The Next Leap in Productivity: What Top Managers Really Need to Know about Information Technology

1.5. Talk the Talk and Walk the Walk

When Joseph Moses Juran, a founding father of modern quality management, died at the age of 103 in early 2008, his grandson David Juran was quoted in the New York Times obituary: "Everyone who's in business now adopts the philosophy of quality management."

He was right, of course. What he did not say, at least not to the Times reporter, is that it has become all too easy to adopt the philosophy of quality management without understanding or embracing the underlying processes that Joseph Juran spent most of his life exploring and writing about.

Good quality management usually results in higher productivity. The best historical example of this is Toyota's approach to the automotive manufacturing process. With Juran's help, Toyota devised a production system in which quality management was tightly integrated with other assembly-line processes.

As a consequence, defects were found and fixed long before the finished product left the plant. More important, the defects themselves were treated as valuable clues that might reveal ways for continuously improving the efficiency of Toyota's manufacturing processes.

Well, we all know how the story ends. Toyota is now the world's number-one automaker.