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In This
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 The
Role of Quality and Teams in the 21st
Century
The Way They Saw
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Where Have We Been?
Where Are We Going?
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Where Have We Been? Where Are We
Going?
Does everyone
foresee the same future for quality and teams? Of course
not! News for a Change thought it would be a good
idea to bring a diverse panel of leaders together and
find out how they view the past and future. This article
launches a three-part series that shares their
perspectives.
Significant
Developments of the Past
Each panelist was asked to review
several lists and consider the question, “What do
you believe were the most significant developments in the
field of quality and teams during the 1980s and
1990s?” In the series, we’ve summarized those
lists in sidebars: “Significant Historical Events That
Changed Our World,” “Significant
Historical Events That Changed Quality and Teams,”
and “Publications That Changed Our Views.”
Here are the panelists’
responses.
Donald
Dewar:
- I think one of the
biggest developments in the 1980s was the spread of
team activities across the United States and the entire
world. Additionally, I believe the growth of
self-managed work teams is
noteworthy.
- The launch of the
Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) had a
tremendous impact on the fields of quality and
teams.
- I think another
important event was the publication of Phil
Crosby’s Quality is
Free.
- Issuance of the ISO
9000 standards in the late 1980s affected quality
systems around the world and led to many team
activities.
- In the 1990s,
quality and team activities moved into the schools.
Programs such as Koalaty Kid have had a significant
influence on the way the concepts and tools are used in
education.
- Six Sigma,
reengineering, and lean manufacturing all have impacted
the history of teams and quality and are likely to
continue to do so in the
future.
David
Luther:
- There are two
questions in the statement. One addresses quality and
one addresses teams. The following comments refer
primarily to quality, with the thought that teams and
teamwork are a subset of
quality.
- A second thought
that sets the stage for my response is the dual nature
of what has come to be called quality. The original
notion was a manufacturing shop-floor activity
utilizing statistical approaches aimed at identifying
and removing product defects. It has a long history and
well-known champions.
- The second notion,
the quality movement of the 1980s and 1990s had more to
do with changing organizational cultures in a way that
improved a much more broadly defined customer
experience. The approaches were different, the people
who were leaders of both groups were different from one
another, and the people who were involved in each of
these areas were, and are, different. The most commonly
shared item was the word
quality.
- The third notion is
that quality followed the same pattern as many other
waves of change. There were four stages, and it may be
more useful to think of the quality movement in terms
of the stages and assign the dates as a second step.
The stages can have any number of labels, however, I
find that “embryonic,”
“growing,” “mature,” and
“aging” make up a useful
set.
Significant
Developments in the Embryonic Stage (Early- to
Mid-1980s)
- Probably the most
significant development was an “initial
event,” and it was the emergence of a mature
Japanese production system that could produce the same
products that the United States made, only better and
cheaper. This was the event that introduced the quality
concept to our nation’s boardroom, but as a
competitive problem and not as an improvement strategy.
This was posed as a major threat to not only our
production capability, but to our way of life as well.
It said that the United States was no longer no. 1 in
commerce, and the prospects for regaining that position
were grim.
- The production of
“If Japan Can…Why Can’t We?”
had a similar effect on the United States and awakened
many to the notion that there was a better way to make
and deliver products that did what they claimed they
would do. It was as much a consumer “wake
up” as it was a business “wake up”
and had broad popular appeal. Consumers were buying
Japanese products and, for much of the time, did not
know they were Japanese. The show said to the man in
the street that Japanese products were a better deal
for him.
- A couple of books
in this stage probably had a lot to do with describing
the Japanese threat, plus, and this is important,
describing how a U.S. response could be undertaken. In
fact, U.S. examples were presented that showed that one
did not have to be Japanese and live on an island
somewhere to do quality work. For people in senior
management positions, In Search of Excellence
was probably the most persuasive in describing
“what” had to be done. J.M. Juran, W.
Edwards Deming, and Phil Crosby emerged with their
approaches for “how” it was to be done but
were really of more interest to unit managers who were
asked to do something.
- Early adapting
companies became change leaders. David Kearns, CEO of
Xerox, in 1982, facing a potential Chapter 11, turned
to quality. Florida Power and Light assumed Japanese
dimensions in terms of teams, story boards, problem
solving, and error-detection approaches. Motorola made
quality the first agenda item for its board of
directors. Quality, and how to get it, was a topic of
increasing interest to the club that ran many of the
Fortune 100 companies.
