Total Quality Is...

The Ten Tenets of Quality

Technical capability and production efficiency, while necessary, are no longer the principal competitive determinants sufficent for success. What differentiates the successful from the unsuccessful organization, today, is superior "world-class" systems of work processes that men and women throughout the organization understand, believe in and are a part of. These systems of clear work processes reduce bureaucracy and cycle times, increase responsiveness and innovation, and lower costs thereby assuring product, market and organizational success. This is Total Quality Management. 
 

1. Quality is an organization-wide process
Quality is not a specialist function, a department, nor an awareness or testing program alone. It is a disciplined system of customer-connected work processes implemented throughout the organization and integrated with suppliers. High quality products are the result of high quality work processes. After all, if you do not improve the process, you cannot expect substantial improvement in results. 
2. Quality is what the customer says it is
It is not what a developer, manager or marketeer says it is. If you want to find out about your quality, ask your customer. No one can compress in a market research statistic or defect rate the extent of buyer frustration or buyer delight. 
3. Quality and cost are a sum, not a difference
They are partners, not adversaries. The quality costs of fixing failures are high compared to quality costs required to properly prevent and assure no such defects. True quality leaders are cost leaders, with 10-20% competitive cost advantages common. 
4. Quality requires both individual and teamwork zealotry
Quality is everybody's job, but it will become nobody's job without a clear infrastructure that supports both the quality work of individuals and the teamwork among individuals and departments. Too often quality improvement activities become islands without bridges. All the left hands must work effectively with all the right hands. 
5. Quality is a way of managing
Good management today means empowering the quality knowledge, skills and attitudes of everyone in the organization to recognize that making quality right makes everything else in the organization right. The belief that quality travels under some exclusive national passport, or has some unique geographical or cultural identity, is a myth. 
6. Quality and innovation are mutually dependent
Quality requires product and process innovation, and the key to successful new products is to make quality the partner of development from the beginning -- not a sweep-up-after mechanism for problems. It is essential to fully include the customer in all phases of development. Paper studies cannot do the job. 
7. Quality is an ethic
The pursuit of excellence, deep recognition that what you are doing is right, is the strongest human emotional motivator in any organization and is the basic driver in true quality leadership. Quality programs relying solely on cold metrics are never enough. 
8. Quality requires continuous improvement
Quality is a constantly upward moving target and continuous improvement is an in-line, integral component of everyone's job responsibilities -- not a separate activity. This requires more than just "better-than-last-year" internal incremental improvement. The marketplace determines what is world-class performance. 
9. Quality is the most cost-effective, least capital-intensive route to productivity
Some of the world's strongest organizations have blindsided their competition by concentrating on eliminating their hidden plant or organization; the part that exists to find and fix mistakes and the associated waste. They have done it by changing their productivity concept from the four-letter word, M-O-R-E, by adding the quality leadership four-letter word, G-O-O-D, to create the "more good quality productivity" concept. 
10. Quality is implemented with a total system connected with customers and suppliers
This is what makes quality leadership real in an organization -- the relentless application of the systematic method that makes it possible for an organization to manage its quality and associated costs. 

Dr. Feigenbaum is the originator of Total Quality Control (TQC), the management approach that has profoundly influenced the competition for domestic and international markets in the United States, Japan and throughout the industrialized world (see Total Quality Control, 40th Anniversary Edition, McGraw-Hill, 1991). He introduced the concept of "Total Quality Management " in the 1983 McGraw-Hill edition of that book. He was also the first to define "Total Quality Costs" in a 1956 Harvard Business Review article entitled, Total Quality Control. 

Dr. Feigenbaum is President and CEO of General Systems Company, Inc., a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, based international engineering firm which custom designs and implements Total Quality Management systems in major firms throughout the world. Prior to co-founding General Systems with Donald S. Feigenbaum in 1968, he was worldwide director of manufacturing operations and quality at General Electric. A more complete biography may be found in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World.