You exclude Q from the core at the first order at your own peril.
You have never been on the ground floor of a company, or a company facing massive external or internal change where it must question its core competence and place bets on the specific processes it must invest with your precious Q. Until you know exactly what model you want to scale up, you don’t know what processes to apply TQM to.
That explains why those TQM-colored glasses you’re wearing are strapped on so tight. I assume for a large company whose processes are well established and benefit from TQM based innovation.
Oh, I read your posts thoroughly; I just didn’t like your tone - and now I see why - you bring a bias to the discussion. You can’t arrogantly hold onto a bias when starting or growing a business.
TQM is a great, great tool. It is not strategic business leadership.
Nope - not at the beginning. First, you have to survive.
Statistician here. Deming’s approach to quality is only reasonable for manufacturing or other processes where you can control all the factors except the one you’re interested in. If you try to apply it in situations where you don’t have that degree of control, your conclusions are indistinguishable from nonsense. Actual quality control of more complicated things is so complicated that it’s simply not feasible to cover it in any useful detail over the course of an MBA.
Thank you.
What is Strategy? by Michael Porter
Title of the first section: Operational Effectiveness is Not Strategy
Please read this. I believe it is one of the most-reprinted articles from the Harvard Business Review and required reading in most b-school Intro to Strategy classes.
The responder above missed something:
Also, I do not think anything else I have written can be taken
to imply that TQM is useful in all business applications, nor that
the terms Quality, Quality Assurance and Quality control are
synonymous with TQM.
I will say that Deming-Japanese manufacturing model was
by far the greatest success story in the world of the last 50
years, and there is no doubt that TQM was the heart, soul
and core of the model.
Your sneering attitude toward “my precious Q” makes me apprehensive
about your chances of ever successfully implementing it.
And FYI the company I worked for emphasized Q day one, about four
years before I walked through the door. QA/QC was always there.
Now, we were under FDA jurisdiction, so we could not afford to
implement Q with the same leisure as you are apparently used to.
Also, I do not think anything else I have written can be taken to imply
that TQM is useful in all business applications, nor that the terms Quality,
Quality Assurance and Quality control are synonymous with TQM.
Conformance with day-one attention to Q is not a form of bias, except
apparently in some MBA programs, such as the one you attended.
Q is a core component of strategic business leadership and if that is
not obvious to you then speaking of Day One, you need to start all
over from that point.
If Q is not there at the beginning then you do not survive.
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
-Sun Tzu
I’m going to agree with **WordMan **here. Certainly managed quality control eventually becomes important as a company matures. But it is not a “strategy” in and of itself.
One thing they do teach in business school is the Capability Maturity Model Integration. When companies are just starting out, they are at Level 1. Activities are chaotic and reactive and typically require heroic efforts to complete. As experience is gained, these processes become more managed and defined (Levels 2 and 3) such that the company can take on a more proactive stance. But it is not until the defined processes have been identified and created can the organization move to Levels 4 and 5 where quantitative controls can be established and performance optimized.
If the organization tries to implement TQM before it aligns it’s processes with the company’s strategy, it runs the risk of creating very high quality products no want needs or wants. Or worse, defining it’s a strategy based on the pursuit of metrics that are ultimately irrelevant or even absurd.
“Strategy and tactics are abstractions, 100% completely useless without soldiers
who have high-quality weapons.” -colonial
Sad, just sad.
It is a sine qua non component of business strategy, just as a good swords
and spears were to the strategy and tactics of the venerable Sun Tzu.
Sad, just sad.
Has there been a US manufacturing start-up worth a billion a year industry-wide
outside IS hardware in the last 50 years? If not, it is easy to see why- our MBA
programs, which should be a jewel in the crown on US industry, hold Q in contempt.
Sad.
**colonial **- how many businesses have you started? Your attempt at dismissiveness is fascinating but has no relevance in the real world. Go tilt at windmills.
[QUOTE=msmith]
If the organization tries to implement TQM before it aligns it’s processes with the company’s strategy, it runs the risk of creating very high quality products no want needs or wants. Or worse, defining it’s a strategy based on the pursuit of metrics that are ultimately irrelevant or even absurd.
[/QUOTE]
Yes.
That concept actually has to be explained? :eek:
WorldMan
I have not started any businesses, and I do not need to to provide evidence
for the truth of my side of the argument.
