Yonatan Reshef
School of Business
University of Alberta
Edmonton, Alberta
T6G 2R6 CANADA

1. Quality is management's problem. Deming argues that 94% of what goes wrong is with the system, that is with management, and only 6% with the individual worker or thing (i.e., special causes of variation) (Deming, 1986: 315). Ishikawa (1985: 58, 110) reports different figures, 75-80 percent and 20-25 percent respectively. The reason being that management defines material specifications, equipment standards, human resource practices, shapes the working environment, and dictates production processes which are responsible for product and production variations. At a strategic level, failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste of manpower, materials, and machine-time, all of which raise the manufacturer's cost and price that purchaser must pay.

2. Top managers must be unequivocal champions of continuous quality improvement. Top managers must be leaders of continuous quality improvement rather than being cheerleaders (cartoon | cartoon). Because verbal exhortations are futile when workers are saddled with conditions beyond their control, managers must adopt a new philosophy regarding their as well as workers' responsibilities, roles, and the management-worker relationship, that would result in changed managerial practices. As such, top managers must personally establish new directions and goals for their businesses and then personally lead the management team toward these goals, because goals without implementation plans are mere slogans. Managers should act as role models, use quality processes and tools, encourage communication, sponsor feedback activities and teamwork, recognize people practicing quality improvement, and provide a supportive environment in which they operate. This change constitutes a thought revolution (paradigm change) in management.

   TQM  requires "a cultural revolution in management" (Deming, 1986: 148). According to Ishikawa (1985: 3, 37, Ch. 6), "quality control could ... effect a thought revolution in management." The thought change means that managers should collaborate rather than control, empower rather than manipulate, lead rather than direct, and share (knowledge and information = power) rather than own.
    

3. Maximize employee potential through empowerment and continuous training (current needs) and development (future needs).

   Read the information on empowerment: empowerment | internal/external  | limits | fail

   Employees are the source of a firm's competitive advantage, because only those involved in a process can improve it. That capability is derived from extensive 'residence' in the workplace and from the repetitive performance of numerous cycles of processing in that workplace (Juran, 1988: 30). To take advantage of this accumulated knowledge, workers' creativity and imagination should be unlocked. Employees should be given both the ability to control what they do and the authority to implement improvement. In other words, responsibility should be decentralized downward. Managers, therefore, must fully involve their employees in the TQM process and maintain continuous education and training of the work force.

   As mentioned in point 2, the "focus-on-people" aspect is highly dependent on the values and vision of the organization, which must be articulated by the company leaders. Unless the corporate culture supports the TQM principles, their benefits will likely not be realized.

4. Reduce functional divisions and emotional pitfalls that set barriers to synergies. Management must break down barriers between departments, build teamwork, and drive fear out of the workplace (cartoon). The reduction in functional divisions by combining responsibility into a team motivates employees to achieve improvements in performance, and reduces the need for supervisory staff. Consequently, new arrangements for the "horizontal" coordination of improvement are required. Note, that these arrangements include suppliers. If management wants to motivate its suppliers to improve continuously their products' quality, management must perceive suppliers as an extension of its own business and integrate them into TQM by forming strategic alliances. This is one of the three occasions where the external environment is mentioned. The two others are when TQM experts talk about customers who, of course, should be the reason for a firm's existence. And, when Deming emphasizes that a system cannot understand itself. Therefore, quality transformation requires guidance from outsiders. The best efforts and hard work of organizational members do not provide an outside view of the organization [The New Economics, 2nd ed.: 54, 92, 101).
   
   

   ORGANIZATIONS LEARN THROUGH PEOPLE, BUT NOT EVERY INDIVIDUAL LEARNING TRANSLATES INTO ORGANIZATION LEARNING

   
    
5. Abolish individual-based merit systems. Deming calls for totally scrapping individual performance appraisal systems, particularly those that are based on management by objectives (MBO) or that encourage competition within the organization. Such competition militates against teamwork, the diffusion of knowledge, and collective responsibility. Being oriented toward outcomes, usually, the objectives set have no direct bearing on the process and serves to obscure employees' understanding of the job (they rush to meet a quota/goal rather than quality). MBO, thus, enhances employee performance within an existing system. The system itself is left unchanged.
   
