ARE YOU A "TRUE BELIEVER"?



Timothy G. Wiedman

Thomas Nelson Community College

Hampton, VA


We have all met the TQM naysayers.  They consider TQM a passing
fad--like hula hoops or pet rocks--which will run its course and
fizzle out.  They view TQM as a management "technique" (like
MBO), rather than seeing it as a philosophy.  And as a mere
"technique"' putting a TQM program in place is straightforward:
hire a consultant to teach the principles, form an improvement
team or two, and turn those teams loose.  What would be easier?

But if TQM is more than a collection of tools and techniques,
the 3-step approach described above will likely have limited
success.  Novelty and enthusiasm may sustain a program for a
while, but they are no substitute for real commitment
(enthusiasm generally feeds on success alone, yet some degree of
inevitable over time).  If failures mount, what becomes of the
TQM program?

If you are a "True Believer", the answer is simple:  you try
again.

The True Believer sees TQM as a philosophy--a way of life.  And
each improvement project is merely a step in a lifelong journey.
So "stumbling" now and again is to be expected.

When the beliefs and values of TQM have been learned and
internalized, an occasional setback is taken in stride because
the practitioner has faith in the philosophy.  Unfortunately, it
is very difficult to separate the True Believers from those who
have simply jumped on the TQM bandwagon and can "talk the talk".
When improvement strategies are working, nearly everybody
becomes a TQM cheerleader (as the saying goes, "nothing succeeds
like success").  It is only when things go wrong that the True
Believers can be identified with certainty.

Having enough True Believers is very important to a maturing
TQM program.  Since the quality journey never ends, eventually
the ten-week projects that are "sure things" give way to
ten-month projects whose outcomes are less certain.  As the
waste is driven from the system, successive improvement projects
tend to yield smaller and smaller immediate savings (at least in
terms of the visible dollars captured by the organization's
traditional accounting system).  At some point--in terms of
short-term payback--a project may appear to yield no economic
benefits at all.  When that eventually occurs, the True
Believers must be ready to deal with the naysayers.  The
less-visible, longer-term benefits of TQM must be brought into
the discussion.

Smaller improvements in product quality, for example, may not
result in any apparent payback that shows up on the quarterly
income statement.  But quality reputations cannot be built
overnight!  Today's small, continuous improvements may bring in
next year's new customers- - - or prevent the loss of an
important current customer.  Yet this sort of information will
not be generated in a payback analysis performed by the firm's
accounting department.  Unless the less-visible, longer-term
benefits of TQM are understood and regularly reinforced, TQM may
come to be seen as a mere cost-reduction technique rather than a
philosophy of continuous improvement.  And it is up to the True
Believers to maintain the organizational awareness of those
longer-term benefits.