- The worker was
discovered, both as an individual and as a team member.
That the person doing a particular job knows as much
about that job as anyone in the world became an
accepted insight. This notion led to delegation of
power, development of self-governed teams, change in
work design that moved away from typical assembly-line
features, and the emergence of the operator as
champion, often as part of a team, but also as an
individual. It moved responsibility for meeting the
spec away from the inspector, and to the worker.
Management layers could be cut out, and labor unions,
already weakened and representing now about 12% of the
private work force, had to join the quality movement,
or at least not thwart it.
Significant
Developments in the Growing Stage (Mid- to Late
1980s)
- A little noted but,
in my mind, very significant trend was the appointment
of senior officers as quality directors in large
companies. Jim Baaken brought Deming into Ford. Kearns
appointed a senior vice president for quality, as did
Motorola with Dick Buetow and others. Bill Egleston,
senior vice president, Europe, IBM, was brought back to
run IBM quality. These people were generally line
managers who were well regarded in their firms and had
a history of doing things. They had the confidence and
attention of the CEO. This was the signal to people in
these organizations that “there was a new sheriff
in town.”
- The Baldrige Award
was a major change mechanism and its contribution was
that it was the “Microsoft” of quality. It
set a standard, and it marginalized the wars between
Crosby, Deming, Juran, and Armand Feigenbaum advocates.
It was not the best quality approach perhaps, but it
did have the power to become the one most widely used
as a road map for improvement. It became the standard.
The Baldrige approach incorporated most of the
requirements of a broadly based organizational change
model, but it did so in a way that did not tell people
how to achieve improvement—it only pointed to
what the changes should produce. The introduction and
subsequent success of the MBNQA is responsible for some
significant portion of the improvement that
subsequently led to the United States regaining much of
its competitive advantage. The emergence of state
awards magnified the impact. Its shortcomings were a
failure to identify innovation as a vital component,
and its lack of emphasis on the financial results of
the enterprise.
- Networking, in
various forms, became a major means for organizational
learning. At the micro level, for instance, the
Conference Board Quality Council, made up of 10 to 14
companies leading in quality improvement, met quarterly
and shared lessons much more frequently. Sessions run
by companies such as Motorola, Xerox, Corning, and
Florida Power and Light, introduced thousands of people
to knowledge and insights about improvement that would
otherwise have cost the attendees a great deal. Endless
seminars, the activities of ASQ, events like the
“National Conversation on Quality,” and
hundreds of speeches, all provided great opportunities
for learning for those who wanted to get
started.
- Information
technology (IT) moved out from the control of the
finance people and became a major workplace tool. The
DEC/IBM wars went away as open systems took center
stage. Distributed intelligence and subsequently
distributed systems spelled the end of dumb terminals
connected to large processors. Data—current,
accurate, and retrievable—became the new
currency, and many of the traditional quality
enthusiasts were left behind; however, the door was
opened, and IT moved away from looking inward and
became a major means for looking outward to customers
and suppliers. Process efficiencies emerged and speed
became the sought after
attribute.
- CEO as the
corporate quality leader had one of its finest hours
with a two-day meeting of the Business Roundtable
devoted to quality management. The Business Roundtable,
made up of 100 plus CEOs of the nation’s top
firms, was described as the most powerful lobby in
Washington. At that meeting, two-hour seminars, given
twice, provided instruction on customer service,
leadership, employee involvement, and process
improvement. The people giving the seminars were Roger
Milliken of Milliken & Company, Paul Allaire of
Xerox, Harvey Golub of American Express, Jamie Houghton
of Corning, Richard Allen of AT&T, and George
Fisher of Kodak. Results were widely circulated and the
word was out… pay attention to
quality.
Significant
Developments in the Mature Stage
(1990s)
- Variations and
extensions emerged for quality. Health care saw some
very significant pilot efforts plus a lot of managerial
attention as cost became a major driver of health care
delivery. Even education tried some quality concepts,
but with mixed results. Vice president Al Gore led the
Reinventing Government exercise with dramatic results
that generally are given little credibility. Various
suppliers, consultants, and authors attempted to put
their brand on what was rapidly becoming a commodity.
