Blurred Vision: Do Our Business Leaders See What Quality is All About?

Presenting a clear picture of quality and cost of quality to business leaders continues to be a challenge. Quality methods and approaches have evolved over the years, but many business leaders still do not associate quality with business improvement initiatives. Quality professionals must address eight myths of quality to change this sentiment.

Many quality professionals have noticed that business leaders still consider quality and business improvement to be separate topics. While this isn’t the case everywhere, it appears to have become common in recent years.

Certainly, this is not what quality professionals have been trying to advance over the years. Has the push to improve the bottom line resulted in a deep divide between improvement and quality? Has the drive by quality professionals to save money has led to missing the real quality objective—better and better products and services? Why does the disconnect among costs, quality and business persist? What blocks business leaders from understanding the connection? What can be done to clear up eight perpetual myths of quality?

There are few aspects of being a quality practitioner more frustrating than not being involved in a business improvement activity. In other words, being tasked to simply make something work rather than actually trying to improve a system. For quality personnel, it doesn’t seem right if business improvement efforts are not related to the quality assurance department.

Quality professionals know that quality and improvement are synonymous. They draw from a rich quality body of knowledge, which contains the most complete and comprehensive set of tools and techniques for business and organization improvement. But why don’t many business leaders see this connection?

A history lesson

Quality was always about control. For many companies, quality started as simply using tools and techniques to prevent bad work from reaching the customer. A few enlightened organizations took the next step to eliminate variation and causes of non-conformance. Producing the majority of products or services to customers’ specifications was the rule most firms followed. Doing more than this was considered a waste of time and money.

Today, fewer firms do just this minimum, but it’s still not unheard of. This approach leads to a reliance on costly inspection to find and sort the defects. These practices continued through World War II and after. For some industries, inspection is still the mainstay of quality.

In the 1970s, quality-minded Japanese manufacturers became strong competitors of U.S. automakers. Influences of Deming, Juran and Phil Crosby led a change in quality awareness, including total quality management (TQM), in which quality was deemed everybody’s job.

Quality professionals were teaching the tools, and they expected quality in business and in products would result. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. But the idea has lasted that quality issues are not just manufacturing issues.

TQM evolved into more advanced improvement programs such as Six Sigma and Lean. Many felt Six Sigma became successful because the operations division usually ran the program and deliberately excluded the quality staff. Quality professionals, too, often did not speak the language of leadership and lacked soft skills. Sometimes they were excluded from the discussion altogether.

ISO 9001 and other standards were developed to ensure companies complied with basic quality processes, which in theory would reduce risk for customers and become a springboard for improvement. But the improvement aspect of ISO 9001 has been limited, and many firms have elected to stick to a minimum level of compliance.

Cost of quality, or the cost of poor quality, has been an underpinning concept in quality for more than 50 years. Still, the majority of midsize manufacturing firms do not apply this metric to plan and improve their business. Six Sigma does incorporate cost of quality, as each project must include a return on investment (ROI) calculation. While a project-by-project measurement approach does not provide the value of a global or comprehensive cost of quality metric, improvement projects are well served when the financial value of the projects are measured.

The world of quality today

Today there is immense diversity in quality thinking. Many approaches have been developed, hundreds of books written and countless ideas blended.

Quality has spread to cultures outside the United States and Japan, too. ISO 9001 has taken hold across Europe and the world. National quality awards have provided road-maps to organizational excellence in many countries, as well.

Ideas generated before and during World War II are now resurfacing to fit the new world of business, fueled by the speed of the internet. As Thomas L. Friedman has said, the world is flat. Knowledge flows faster than capital, and information spreads with amazing speed.

The landscape is rich with opportunity for business improvement. With quality concepts seemingly more accessible than ever before, why are quality professionals not reaching leaders with a clear message about quality?

Many business leaders are introduced to quality through a master’s level education. Many master’s level programs might have one class in quality principles taught by a generalist, not necessarily by a subject matter expert. Possibly, too much information about quality is presented to future business leaders in a poorly organized form.

How has our history and our educational system created a gap between quality and improvement? Established ideas are what get taught, but many established ideas are like myths. Consider some of the following quality myths and the actuality of each one, and whether there are any solutions to be found here.

1. Quality is strictly about product or service issues. The focus of quality is on the product or service’s features, not the process it takes to build and deliver that product or service.

This myth, reinforced by constant marketing, leads us to equate higher cost with better quality. The definitions of quality create a divergence in how quality and cost are viewed, a divergence that spreads across society and lingers in the boardroom.

The actuality: Lasting quality lies in the people and the process. Products and services are ephemeral, replaced frequently by new ones. Having a high quality process run by skilled people makes high quality products and services possible, never the other way around.

2. Cost, quality and schedule form an iron triangle. If you improve one, you make the others worse. If you believe higher quality means higher cost, you will believe that these three metrics operate against one another.

The actuality: Organizations that perform quality well know schedule adherence and costs improve if process quality improves, but the reverse is not true. If process quality improves, not only does product quality improve, but so do cost and schedule. Getting it done on time may actually hurt costs, or hurt outgoing quality.

3. Quality is about controlling risk. If your quality budget is only about inspections and audits, this is true. This view occurs if you believe quality tools do not play a large role in business improvement. All managers have a goal to reduce risk, and quality is everyone’s job. So it would follow that risk and quality become intertwined.

The actuality: Quality and risk are linked, but it is not a simple equation. Breakthroughs in process quality often occur after some risk is undertaken, and after innovation is applied.

