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Keith Grint: Templeton College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
"
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning
(Stevie Smith, Not Waving but Drowning)"
Introduction
In Stevie Smith's lines the subject is mistakenly assumed to be happily waving from offshore but he is in fact unhappily drowning; the image that the viewer has is one of frenetic energy, a celebration of progress and skill in a difficult technique. But the image that the subject is trying to give, while certainly energetic, is frantic rather than frenetic, a funeral wake not a funny wave. The technique looks the same but the consequence is starkly different. This paper suggests that the progress made towards the acquisition of quality through TQM, ISO 9000, BPR, BSCs (balanced score cards) and all the other related TLAs (three letter acronyms) and techniques is in danger of consuming itself through a process in which the goal is displaced by the means: quality by measurement. This form of development, defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, failure constructed from precisely those features that generated success in the first place, has a long and distinguished career whose theoretical origins we can trace at least as far back as Hegel.
I have no doubt that great progress has been made towards quality improvement through TQM and ISO 9000; however, I am struck by the warning embodied in Stevie Smith's lines. What follows is divided into two sections. The first focuses on the waves, not waves of appreciation - much of this activity has already gone on and will continue afterwards - but on waves of managerial fashion (Grint, 1997). Here I consider various arguments for the growth of the quality movement, some of which carry their own warnings on the likely future. In the second part I focus on the drownings. Here I want to explain where some of the dangers to the quality movement lurk.
Waves of change by numbers
I am sure most readers are familiar with Pascale's (1990, p. 20) reconstruction of managerial changes since World War II. In this diagram he lists all the major developments that have swept over management like waves crashing on to...