Even topics like reengineering came and went, and were
seen as part of the demise of total quality management
(TQM).
- New business models
emerged, and they did not worship at the altar of
quality. Dell sold computers, did not have retail
outlets, billed the customer before the parts supplier
got paid, and became the dominant force in the market.
Wal-Mart became the largest company in the world,
applying IT to a very mature business. Outsourcing,
supply chain management, and various systems approaches
were seen as replacing the now somewhat tired TQM
efforts. Below the surface, the same principles seemed
to apply, but the titles on the conference doors
changed.
Significant
Developments in the Aging Stage (Late 1990s to
Today)
- Six Sigma arrives,
mainly because Jack Welch and General Electric (GE)
made it work. It prevails because it does have value
and does provide the bottom-line emphasis that many saw
as missing in TQM. It is today’s buzzword, with
all of its paraphernalia, i.e., Black Belt, Master
Black Belt, and other macho terms. It is a blessing for
the quality community and, for many in the original
quality school, its redemption. Interestingly, some in
the quality community are not supportive, stating that
Six Sigma is simply old wine in new bottles. They get
little attention.
- TQM public
intensity declines. Major quality conferences show
year-to-year declines, and the Baldrige Award struggles
to maintain submission rates; however, many companies
now have a good idea of what quality management is and
how it should look, and have adapted some particular
part, but not all, of the prevailing models. Other
forces and news topics push quality off of the front
page, and even the back page of business
periodicals.
Jennifer
Powell:
- I think the NBC
white paper “If Japan Can… Why Can’t
We?” is the first one because it stirred up a lot
of people. The United States in general is fairly
competitive, and none of us likes to be accused of
being behind; we want to be ahead all the time. I think
that show ruffled a lot of feathers and was a catalyst
for change.
- I believe that the
AFL-CIO announcing its plans to issue a guide to unions
in dealing with quality circles also was significant.
It was interesting to see such a large organization get
concerned enough about the concept of quality circles
to issue a manual and guide. I think there was a
“ying and yang” to that announcement.
Obviously, there was some sense of fear, but there also
was a realization that front-line employees needed to
get involved.
- I thought the U.S.
House and Senate resolution (and subsequent
presidential proclamation) for National Quality Month
was significant. It was a major statement for the
federal government to create a whole month dedicated to
quality.
- The Malcolm
Baldrige Quality Improvement Act really legitimized
what the most conscientious companies were
doing.
- Similarly, Florida
Power and Light’s being the first U.S. company to
receive Japan’s Deming Award is also quite
significant.
- The
downsizing/rightsizing/reengineering movement of the
early 1990s was another two-sided coin. On one hand, a
lot of dedicated positions and quality professionals
were rightsized out of their organizations. On the
other hand, this caused some companies to make a
commitment on how to internalize quality, flowing it
through the organization and making it everyone’s
responsibility.
- Margaret Wheatley
shook up the views on leadership and got a lot of
attention with her book, Leadership & the New
Science.
- In the mid-1990s,
mergers began to take off, and I think that had a
negative impact on quality and teams and created some
chaos in some organizations. I also think, however,
that this situation kept people from getting too
complacent, forcing people to stand up and take note
about what they are doing.
- The World Wide Web
has greatly impacted teams and quality by changing the
amount of information available and the accessibility
of that information. People’s ability to
communicate and share ideas has increased tremendously,
and the whole concept of virtual teams in the companies
is a side effect of that change. Some companies have
done very well pulling teams together in remote
locations and multiple
organizations.
- The other
significant development involved the beginning and
explosion of e-commerce. It seems as if
people believe that you can start any
kind of business and make a million dollars in a hurry,
and it doesn’t make any difference what goes on
in the organization. Supposedly, you can burn people
out, and they will come and work for you for the short
amount of time you are around if you are paying them a
lot of money! I think this has had a negative impact on
people’s willingness to work together, creating a
lot of “Lone Rangers” and people who focus
only on personal gain.
Gregory
Watson:
- The U.S. Model
Uniform Product Liability Act of 1980 established
guidelines by which corporations would be held
accountable for product safety and
quality.
- In 1980, NBC aired
the white paper “If Japan Can...Why Can’t
We?” which featured Deming and influenced the
perception of the need for quality at the top levels of
American business.