The three areas of quality cost are prevention, appraisal and failure. If you begin with risk mitigation, then you will view this as a zero sum game. For example, more expenditure for quality means less for operation improvement. If you see quality as the doorway to improvement, then higher expenditures for prevention activities will show a ROI through reduced appraisal and failure costs. My experience in quality cost shows this return can be as high as 8 to 1: $8 of reduced failure and appraisal for each $1 of added prevention.

4. Six Sigma and lean are great tools. Tools get hyped: They’re handy and make it seem simple to fix things. For example, Six Sigma is ‘special’ because it connects improvement to financial measures.

The actuality: Six Sigma leverages quality engineering tools, along with project management techniques in an organized command and control structure, and Six Sigma delegates tasks to people with differing levels of skill or training. There is really nothing that new about Lean either. Just as Six Sigma puts standardized statistical tools in the hands of the masses, Lean puts industrial engineering tools in the hands of those close to the work. There is really nothing new here except the means of application.

The efforts to start Lean and Six Sigma are prevention costs. The ROIs come from reduced appraisal and failure costs. The actual tools used by Six Sigma and lean practitioners are the same as the tools used by a skilled quality assurance staff. The real questions are what is your investment and what are your skills?

5. Choosing a quality approach is a task for senior leaders. Senior leaders take information about the organization and its environment to create a vision and promote that vision throughout the organization. The employees believe that the responsibility of choosing and promoting the quality approach lies with senior leaders, and nothing will get done until these leaders make the correct decision.

The actuality: Often missing at all levels is the knowledge of how to choose a quality approach. You need to understand what is required by each quality approach and what your organization lacks or has established before you choose an approach. Because there is no clear standard in quality education for leaders, how can we expect that senior leaders will be able to choose wisely? What our leaders need is good information, and skilled and trusted subordinates are the best source for reliable information.

Narrowly focused consultants can harm things. If you contact ISO 9001 consultants, they will see everything through ISO 9001 lenses. Baldrige consultants will promote their view. This can lead to more confusion for business leaders. It takes a well-grounded generalist guide who can help your teams learn how to work together well.

6. No preparation is required to run an improvement program except willpower. If employees know their jobs, they will know how to improve their work. Good ideas will occur and be implemented, and improvement will happen through trial and error approaches. Thomas Edison used trial and error and he was successful.

The actuality: Some organizations’ personnel are lacking in fundamental requirements (both in technical and people skills) to successfully implement an improvement approach. While your business may succeed even if these skills are lacking, your success will be enhanced and the probability of success will be increased if you have some fundamental underpinnings in place when you start.

Truly world-class organizations need years to get to the top. An “overnight success” is really an eight to 10-year process. For examples, just read Jim Collins’ Good to Great or look at Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award winners.

What are these companies doing in the early stages? Usually a lot of learning and planning, along with experimentation. While willpower is the fuel, the engine must be attached to a solid foundation of knowledge.

7. Cost of quality programs are old school. Quality cost approaches have little bearing on today’s organizations. There is no widespread outside requirement to measure quality costs. Quality cost measures run counter to the cost accounting approach to always look at the totality of all costs. Newer improvement approaches such as Six Sigma have supplanted quality cost.

The actuality: The old measure called cost of quality should be revived. The name is poor, however. We need to call it by a name that makes sense today. “Finance for improvement” might be more appropriate, as we are using financial language to measure the overall business improvement results.

This is not a change to established methods of measuring quality costs, but a change in talking about it. Six Sigma does look at quality costs, but it is project driven and the savings are not aggregated. A piecemeal approach results in spotty improvement. Too often, the global cost of running Six Sigma is not integrated with the entire quality program. This happens when operations personnel run the Six Sigma program and the quality staff runs the control program. Lean approaches frequently avoid cost metrics altogether.

The term cost of quality is well understood by quality professionals, but is confusing to many business leaders. If we are trying to reach new business leaders, we need to use their language.

8. Quality is a discipline learned on the job, not in a classroom. To be a quality manager, you only need to know your operation’s products. Since quality derives from the product and not the process, quality management skills must not be transferable from one organization to another. Quality approaches have a minor place in academic programs, and teaching quality can be done with a few historical references to Deming and other gurus.

The actuality: The weakness in quality teaching in master’s level programs leaves organizations at the mercy of internal tribal knowledge. There are virtually no degrees in quality today. There are some classes for undergraduates, but there needs to be a better curriculum for higher level education than a handful of historical references. This education should be connected to the real world and linked to other portions of the curriculum and the students’ work environment.

These gaps in higher education are felt as organizations try to reach for excellence. Because new graduates are rarely put in excellence-driven situations, there is no need for these graduates to master the quality body of knowledge. It is only after graduation and accumulated work experience that the need for these tools is felt.

The choice to learn about and apply the quality knowledge occurs after a problem exists. With an eight to 10-year development curve to move a business toward excellence, it is no surprise that only a few visionary organizations start, learn, implement and succeed in driving real excellence into their work processes. 

Start the dialogue

Recognizing myths and countering them with active dialogue is one way to clear the haze that clouds quality processes and excellence thinking. Not every improvement needs to start at the top. We can all make a difference in our own sphere of influence.

If you hear these myths being perpetuated or promoted, or if you see improvement actions blunted by people misguided by these myths, bust the myths and enable improvement. Remember, many people you encounter do not understand the background of quality and might be misdirected by some of these myths. Your knowledge is your best lever for change.