus on the things most important to achieving excellence in your organization. On the other hand, if you develop the principles upon which you expect all action to be taken, you create a foundation for the system to evolve and improve over time.
Leaders must think through the ideas that will support their organizations’ future success. General lists of principles are useful to stimulate this thinking, but they don’t provide the answers for each and every organization. Actions and tools must follow principles, not the other way around.
John E. (Jack) West is a consultant, business advisor and author with more than 30 years of experience in a wide variety of industries. He is chair of the U.S. TAG to ISO TC 176 and lead delegate for the United States to the International Organization for Standardization committee responsible for the ISO 9000 family of quality management standards.
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