An individual doesn't need to be observing for more than ten or fifteen years to see the obvious rise and fall of many management schemes (some say fads) meant to reform the world, or at the very minimum the structured world of the organization that you function in. To begin the series of events we had Quality Circles, supposedly to bring about participative management to businesses with a stiff management hierarchy, chased by Total Quality Management (TQM) that obligated every individual to a process method dealing with quality improvement, and then Six Sigma, a very costly upgrade to TQM that depended on an incredibly detailed training method with grades of operatives having loyalty to an eastern wrestling culture. The application of this latter program would need radical advancements just to pay for the 'training'.



Looking back over the years, the successful programs have been comparatively few, if we judge success by the benefits and the longevity of the program. Management has been told to 'do this and all your problems will be over'. Success, no matter how you measure it is yours for the asking, and we will show you how. Enter the consultant. Training in one form or the other was mandatory. Teams were the order of the day, with teams anything could happen, and probably did, but improvement - that was a different matter. If training input was anything to go by, improvement should have been automatic and continuous, but it wasn't.

A careful study of what was intended, and what was delivered, should lead to the conclusion that performance improvement was both possible and probable, but somehow it just didn't happen to the majority. Why is that so?

Over time I have reached the conclusion that each of these programs - Crosby called his a Process not a program, has the ingredients that would lead to a successful outcome, if some effort was made to understand what they were about. As I see it, the problem lies with two groups - business managers and the consultants they employed. Business managers expected something, but weren't sure what it was, while the consultants had a teaching role, and success for them was in transferring the lessons to the employee subjects. Only irregularly would the managers be voluntary participants in the training operation. But what was being taught? Maybe the question should be what should have been taught? In retrospect, the difficulty is one of understanding. TQM is a philosophy that must be adapted to the task and people involved at the time. The methods will therefore fluctuate to meet the requirements of the business, its technology and its employees. By seeing TQM as a set of techniques, more or less set in stone, the program managers, both consultants and corporate managers failed to establish the conditions for success in their programs. Those whose programs proved to be successful and long lasting have generally been found to have management teams that were serious about the objectives and the management of their programs, and who established ground-rules for the operation and achievement goals from the outset. The representative case in point of this is the Motorola Company. Under the guidance and direction of an informed management, the company moved progressively though a series of improvement objectives, eventually establishing a Six Sigma objective for performance. Today six sigma has been captured as a program name with objectives totally remote from the original statistical 'and for Motorola very real - performance objective.

My conclusion therefore is that programs fail because the philosophy has been interpreted as a set of rules, and rules unlike philosophy require a consistency of performance regardless of human cultural and technological differences.