Improvement ideas for leaders and managers
from the editors of the Journal of Innovative Management
By Laurence R. Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, GOAL/QPC [lsmith@goalqpc.com]
[I]n recent decades the subject of managing for quality has moved to center stage. Achievement of quality has always been one of the goals of human effort, but seldom did it occupy the attention of the leadership.
—Joseph M. Juran, in A History of Managing for Quality, 1995.
A capacity of emotionally and spiritually mature leaders is the power to be—with compassion—responsible and accountable for the quality of life in and around their organizations. The current trend toward performance excellence in organizations is essentially about how to become continuously more mature about what the community does, how they do it, and to be collectively responsible and accountable in a compassionate manner for the results. That, in a nutshell, is what quality leadership and management is all about.
At least one nation-wide learning community has been evolving in this regard during the past two decades, and a new milestone in this effort was reached this year. On April 24, 2008, a historic event took place in Washington, DC, and I had the pleasure to witness it. The City of Coral Springs, Florida, became the first municipality in the United States to strive for and receive a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. This was especially significant to me as I recalled a conversation I had a number of years ago with the Mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, a pioneer in municipal quality management, who said that quality was good government but not yet good politics. The good news for today is that quality has, because of good leadership, become good government and good politics in Coral Springs, to the mutual benefit of its citizens, businesses, and employees. In addition to the national quality award program, forty states have their own quality programs and maintain a cooperative relationship with Baldrige.
National and State Quality Models
PRODUCTS