End of the Road for TQM

CORNERSTONES OF QUALITY

y 1990, economic conditions in the United States were playing havoc with the TQM movement.

Facing severe competitive pressures and a recession, American manufacturers had begun massive downsizing efforts. Plant closings and widespread layoffs seemed inconsistent with the TQM philosophy, which had promised workers job security in exchange for being trained in quality techniques and participating in quality improvement teams.

The business pages of major newspapers ridiculed each major layoff or corporate failure by a TQM champion-such as the bankruptcy of one Baldrige Award winning firm. The Washington Post ran an article called "Totaled Quality Management" on the front page of its Sunday business section, complete with a cartoon showing how consultants were the primary beneficiaries of TQM.

Robert Cole, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley considered the premature demise of TQM in The Death and Life of the American Quality Movement. He argued that while support for TQM initiatives was fading, the quality movement was proving to be "remarkably durable, sinking deep roots in many companies."

Gradually, TQM, the consulting program and label, gave way to a more patient, fundamental approach called, simply, quality management. The reformed version of quality would discard many of the fatal flaws of TQM that Cole had identified: "the bellowing of top management about quality without any follow-through; wholesale training of employees without immediate action; unrealistically high expectations for quick results; [and] the bureaucratization of quality efforts."

The new version of quality would be driven not by consultants and vendors, but managers, employees, and unions who recognized that employee participation was inextricably linked to quality goals and objectives.

Re-Enter Quality Management

Quality management in the public sector got help from an unexpected source in the early 1990s. Companies in the American service industry launched a major effort to embrace quality improvement efforts, even though they had no direct Japanese model to draw on.

The telecommunications, banking, insurance and health care organizations who started such efforts all had counterparts in the public sector at federal, state and local levels, and they encouraged benchmarking and sharing of best practices with government executives. Many corporations helped fund studies on quality practices among state and local governments

The General Accounting Office also contributed with a study of quality in government in 1992. GAO concluded that quality had been introduced into the majority of federal agencies (more than 77 percent of agencies responding) but that direct workforce participation lagged far behind (only 17 percent of the workforce was directly involved in quality activities).

In 1993, Bill Clinton came into the presidency with an enviable quality management background. As governor of Arkansas, he was the first elected state leader to launch a major TQM initiative. Most Arkansas agencies had quality improvement teams and a statewide quality council to lead and provide training support and resources.

In the Clinton administration, responsibility for management change was quickly delegated to Vice President Al Gore in the form of a sweeping internal executive review called the National Performance Review.

The NPR's blueprint was David Osborne and Ted Gaebler's book Reinventing Government (Addison Wesley, 1992), which included TQM among its various prescriptions for entrepreneurial, customer-focused government. When the September 1993 report of the NPR was issued, TQM was not a primary reference point, but the report's second chapter-"Putting Customers First"-was quality management 101. Agencies dealing with public would identify their customers, set quality standards for service, survey their customers, and act to make government services "equal to the best in business." Executive Order 12862, issued after the report, turned all of these goals into agency requirements.

This was a major victory for quality management, in everything but name. Of course, customer service improvement would have to compete with the more than 200 other recommendations of the NPR, but at least it was a prime directive.

Later, as the NPR got bogged down in controversies with Congress' successor over legislation to implement budget, procurement and civil service reforms, and mired in controversy over making the reduction of more than 250,000 jobs as its primary goal, the distance between the NPR and TQM proved a useful buffer.

The BPR Challenge

Ironically, the quality movement got a boost in the 1990s from its biggest enemy-the business process reengineering (BPR) movement. This "next revolution" in business thinking was launched by a 1990 article in the Harvard Business Review by Michael Hammer called "Reengineer Work: Don't Automate-Obliterate" followed up by a bestselling book, Reengineering the Corporation, co-authored with James Champy.

The premise was simple enough: The quality movement's continuous improvement style was insufficiently radical and too slow. Organizations should discard work processes and completely redesign them, the reengineers argued.

The immediate result of most of this was a reengineering frenzy that launched a wave of corporate downsizing, this time hitting much of the service sector. On the sidelines, quality consultants squared off against reengineering consultants in a war of jargon. About the only real clear winner was Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dilbert, who now had enough material for a decade of cartoons lampooning American management techniques.

The BPR movement has basically fizzled. The first studies of BPR results showed 50 percent to 70 percent failure rates. Blame for corporate downsizing fell, fairly or unfairly, on the reengineers. Now, the same headlines that taunted TQM have been recycled for BPR, proclaiming it "passé." Its gurus have given interviews explaining how reengineering was misused, what went wrong, and why organizations were incapable of implementing radical redesigns and achieving promised gains.

But the unexpectedly quick failure of BPR has returned some semblance of sanity to American change management. For one thing, the war between the quality and BPR consultants is mostly over. Organizations now recognize, as Evelyn Wilk of Xerox puts it, that quality and continuous improvement is one component of how an organization manages what it does and process reengineering or radical redesign is another. In a sense, the inability of BPR to deliver what it promised has put new attention on the implementation aspect of change. This brings organizations right back to square one: quality management.