Many American corporations are struggling to find their way in an increasingly demanding and complex global economy by turning to the quality movement sweeping the business world. As they do, however, more and more are making a painful-and sometimes fatal-discovery.
”Quality improvement processes, like health regimens, are necessary fundamentals for vitality,” says Jeanie Duck, vice president of Boston Consulting Group, ”but they are not guarantors of success,”
Duck, along with others at her company, recently took a critical, in-depth look at the quality movement that began inching across the nation in the early 1980s and now has hit full stride.
What they found is a fundamental flaw in how many corporations are embracing the lexicon of the ideas at the root of America`s recrafting movement: statistical quality control, cross-functional teams, total quality management, empowered work forces and customer focus.
Increasing numbers of executives have discovered that those ideas, as valid as they are, don`t always coalesce if they are not tailored properly to the company or not managed systemically.
The result has been that an increasing number of American firms have gotten lost in a frustrating quality ”Twilight Zone,” where the complex pieces of the quality puzzle don`t fit and where corporations find themselves worse off than before, and in some cases even out of business.
”A lot of people do not understand that change is a process in and of itself and must be managed as such,” says Duck. ”In the 1980s people got excited about quality for obvious reasons. Companies trained everybody and there were lots of successes. But once you picked all the low-lying fruit, the successes for some companies began to dissipate. The problem was the quality push in the 1980s didn`t incorporate systemic change.”
Companies are realizing that altering processes is not always enough. They have to plan and manage those processes so that they not only provide for customer needs, but anticipate customer wants. They must not only deal with strategic priorities, but possibilities.
Quality is not static, not simply a matter of conforming to rigid requirements. Quality is dynamic, always moving.
Too many executives, Duck adds, have attempted to succeed by being copycats in the quality movement.
Duck, who until four years ago owned her own consulting firm in Minneapolis focusing on corporate restructuring and quality, began thinking critically about the quality movement in America when the chief of a major corporation came to her recently with a problem.
”He told me he had taken the ideas he had heard at quality seminars and that he had created a methodology, but that now his company was mired in that methodology to the point where people were no longer looking at business issues,” she says. ”The management team had figured out the methodology, but it hadn`t figured out the decision-making process that would allow them to use that methodology in proper context.
”Some people don`t realize there is rigor to be applied,” says Duck.
”Too many people think there is some black box filled with magical cures that can make this happen. Others understand that there is no quick fix and are willing for the solutions to be hard and painful as long as they are clear and guaranteed.
”We`re not afraid of hard, we`re afraid of unsure,” Duck says. ”If the keys to success are clear but more than we can do, our failure is clear and attributable. We can believe that if only we had done all the steps longer or more rigorously, we would have gotten the rewards promised.
”The problem is not with improvement initiatives, the problem arises when reductionist thinking takes over,” Duck says. ”The reductionist believes in the simplicity and surety of the formula: `If I perfect and control my part, using the correct tools and measurements, and everyone else does the same, then the desired results will automatically follow. If we do all this, our customers will love us, we`ll get greater market share and increased profits.`
”It`s not that these things can`t happen, it`s that they`re not automatic. We must not hide in reductionist thinking that seduces us into believing that if we just do certain things correctly, we`ll be safe.”
Often two things happen as a company embraces any of the quality formulas making the rounds of corporate America, Duck says. First, everybody feels better because ambiguity has been banished and replaced with certainty-a plan. Second, legitimate improvements occur, and quality improves when people concentrate on preventing problems rather than depending on rework.
Recrafting a poorly managed corporation from top to bottom means moving beyond a companywide system of formulas and rules, Duck says. It means designing the changes so they are strategically correct for that company. Then it means managing the different ingredients so they make sense to that company.
”The new (quality) technology of the 1990s is the art of managing large-scale change,” says Duck. ”How to do it? What`s the sequence? What`s the pace? Do we start with structure, re-engineering, what?”
”You can measure everything, but totally miss the mark,” Duck says.
”Quality is not a black or white thing. We all want formulas. Things like statistical process control, cross-functional teams. . . . These are all tools, like a computer. But a computer is not the answer, it is the tool we use to create the answer.
”Our ability to assess the range of possibilities that will affect not only our own business, but those of our customers and their customers becomes increasingly important,” says Duck. ”We must be flexible and responsive.”
Quality experts like Deming say the Japanese have understood those principles for decades. Deming is credited with teaching the Japanese most of the theories of total quality management in the early 1950s.
Today, most Japanese manufacturers understand that quality is a moving target, that the consumer is the most important part of the production line and that learning from the consumer is vital to a company`s survival.
Some slow-moving American firms are learning those strategic lessons in much the same way that the American TV industry did in the 1960s and `70s, Duck says.
”Zenith once produced a TV with `the works in a drawer,` ” she says.
”You were able to slide out most of the components without tearing the TV apart. It was made that way for a combination of reasons. One reason was easy servicing, but another was because Zenith made money off its distribution system and service network.
”Then, along came the Japanese. They had neither distribution nor service networks in the U.S. So they chose a different strategy. It was a strategy that called for building highly dependable, defect-free TV sets that didn`t need servicing.”
It didn`t take long for most U.S. TV makers to close up shop. Consumers opted for sets that were more reliable rather than ones that were easy to repair.
As quality gurus often point out, American TV makers failed to use knowledge, imagination, innovation, risk and trial and error to develop the kinds of new products and services consumers wanted. They failed to anticipate.
American businesses in the 1990s must create a strategy designed to solve business issues, and then, says Duck, they must understand that quality is a mechanism to accomplish that strategy.
”That,” says Duck, ”is the new technology of quality.”