- In 1987, the Profit
Impact of Market Strategy (PIMS) Study demonstrated
that companies that pursued quality as defined using
customer perception were able to significantly
outperform their competitors in the measure that
matters most to the corporate
future—profitability.
- In 1987 the
ANSI/ASQC Q90 series was introduced to define a model
for the minimum acceptable features of quality
management systems that would be required to satisfy
third-party audits for commercial
purposes.
- In 1991, George
Fisher, Motorola CEO, announced that the entire
corporation had improved quality to the 5.1 sigma level
and that the cumulative savings from their efforts had
passed $1.2 billion. Motorola registered “Six
Sigma” as a trademark for their approach to
quality management. In 1995, Larry Bossidy, CEO of
AlliedSignal, announced a turnaround of the company
based on the application of the Motorola Six Sigma
methods, achieving savings of $1.2 billion in just 18
months and improving shareholder value by more than
165%. In 1997, Jack Welch, CEO of GE, announced that
their forward-looking, business-improvement strategy
would be based on the foundation of the Six Sigma
methodology and that its methodology would be extended
from problem-solving to product, service, and business
design. GE set expectations for savings of more than $9
billion in the next five years, and stock analysts and
institutional investors took
notice.
- In 1995 and 1999,
the American Society for Quality (ASQ) conducted future
studies that significantly redefined quality into two
significant value dimensions: 1) value added through
design of the market promise based on understanding of
customer needs and requirements, and 2) value added
through conformance to the promise made to markets
about product and service
performance.
- Between 1995 and
1999, the Internet and requirements for conducting
e-commerce changed operational definitions in the way
that companies produce and deliver their products and
services, raising new questions for quality related to
both information security and personal privacy rights,
as well as requiring new definitions for service
quality performance
standards.
 Significant
Current and Future Developments
What do you believe
will be the most significant developments in this field
during the 2000s?
Donald
Dewar:
- I think there will
be much recycling of earlier programs—everything
from quality circles, MBOs, you name
it.
- I think there will
be growth in the area of education, where schools will
introduce more programs, such as Koalaty
Kid.
- Global competition
will continue to increase, and the Internet will fuel
its expansion—anybody will be able to buy
anything from anywhere. This will drive the need for
quality products and
services.
- I think there is
going to be a new emphasis on suggestion programs,
which will be followed by a resurgence of
Kaizen—not huge improvement efforts but many
small incremental improvements that encourage everyone
to contribute. When quality circles and teams are
launched, people often get frustrated because their
personal suggestions aren’t high enough
priorities to warrant group effort. I believe that a
new approach to Kaizen is going to emerge that will
address some of this frustration. Every employee,
including the president, will be required to identify
and implement opportunities for improvement each
month—independently in most cases. Not only will
the individual workers feel that their personal ideas
have been valued, but these small improvements will
accumulate into big improvements for the organizations.
I foresee big growth in this
area.
Here’s a story
that describes what I mean. I was leading a group of
people on as study trip to Japan. At one of the companies
we visited, the plant manager told us that everyone,
including himself, had been required to come up with one
idea a month and implement the improvement, in addition
to the work that was being carried on in their quality
circles. Four years later they increased the requirement
to two ideas per month because the initial program was so
successful. Several months passed, and they increased to
three per month. Eventually, the requirement was raised
to five per month!
David
Luther:
If one believes the
argument that the Japan threat was the event that got
senior management to buy into TQM, is there a parallel
that one could expect for the next eight years? The
strict answer is probably no. It is unlikely that a
competitive threat to the United States could emerge that
would raise the concern level to that seen in the early
and middle 1980s; however, there are at least four
possible other scenarios.
One is a continuation
of 9/11, and what that would do is anybody’s guess.
The second is a war that would tax the industrial
resources of the United States. That is also
anybody’s guess. The third is economic meltdown,
which would probably significantly reduce the level of
commerce and move the focus to cost reduction, low-cost
alternatives, and survival. The fourth is probably the
most likely, and the one that provides the most guidance,
and that is the increased application of the Dell and
Wal-Mart business models. Gateway, for instance, has to
change, or it will be out of business. Kroger may already
be gone. The observation is that others will have to
adapt some form of the techniques used by these firms,
and it would seem that the quality people could take
advantage of this opportunity to use their
skills.
