Abundance, in my view, is the natural state of the world. So I certainly have no objection to making money. We should rejoice in our wealth.
The problem arises when making money assumes first priority. More than once I heard Dr. Deming say that if you stress quality, profits will take care of themselves. But if you stress profits, quality will *not* take care of itself. Put differently, when quality goes up, productivity and profits go up and costs come down. When you put profit first, quality and productivity come down, costs go up, and, ultimately, profits decline. We are all worse off.
I believe that I see at least three underlying and largely unstated philosophic principles in the quality movement. The first is profound respect for human beings. This respect is manifest in the attention given to the customer who is and should be the dominant figure in any business enterprise. The same respect applies to people within the organization, the workers, the internal customers. Quality managers know that quality process improvement must come from the people who work in the process. And use of teams, especially self-managing teams, reflects enormous respect for people.
The second principle is allegiance to the truth. This principle expresses itself in the scientific approach to the study and improvement of processes using the statistical tools and the management/planning tools.
The third principle is a belief in the power and rightness of leadership and its antecedent, empowerment. The principle is at the root of the insistence by any quality professional worth his or her salt that quality must be led from the top.
All three of these principles are seriously undermined by American me-first-ism and its primary embodiment, seeking for money. To the degree that money is the first consideration, then damaging practices like cost-cutting and the use of fear (both enemies of quality, according to Dr. Deming) to get more work for less money are perfectly valid approaches.
In my years in quality business, too often I have seen organizations willing to hire me to make it *look* as though they were embarking on the quality journey when in fact they had no intention of doing so. These organizations were concerned with short-term profitability. The look of quality was important to them for that reason. But they were unwilling to invest their time, leadership, or money in transforming themselves into quality organizations. They wanted me to collude with them. I always refused.
Worse, when I refused to help in the pretense, other quality professionals were quite happy to do so--for a fee. Too often, quality professionals are willing to sell their services for a price even when they know that the organizations hiring them will not succeed. These same professionals are profoundly concerned copyrights and patents to assure their work will not be used without profit to themselves.
Put in a larger context, I see the quality movement as one (possibly the only) answer to America's economic (and to a degree, moral) ills. We are threatened by our own complacency and arrogance. Our me-first-ism (we call it "rugged individualism") has led to poor quality goods and sloppy treatment of customers. Our concern for short-term profits puts long-term quality at risk. Other nations have been quick to take advantage of our weakness.
When quality professionals collude in quality failure to make money, my sense of impending collapse becomes severe.
I don't mean to imply that all companies and quality professionals are guilty of these sins. Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Federal Express, and Campbell Soup come to mind as examples of quality companies who have done things right. Myron Tribus, Del Kimbler, and Jim Clauson are men who have given and given and given of their time and leadership an excellence for no purpose other than to change the world for the better. They have, to my knowledge, gained nothing for their generosity. All three, God bless them, even allow their writings to be posted on Internet for free. By the profit-first rules, these men are fools. By the quality rules, they are heroes. They have made a profound difference in the world.
I turn sixty this year. I've given the best I had. Now it's time for me to give full time and attention to writing.
I know that many readers will disagree with much that I have said here. I don't ask for agreement as much as for understanding.
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Tom Glenn, DPA
SysOp, The TQM BBS
301-585-1164
Internet: tom.glenn@tqm.permanet.org
tom.glenn@den.permanet.org
Fax, voice: 301-565-8882
100 Hodges Lane
Takoma Park, Maryland 20912
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Included with permission of Tom Glenn.
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