To achieve quality, you must think quality.

• Author: Johnson, H. Thomas
• Position: Viewpoint

Chances are you've seen stories in the business press recently suggesting that quality programs in American business are failing. These stories usually emphasize that many total quality management (TQM) programs have failed to produce significant financial results despite substantial investments in employee training and process improvement efforts. Most dramatic, perhaps, are stories of Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners that have experienced financial setbacks, executed layoffs and even suffered bankruptcy.

The conclusion many people draw from these stories is that quality, after all, is just another management fad that now has run its course.

I disagree. In fact, I believe that most American businesses have not really started on the road to quality. Most companies that claim to be on the path to quality simply have extended old bottom-line-focused ways of doing business under new names.

The results of quality initiatives are so often disappointing because few companies have achieved the transformation in thinking that must occur if American business is to rise "out of the crisis," to use the title of Dr. W. Edwards Deming's best-selling book. Most companies that espouse TQM have not come to terms yet with the new ways of thinking and new ways of doing business frequently described as a "paradigm shift." They hold on to old ways of thinking and try to build a new world in the present by extrapolating from the past. Seldom do these so-called TQM companies try to create the present as the past condition of the future.

But that is exactly what it takes to adopt a new management paradigm. When paradigms shift, you must build backwards from a vision of what you intend to be, not build forward from the bedrock of the status quo. TQM initiatives too often pile new icing on top of a stale cake. They do not begin, as they must, with a new cake made from a new recipe.

What is this new recipe? It is a new vision of what business is and why it does what it does.

In the management paradigm of the past 40 years, business exists primarily to grow return on investment in order to maximize shareholder wealth; success hinges on managing bottom-line results, primarily by controlling consumption of resource inputs and the profit-mix of product outputs. In the new paradigm, however, business exists primarily to create fulfilling jobs in learning organizations that continually enhance people's capacities to profitably exceed customers' expectations. Business success in the new paradigm does not hinge on controlling resource consumption and product mix; instead, it requires companies to build resource capabilities and customer satisfaction -- in other words, to build people.

Contemporary business literature and discussions I have had with scores of executives in dozens of companies around the world convince me there is a lack of understanding in most companies' efforts...