The company I worked for went from nothing in 1980 to about $750 million
sales per year at the time I left in 2003, with profit margins of 65% minimum
per product line.
How about you?
I had hoped that by now our industrial problems might be finding their solutions
in the form of an industrial generalship dedicated to Quality as a core theory and practice.
Maybe they are, but if so you and people like you are not part of that solution,
even if your contributions are not wholly without value.
You haven’t indicated whether you had anything to do with deciding what your company’s business model was. So maybe you didnt, but you had something to do with making sure it was operationally excellent? Cool; good for you.
re: financial analysis
books always assume what you read in balance sheet and income statements are correct. we in banking spend thousands of bucks validating the contents of a borrower’s financial statements. then they became too lazy to analyze and validate F/S’ and switched to quantitative scoring. that’s when you got the sub-prime crisis.
Which further underscores your complete lack of understanding of the difference between strategy and operational efficiency.
TQM and Sig Sigma have been tried in professional services, often with disasterous results. Which is one of the reason they are often mocked and ridiculed. Professional services such as law, accounting, finance, technology and consulting don’t lend themselves well to formal quality control methodologies. They require too much creative thought, there are too many variables and their end products are often too abstract to quantify in the same way you would measure widget production. Frequently it is far more important for these sort of companies to provide an 80% solution on time than a 100% solution late.
But I would agree with you that a lot of companies are horribly run because their quality is for shit. My first job out of business school was in the Performance Improvement managemetn consulting group in one of the Big-4 accounting firms. I was just an associate so I didn’t really know anything. But it struck me as odd that there didn’t seem to be any formal process or framework for actually measuring a companies performance. Mostly it seemed to consist of mapping out a lot of processes and putting together bullshit Powerpoint decks with the ultimate goal of convincing the client to purchase expense Lawson and JD Edwards ERP implementations.
But thank you for hijacking this thread with your TQM evangelism bullshit.
Yeah, how did we get from what turned out to be “are case studies helpful outside business school?” to this?
To bring it full circle, I would also agree that most companies can do a better job of truly being TQM in their operations. I also agree that it would be smart to include exposure to it within business schools - it is a key business tool alongside the others mentioned.
The company I work for was really pushing things like Lean Six Sigma and Kanban when I joined, though it depended on the department. While the Kanban-style cards are actually helpful for, say, keeping the solvents in stock, I’ve yet to figure out what Six Sigma is supposed to do in a research laboratory. In GMP and at the plant, sure, especially when you’re not making a one-off. But not when we’re doing research and not production. And I’d think having big signs on the walls saying things like DMAIC would be rather insulting to a scientist. At least I find it obvious at best and patronizing at worst.
But hey, maybe that’s why I’m just a bench chemist and not one of the people in upper management losing the company millions of dollars and getting bonuses for it. Apparently actually understanding what your company actually does isn’t something they teach at business schools either, or Pharma wouldn’t have people like Jeff Kindler (I realize he’s no longer at Pfizer) running the companies.
A common critique of business school is that it doesn’t really provide real practical skills (other than perhaps how to be an analyst at an I-bank) and that much of the teaching is too high-level and strategic.
One of the difficulties of management in general is guageing how much into the weeds you need to get and when you should stay at 40,000 feet.
It might be an NYC thing, but I also feel that an MBA doesn’t really teach you to be a “manager”. It’s basically a pipeline for getting into Wall Street as a trader, I-banking analyst or hedge fund manager.
At the risk of derailing the thread (and please tell me to knock it off if I am), but it seems to me as a guy outside looking in that business school must teach about widgets. That you can treat everything the same way, no matter what your business actually is. Also that somehow making up complicated financial instruments is a better use of time and money than actually making something that either exists in the real world or doesn’t physically exist but is actually useful and does something (e.g., software.)
Sorry, I’ve been pissed off about this for years now and the skating that Wall Street seems to be getting away with doesn’t help.
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.
I think we’re seeing the exact opposite of that here - the only person trying to shoehorn every aspect of a business under one concept is colonial, and the MBAs posting are trying to explain why that’s not a great approach.
From what I understand, business school provides a variety of different tools, and the case studies are intended to demonstrate how those tools can (and can’t) be applied to a range of situations. You can certainly specialize in one of those tools and make a good career out of that specialization, but I don’t think any reasonable person claims that his/her specialization is the be-all end-all of management methods.