   In addition, MBO may set a "ceiling of mediocrity."  Employees may calibrate their performance to reach a set objective, and then do little or nothing to surpass it.
   

   In Out of the Crisis, Deming (1986: 102) claims that management by objectives is management by fear the effect of which is devastating for it nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, and leads to rivalry and politics. It leaves people bitter and crushed, some even depressed, unfit for work for weeks after receipt of rating, unable to comprehend why they are inferior. It is unfair, as it ascribes to the people in a group differences that may be caused by the system (management) that they work in.  Put differently, in a stable system (see point 7), variation in performance is mostly due to chance (the system) rather than individual effort and ingenuity.

6. The producer-user relationship is continuous rather than episodic. For any given enterprise, there are two sets of customers - external and internal. The external customer is the end user of a product or service. This is an occasion where TQM experts become aware of the external environment.

   The internal customer is the person or work unit that receives the product or the service of another within the same company. The notion of internal customers lends relevance to each employee's job and is absolutely critical to a quality transformation. "Internal customers," unlike employees, are not taken for granted. They should be won over into a long-term collaborative relationship with a supplier. Importantly, the needs of customers, especially internal customers, go beyond products and processes. They include needs for job security, self-respect, respect of others, maintaining habits, and other physical and psychological needs.

7. View Chart  
   Knowledge of statistical process control is essential to assure quality. The improvement process must be based on hard data rather than on judgment or gut feeling. The job of any person or department should be viewed as a collection of processes. Each process could be measured. The goal is to reduce performance variation, thereby achieving statistical control. Statistical control is a state of random variation, stable in the sense that the limits of variation are predictable. Once the system has been stabilized special causes of variation, those individuals who are out of statistical control, can be dealt with. Management is expected to assist low performers and recognize and learn from high performers. Removal of special causes of variation, however, is not improvement of the process. Rather, it is the way to achieve statistical control.  Once statistical control has been established, serious work to improve quality, that is investigating and removing common causes of variation attributable to the system (i.e., management), can commence.

   Deming (1986: 318-19) talks about two kinds of mistakes:

   1. Ascribe a variation or a mistake to a special cause when in fact the cause belongs to the system (common causes). Overadjustment is a common example of this mistake.

   2. Ascribe a variation or a mistake to the system (common causes) when in fact the cause is special. Never doing anything to try to find a special cause is a common example of this mistake.

   Uncontrolled variation leads to low productivity, poor quality, and increased need for technology to obtain high rates of production. If management is to control production variation, there is no escape from learning how to use statistics. Furthermore, if the cooperation of workers is sought, they too must learn the language of statistics. Management must understand the differences between tampering with a stable system and system improvement.

   Remember, management should not take the system as given, trying to make the most out of it as it is. Rather, managers should make every effort to improve continuously the system with the resources at hand.

   To sum, TQM emphasizes continuous improvement through the development of new managerial philosophy and practices that should permeate every aspect of a product's life cycle. As such, quality is unlikely to improve unless the full effort toward quality is internally consistent. If management, therefore, tries to implement the more readily available parts of TQM practices, such as quality circles or any of the multiple statistical process control tools for isolated groups of employees, it may end with two contradictory systems of communication and human resources management that will leave managers and employees alike confused and frustrated.

REFERENCES

Deming, W. Edwards. 1994 (2nd ed.). The New Economics: For Industry, Government, Education. MIT, Center for Advanced Educational Services. 

Deming, W. Edwards. 1986. Out of The Crisis. MIT, Center for Advanced Educational Services.

Ishikawa, Kaoru. 1985. What Is Total Quality Control?  Prentice-Hall.

Juran, J.M. 1988. Juran on Planning for Quality. The Free Press.