Jennifer
Powell:
- One of the things
that is exploding right now is the coaching field. I
think coaching will be significant because there are
lots of leaders who need support and attention, and
organizations typically don’t have a way to
provide it. What I did as a quality circle facilitator
in the early days is very much what leadership coaches
do now.
- I hope we will
rediscover why it is important to look at the long view
and not the fast buck. I think what happened in the
dot-com world and what happened in the stock market
will help us come back around to a longer-term
perspective.
Gregory
Watson:
- ISO 9000:2000 moved
the definition of a minimum-acceptable quality
management system much closer to the definition of
performance excellence that is contained in the
criteria of the MBNQA, signaling a closure of the
perceptual gap in minimum standards for quality and
best practice in managing for quality. This implies
that quality is foundational in business management and
that it is no longer an “elective” that may
be selected to differentiate
corporations.
- In 2001, AQP joined
forces with ASQ to establish a more coherent and
holistic foundation for the body of quality knowledge
that would be required to meet the emerging technical
and management needs of businesses in the face of the
challenges of the new business
environment.
- The need for new
standards that define quality in the face of e-commerce
and global business challenges will emerge into a
coherent set of standards that grow the way businesses
approach information security, privacy rights, and
customer service.
- Quality management
will be seen as an evolutionary process that has
delivered a series of lessons about effective
management that must be integrated with business
culture to establish performance excellence. Six Sigma
has been a major step in this direction, and its
integration with lean thinking, policy deployment, and
information systems technology is the next step in this
integration.
- Technological
solutions will be automated for delivery to the masses
in organizations. This will leave integration to
individuals and team members in the workplace who will
design the factors that differentiate competitiveness
between organizations. The human element of quality
will become the dominant factor in defining, designing,
and deploying quality systems to achieve business
purposes.
Concerns for the
Future
As you look toward
the next five to 10 years, what concerns you most about
the future of quality and teams?
Donald
Dewar:
I think one of my
concerns is companies launching team activities without
regard to measuring team achievements. When the going
gets tough in times of tight economics, such as we are
facing now, teams that cannot demonstrate their success
with measurable results become vulnerable because they
appear to be a cost liability. Top management makes the
decision whether specific programs and approaches live or
die, and top management is concerned with the
numbers.
Well-managed team
activities can be very profitable, so why aren’t
these activities measured more often? Much of the problem
comes from the fact that the team facilitators
don’t know how to measure team results in terms
that are compelling to top managers. The steering
committee needs to step up and provide facilitators with
the appropriate training.
Additionally,facilitators need to be put in touch
with members of the financial organization and/or
industrial engineering who can help them identify the
best possible measurement
systems.
David
Luther:
- The biggest concern
has to be the lack of concept renewal. In the 1980s, a
quality professional could go into a boardroom and talk
persuasively about the magic of run charts and control
limits and show how they can improve profitability.
Everyone knows that today. But, today there is nothing
new to take into the boardroom, with the exception of
Six Sigma, and that will not last forever. Another
interesting thought is that the stuff that was peddled
to senior management in the 1980s, in fact, had been
around for a long time, and there were people who knew
how to make the quality tools work. To my knowledge, no
parallel situation exists
today.
- A second concern
has to do with the impact that IT-driven firms are
having on the quality principles. An earlier concept
about not shipping the product until it absolutely
meets spec is not working in many fast-moving firms.
The approach now in many places consists of managed
improvement cycles, where an idea is tested, observed,
considered, and either adapted or not adapted, and then
on to another cycle. This approach is radically
different from traditional quality approaches and may
even discredit traditional approaches. The biggest
example, of course, is Microsoft, with half the known
world acting as beta sites, which amounts to putting
customers to work finding your
errors.
Jennifer
Powell:
- One of the things
that worries me is that in the face of reengineering,
organizations believe they have “done
quality.” They think they are ready for the next
thing—moving from one management fad to the
next—and that worries me. Because our society is
always ready for the next thing, we better have the
next thing ready to keep managers focused on some
purposeful work to make their organizations
better.
But the truth is
that there hasn’t been a lot of new thinking
coming out in the field of management theory in a long
time. Instead, a few concepts have been taken and
repackaged and thrown out there claiming to be a whole
new concept.
