Is your company serious about improving quality?

• Author: Galvin, Robert W.
• Position: Special Global Report

I was at a conference recently where several presenters proposed that in the next 100 years we will need to increase the gross national product of the world by 30 times. Well, that's as good a number as any, I guess (at least it shows they put some thought into it), but can you imagine what it means to Corporate America? Thirty times more beryllium, 30 times more copper, 30 times more coal. How are we going to orchestrate such a change?

Motorola is presently a $10-billion corporation. Applying the 30-times philosophy to our company means that, given a growth rate of 15 percent a year, in just 25 years we could be doing $320 billion of business annually. I don't think that's so farfetched. With new technologies and other creative ways of working being discovered every day, some gigantic changes in growth are achievable.

And what will we be doing with our $320 billion in 25 years? We will be investing around the world, helping to lead the U.S.'s global growth. And the key to accomplishing this, I believe, is concentrating on quality.

Motorola's quality push:

If we make a corporate commitment to raising our expectation levels for quality-not just a few changes here and there, but in orders of magnitude-in as few as three years we will see a difference.

First, we will reduce waste. Then our resources can be husbanded and used more practically.

We will speed up our production, which means we can save time. At Motorola, we've realized that we can change our cycle times by huge amounts. Not just 5 or 10 percent. In fact, we hardly take a serious interest in making a change that results in less than a 50-percent improvement. For instance, we can take an order at 9:00 a.m. for one of our pagers and have the product at the shipping dock an hour and 40 minutes later. Before we installed our improved electronics and production systems, it took 44 days.

I admit that not every process is going to change quite that much, but when Motorola decided to reach for total, perfect quality, all of these improvements became wealth-creating phenomena. And this wealth turns into seed and savings for investment globally. U.S. leverage worldwide is absolutely essential to this.

One strategy that promotes this attitude is vying for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The Baldrige Award, established by Congress and signed into law by the President in 1987, rewards companies for achieving high standards of quality. Motorola earned the first Baldrige Award ever...