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In this issue of Spotlight, Dr Armand Feigenbaum talks to editor Sarah Powell about the concept of total quality control, the need for continuous improvement, the crucial importance of customer-- orientation, and the main messages of his two forthcoming books, The Power of Management Capital and Total Quality Control, 4th edition.
Spotlight: How has your concept of total quality control developed since it was introduced in the 1950s?
Armand Feigenbaum: A good question. As you know, when I originated total quality control, and later total quality management, the fundamental theme was that improvements in quality lead to improvements in everything else in the organization; hence quality is a way of managing.
What we are doing with total quality control in the General Systems Company at present, and the focus of the upcoming new edition of my total quality book, is what we call Total Quality 2000. The basic message of this is that quality today has become a central plank of business success, because a company's income comes not from Wall Street but from its customers, from satisfying its customers.
Quality is neither a department, nor a technique nor a philosophy. It is a fundamental way of managing. Central to this is the recognition that, without quality, your customers, whether industrial or consumer, are simply not going to buy from you. Acceptance of this by business depends on the company and its leadership and on the business cycle. If you look at companies such as General Electric, Wal-Mart or Union Pacific, you will see that quality has been an indelible characteristic of their leadership from the beginning. Some other firms, however, have demonstrated a dangerous tendency to confuse a strong economy with good quality, which is quite different. Such confusion is one of the factors contributing to a remarkably rapid sales downturn suffered by some companies. These companies have quite simply failed to understand the quality argument.
When times are hard, it is easy to emphasize the importance of a total customer focus because "the barbarian is at the gates", sales are slack and so on. But in good times some businesses can just as easily lose their customer focus. Here we can differentiate between leading companies which demonstrate consistent quality and those with a...