his year marks the 10th anniversary of the National Conference on Federal Quality. More than 2,000 federal managers, trainers, and consultants will come to Washington this month to listen, discuss, and assess where the federal government is on the path to continuous improvement.
In the last decade, the cornerstones of quality haven't changed. Process measurement, customer feedback, participative management and supplier cooperation remain the keys to any successful quality improvement effort in the public and private sectors.
Ten years into the quality improvement crusade, you can ask any federal manager whether he or she believes in these cornerstones of quality, and the response is invariably, "Of course." So, in a sense, quality management has become common-sense management.
Quality proponents argue that it must be more. What quality management now means is an organization's systematic efforts to transform the cornerstones of quality into an integrated framework that management and the workforce use in short-term decision making and long-term planning.
This common platform is critical. The main conclusion of a 1994 report of the Federal Quality Institute on high-performing organizations was that failure is inevitable when "quality management is seen as separate and apart from the day-to-day management of an organization." Quality must have everything to do with an organization's main line business.
This conclusion is echoed in research efforts at the Brookings Institution, which has been tracking quality and reengineering efforts in the private and public sectors. Not only must the cornerstones all be there, they must evolve over time. Each of the cornerstones will have stages of development that help identify future options for organizations using quality to improve management.
Nevertheless, the question on the minds of many of this year's Federal Quality Conference participants will be whether these cornerstones can be effectively laid in the era of government downsizing and yet-to-be realized zero-budget-deficit targets. Many will remember that major corporate layoffs a decade ago nearly ruined the total quality management movement in the private sector.
Are the roots of the quality movement deep enough to withstand the budget droughts to come? Has quality management learned from the rapid demise of management fads and the high failure rate of consulting interventions to avoid becoming another tombstone in the management graveyard?
Answering these questions requires taking a look back not only at the decade of federal quality efforts, but at the genesis of the quality philosophy some 50 years ago and the various movements it spawned in American industry and government.
A Successful Export
Most managers know the story of how quality management was developed first in the United States, exported to Japan following World War II, and then imported back to the United States two decades later. David Garvin, a professor at the Harvard Business School and one of the earliest critics of shoddy American production processes, has lamented that quality control techniques have been one of America's most successful exports.
The earliest quality control and assurance efforts originated at Bell Laboratories in the 1930s, with the efforts of Walter Shewhart and others. By the 1950s, Joseph Juran, Arnold Feigenbaum and W. Edwards Deming (usually referred to as America's quality gurus) had developed the core concepts: quantifying the costs of quality, establishing total quality controls, reliability engineering and-perhaps most controversial of all-advocating the pursuit of zero defects.
The quality movement never really took off within American industry. But in Japan, quality would become the core structural approach to management. When Deming, Juran and Feigenbaum visited Japan and gave lectures to Japanese business and government officials in the mid-1950s, they found a highly receptive audience. The rest is industrial history.
Of course, the Japanese developed their own innovative approach to quality-but it began with an understanding of American quality management techniques and concepts that were simply underappreciated in the United States. The Japanese, some have argued, sought to produce the best products in the world so that the label "Made in Japan," once synonymous with junk, would set the standard for quality. In the ensuing 20 years, they achieved exactly that.
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