This creates an
interesting dilemma. On one hand, it creates a
superficial way of interjecting seemingly fresh
thinking in managers’ minds. On the other hand, I
think this creates a mile-wide, inch-deep situation,
where managers scratch the surface of a concept and
say, “OK, I mastered that. Tell me what comes
next.”
In fact, you can
take a quality concept or management approach as deep
as you want to take it, and you don’t ever have
to change the name—you are still working on
improvement in your
organization.
- I also am worried
about the virtual office concept and the loss of
personal contact. I do a lot of work through e-mail,
and I do find it to be effective, but to me there is
nothing like sitting face to face and having a
conversation with somebody.
- I guess the other
thing that I worry about is how much we focus on top
management. In many ways, I think this is a stall
topic—it is a way of not having to do anything
really meaningful or take any meaningful risks. If you
say, “Well, we have to have top management
support for this, and we can’t do it unless we
have their buy in,” you’re making an excuse
for not moving forward. I think the phrase,
“Think globally, act locally” is so
accurate. Real social change happens at the grassroots
level—think of Cesar Chavez, Gandhi, and Martin
Luther King Jr.
Gregory
Watson:
- A big concern is
the constant bickering and infighting among
professionals in fields related to quality, where each
disciplinary area seeks to dominate others in terms of
importance and the need for top management attention.
Collaboration among professionals in those disciplines
that deliver quality is a requirement for top
management to accept that these methods apply to their
system for doing business. Quality will no longer be
accepted “one-tool-at-a-time” by senior
managers—an entire system must be defined, and
each element must contribute to the business goal, or
it will be considered to be nonvalue producing and
suitable for elimination or
automation.
- Another concern
involves the trend among business leaders to accept
“executive excuses” for nonperformance, and
the application of “root-blame analysis” to
side-step personal accountability for the results that
their organizations produce. Leaders who are held
accountable for the results of the whole organization
are more likely to accept a systematic perspective of
those factors that contribute to the overall
effectiveness of results produced. It is time that
quality becomes defined in performance terms that
relate to expectations for “role model”
performance at every level of the
organization—from the top team to the front-line
team.
- The confusion
between data analysis and opinion sharing is of
considerable concern for me. Too many people believe in
the value of brainstorming as a basis for making
business decisions. Brainstorming and other tools
stimulate creativity and human innovation, but these
tools must be supplemented with analytical tools that
help us to understand the relative merits of the
alternatives produced by the more qualitative
approaches. An integrated approach to innovation and
human understanding must become more broadly
applied—treating ideas as alternative hypotheses
that must be tested and evaluated, not just opinions
that are accepted by the force of emotional appeal or
based on the perceived value of the person making an
assertion. This is a driving requirement for
integration of both hard and soft components into a
holistic approach for defining quality, rather than as
alternative approaches.
- The effective
contribution by all levels of an organization is
required to produce sustained organizational
performance excellence; however, organizations do not
always demonstrate to each level that their
contributions are valuable. In the future, more
consistent reward-and-recognition systems must be
applied by organizations to assure that the
contribution of all levels are valued—both to
encourage future effective participation and to
recognize the benefits of past
contributions.
 Promises for the
Future
What do you believe
holds the most promise for the future of quality and
teams?
Don
Dewar:
- I think the Koalaty
Kid type of movement is very
promising.
- I also believe that
the increasing use of measurements also will help us
succeed in the future. When coupled with appropriate
goals, peoples’ attention will be aimed at the
most beneficial outcomes.
- Virtual learning is
going to be an increasing factor in our ability to
enable people to achieve higher levels of quality in a
global, more competitive environment. It also will
enhance the ways that teams can interact and exchange
information when their members are located far
apart.
Dave
Luther:
My guess is that the
most promise lies in learning how Dell and Wal-Mart do
what they do and adapting it to our own companies before
the competition does.
Jennifer
Powell:
- I am very
encouraged by the work that is going on in the school
systems. I just attended the Quest for Excellence
Conference and saw the three schools there that
received the first Baldrige in Education
awards.
- I am also hopeful
about the impact that team activities have on employees
in organizations. Once people have a taste of team
management or get involved in decision-making, they are
changed forever. They see what is possible, and they
will never be the same again. The organization may turn
its back on any kind of formal commitment to teams, and
the leadership may change, but the individuals who were
touched by the work they did on the team will never be
the same again. I think there is a lot of power in
spreading the concepts or quality and team management
one by one.
