There’s little question that mainstreaming quality — working it into strategic organization operations — is the best way to make it pay off. Typically, the “boutique” approach, setting up a “quality department” to create small scale successes that become groundwork for somehow influencing the planning processes and operations of the organization, is what is used. Tom Peters says that this approach virtually guarantees that quality will get stalled as “internal programs run by technocrats.” It must become “the religion, organizing logic, and culture of the firm.”

Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School states:

The key to merging quality planning with operational and strategic planning is better information—about customers and about the rest of its industry. Quality has been made a peripheral issue for too long. There is no longer the luxury of spending years on a quality learning curve. The transition must be brought down from several years to between now and the next planning cycle. There is no choice but to actually be talking in quality terms and emphasizing the customer as plans are developed.

How to tie TQM into strategic planning

1. Don’t get bogged down on internally focused training or consciousness raising. Focus on leadership. Some knowledge gaps will have to be filled in, but a good CEO can do an 80% job of filling that gap in an afternoon.
2. What are your present quality efforts costing you? Include warranties, repairs, problem solving, prevention, measurement, and monitoring. What is your current return on this investment?
3. What gets customers? Keeps them? Makes them go away?
   • Customer data must be collected and used as part of planning. It goes far beyond the ubiquitous “customer surveys,” which typically lack the focus and precision needed to determine what the data actually means.
   • Get actionable information that lets you predict what customers will do if you make some kind of change—not how happy they are on a “1 to 5 scale” with generic customer service attributes.
   • Feed data back on two or three significant factors such as shorter cycle times, lower costs, customer retention as well as on internal measurements, such as error rates or rework reduction (Improvements of 50% or higher are not unusual).
   • Abandon programs that don’t have much impact and watch your competition closely.

Summary
Current management practices still clingingly hold onto their paradigms and try to adapt the latest philosophy to existing archaic frameworks in the manner of the “tail wagging the dog.” Quality zealots do not help by their well meaning, but misguided and expensive training programs with assurances to management, “But it will take time! You must be patient!” If anything, the pendulum may have even swung too far in the opposite direction with the “immediate results” philosophy espoused by Six Sigma. The accelerated need for change and more sophisticated customers are going to force organizations to face, finally, the human behavioral issues that even the best training on “processes, tools, and good information” still blindly ignore.