21st Century Quality

Arthur C. McAdams III, Ph.D. is a senior lecturer in the School of Business at the University of Bridgeport.

It is tough being a Quality advocate these days. Up until a few weeks - and a few million recalls - ago, Toyota arguably represented the best application of this management philosophy. For the last several decades, many U.S. organizations have "implemented" Quality, with varying degrees of success, only to return to traditional methods or to embrace a new management trend. I believe Quality has faltered because we have not fully embraced its basic nature.

First and foremost, Quality is a systematic, holistic, and dynamic management philosophy. Quality leaders promote a continuous, comprehensive, and purposive examination of the organization’s goals, capabilities, and results to deliver the right product to the right market in the right way. Best practices include perpetual planning and review cycles at the immediate, short-term, and long-term time horizons to continuously improve the organization’s performance in a constantly changing environment. Quality tenets address many timeless challenges, such as pursuing progress and delivering innovation while providing stability and minimizing disruption. This type of thinking prevents problems - whether related to disappointing revenues caused by poorly conceived products or rising expenses due to shoddy production practices. Quality ideals foster mutually successful stakeholders (customers, employees, suppliers, owners, community, et al.) and are woven into the fabric of the "extended" organization.

Quality is probably best known for its scientific components that leverage tenets from operations management, such as economies-of-scale, specialization, cause-and-effect diagrams, and flowcharts that have led to great gains in productivity through much of the 20th century. The advancement of these methods has broken systems down into activities and tasks that can lead to streamlining the overall process, as well as improving the individual performance of each unit. These practices have advanced professionalism in organizations, but taken to an extreme, these well-meaning exercises often can become an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. Customers make the final determination - and in the long run - self-aggrandizing metrics, catchy advertising slogans, and clever financial wizardry won’t make up for poor Quality.

Graduate students in the Strategy & Policy capstone course at the University of Bridgeport evaluate the competitiveness and health of industries and companies using criteria from the Baldrige National Quality Program. This exercise illuminates the inherent integration issues that arise in organizations as each functional area (accounting, finance, HR, IT, marketing, and operations) pursues excellence within its own terms, which may come at the expense of the collective enterprise. It has been my experience that when students - and practitioners - explore Quality in its best form, they embrace this "bird’s eye" view of organizational performance. Quality improves organizational effectiveness and efficiency, which benefits business and society – and for this reason - I hope we can learn from the past and forge a Quality renaissance.