Gregory
Watson:
- The first thing
that excites me is that we already have produced a
comprehensive body of knowledge with sound examples of
applications that define excellence in quality.
Excellence comes from flawless execution of the lessons
that already have been learned. But, flawless execution
requires two ingredients that are difficult factors:
constancy of purpose and collaborative
work.
Constancy of
purpose is the job of the leadership team in an
organization. It is essential that they establish the
direction and constantly adjust priorities in order to
apply their resources effectively (both financial and
human), working with the end in mind to achieve the
overall desired result. Leaders must ask themselves two
basic questions: 1) What is the result that they wish
to accomplish? and 2) How will they know that they are
doing the right things to accomplish that result? These
questions are the basic ingredients of a
policy-deployment-based management system and require
measurement of both process performance and results to
assure that organizations remain on
track.
Collaborative work
comes from the effective participation of all workers.
When they all believe that the work they accomplish as
individuals is aligned with their own system of beliefs
and values, and they can understand how that work
contributes to the shared purpose of the organization,
then they become more dedicated to their work and more
creative in their contribution toward the shared
purpose. Without top management’s constancy of
purpose, there can be no collaborative work because the
people will not understand how to align their efforts
to produce the desired
results.
- For me, the
excitement of the coming decade lies in how we will put
this knowledge into action. No one person can move the
direction of the world—movement must come from
the efforts of mankind to find a common purpose and
defining direction that is worthy of our united
efforts. In history, all great movements have found
that they must have a basic uniting principle. I
believe that in the years ahead this principle will
evolve from the crisis that we face together in making
Earth more sustainable environmentally—to ensure
future generations of mankind will be able to exercise
their “inalienable rights” to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To accomplish
this, we must have quality in life—in every
dimension of our world—not just in communities,
but also in countries and our environment. This is a
challenge that requires a call for action for the
greater good and can engage our energies fully as human
beings for accomplishing something of value for
everyone.
Our Distinguished
Panel
 DONALD L. DEWAR pioneered the introduction of
quality circles in the United States in 1973 and
co-founded AQP in 1977, serving as its president for
three terms. His background involves industrial
engineering, manufacturing, quality control, finance,
industrial relations, and marketing. He served as an
examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality
Award. He has spoken in 25 countries worldwide and has
authored or collaborated on nearly 300 articles and
papers, 46 books, and 97 training videos. Dewar is
president of QCI International, publisher of Quality
Digest, Timely Tips for Teams, and
QualityInsider.
 DAVID B. LUTHER retired from Corning, Inc.,
as senior vice president of quality, following
assignments as vice president of personnel, and lead
roles in finance, information systems, and
manufacturing. He is past chairman of ASQ, co-founder
of the Conference Board Quality Council, a four-term
judge for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award,
and former chair of the New York State Quality Award.
He is a member of the International Academy for Quality
and served on the Visions for Governance project at the
JFK School of Government at Harvard
University.
 JENNIFER POWELL has extensive experience in
integrating human resource management with total
quality and employee involvement, as well as
organizational development and change management. She
currently serves as president of AQP’s board of
directors and has been involved as a leader and officer
since 1986. She is currently chief of staff to a
regional vice president of customer service at Aetna,
Inc. Her previous employers include The Weather Channel
and WJZ-TV/Westinghouse Broadcasting. Powell has
presented at numerous professional conferences and
seminars both domestically and internationally on the
topic of employee involvement. She also has had
articles published on this topic as well as the role of
human resources in employee
involvement.
 GREGORY H. WATSON is past chairman of ASQ and
was named one of its “21 Voices of Quality for
the 21st Century.” He also has been a member of
the AQP board of directors and received the AQP
President’s Award. He has served as an examiner
for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, United
States Air Force Quality Award (chief judge), Florida
Sterling Award (judge), New York State Excelsior Award
(judge), and Texas Quality Award (judge). He has
written more than 70 papers and authored or
collaborated on six books. Watson is managing partner
of Business Systems Solutions, Inc. He previously has
worked for Xerox Corporation, American Productivity
& Quality Center (APQC), Compaq Computer
Corporation, and
Hewlett-Packard.
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