Question: It is said that quality never goes out style but there is a faddish element to many of the quality concepts and initiatives. What in your judgment are the enduring aspects of quality management?

Townsend:

First of all this fad thing is very real. We can’t even call it quality much anymore. We use the word quality but we call it continual improvement or we call it performance excellence. Why? It’s simple! If you introduce the idea of quality to most American executive nowadays, they respond, “Ah, yes! Quality. Uh, we did that, uh, ’97, I think. What’s hot now?” The only people in corporate America who use the word quality without hesitation are in marketing. Because the American consumer, when we take our business hat off and put our consumer hat off, we still respond to quality. We still look for it. We still want it. We still demand it. So you still see the word in advertising, but you never see it in the board rooms anymore, which speaks to the fad piece of this thing. Now it’s the enduring aspects. That’s where the real brilliance and idea of the Baldridge criteria comes in.

The ISA’s Malcolm Baldridge award. Dr. Kurt Reimann, who was the initial director of the effort beginning in 1987, and of course it’s been refined on a continuous basis ever since. It managed to boil down business functions to the true essentials and on top of that making it even better is Kurt and his team who were bright enough to define “the what” rather than “the how.” They said what had to happen and asked you how you got there. That is the true brilliance of it. So if all kinds of companies, with the Baldridge, it’s totally different, but they get to the point of doing the right things, and that’s what counts after all. Imagine if public education were as well defined and well assessed. Imagine if the central effort of education were confined to defining that the children should be able to read, write, reason (which includes math), and do research. And then their focus on the matters in the education industry was just to measure those outcomes rather than all their time chasing fads and dictating details. I daresay we’d hear a lot less discouraging reports about education in this country. That’s this quality thing is so very real. The thing I haven’t mentioned, and shame on me, is that we do all this stuff, incidentally, because quality makes money. It also makes for customers who are loyal. It makes for employees who are loyal. And, by the way, it’s the ethical thing to do. But quality, you do it because it makes money. It’s not a fad. It’s the strongest system of money making we’ve come up with.