Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Paul J Steel
President, Total Quality Inc., USA
tqi@msn.com
Today I want to discuss what I have learned from observing and participating in efforts to
improve quality and achieve excellent performance over the past fifty years by individual and
by organizations. I speak not as an expert but as a student. A student who has had some very
distinguished teachers including Dr. W. Edwards Deming, Dr. Armand V. Feigenbaum, and
Dr. Curt Reimann. I worked seven years with Drs. Deming and Feigenbaum and my work
with Dr. Reimann began in 1988 and continues today more than twenty years later.
I have also learned much from assessing hundreds upon hundreds of organizations
worldwide. More than this, I have learned from discussions with Dr. Joseph Juran, Phillip
Crosby, Masaaki Imai, from Dr. Kaoru Ishikawa studying a Total Quality System
Management project I was leading in Brazil in the early 1980s, and from reading the works of
many acknowledged leaders in the evolution of excellence including Dr. James Harrington.
So, as you can see, I have been fortunate to have some of the best teachers and today I want
to share with you what I have learned.
I also realize that all of us here today are students and that what you have learned may be
different and in some cases in conflict with what I am about to report. Sharing our views is
what learning is all about and I look forward to listening to your inputs and improving my
personal learning in our discussion following my talk.
Dr. Deming also required a person competent in statistics be assigned to work with him. I
was selected for this role of working with Dr. Deming because I was the only one at that time
known to have extensive education and practical experience in applying statistical process
control (SPC) and other related statistical analyses. During our meeting at Ford World
Headquarters, Dr. Deming quizzed me on statistics and I asked him to recommend how best
to implement the techniques that worked so well in Japan at Ford's suppliers. The meeting got
off to an awkward start because after I asked how we could effectively use SPC with our
10,000 suppliers, Dr. Deming responded by saying: "10,000 suppliers! I have no idea!” I was
shocked and cautiously asked again and he responded by shaking his head and staring at the
floor while repeating his "I have no idea!" reply. Out of desperation, I suggested an approach
as to how I thought we could do it. He shook his head favorably and said he thought that
approach would work. I did well on his statistics quiz but not well enough to avoid getting a
homework assignment. He later authorized me to give his statistical process control seminar
internally at Ford and with our suppliers. I still have and treasure the copy he gave me.
As the meeting ended and he needed to go to the auditorium to address the Ford quality
managers who had been flown in from all over the world to listen to him, he stopped in the
meeting room doorway and waited for me. He extended his hand and said to me that he
looked forward to working with me. At that moment, I knew I wanted to become a
consultant. Within a year, I left Ford to work as an international quality management systems
consultant for Dr. Armand Feigenbaum. I owe much to Dr. Deming for the inspiration and
knowledge that he gave me but he was not the person I learned the most from related to
achieving world-class excellence.
Do you remember Quality Circles and teamwork that took root in the 1960s in Japan? They
continued to be heavily promoted in the eighties. In fact, what surprised me is that I had not
associated teamwork with Dr. Deming but I observed first hand that when he visited our Ford
facilities and met with the workers and/or managers that he made it a point to always
emphasize the value of working together and respecting the knowledge that all employees at
all levels have.
The call for change, the call to overcome resistance to change, and videos on escaping from
your paradigms were everywhere. People bought books and went to seminars to learn more
about the need to change and learn from organizations that had changed. The flights to Japan
were full of people seeking to learn how to overcome the resistance to change. Today, the
interest to make cultural change is well understood but the high level of interest in this topic
has faded. As an observer, I believe that the seminars, books, and visits all failed to provide a
The Evolution of Excellence – Paul Steel – 25 July 2008 Tehran, Iran
means or a process to enable making change in your organization when you returned to it. In
retrospect, the need and value of change was advocated but the means to achieve it were not
effectively communicated and certainly not widely implemented. People who visited
organizations that had successfully changed their culture also learned that the new cultures
were not the same from organization to organization. Logically, the question of why should
we change our culture if we do not know what culture we should change to was not
consistently answered.
Dr. Deming and SPC were highlighted for most of the 1980s but two major events were
occurring that would change how excellence is pursued dramatically. At Motorola, Bill Smith
had taken some of the popular quality improvement techniques such as SPC and bundled
them into an approach he titled Six Sigma. The technique components of Six Sigma had long
been proven to be effective. Bill Smith however synergistically bonded them and validated
their effectiveness. As was so often the case, widespread understanding, acceptance, and
application of Six Sigma would take years. Unlike TQM and Reengineering, Six Sigma is
defined practically and the steps to effectively using it are validated and accessible allowing
for application which is frequently successful. Even today however, several areas of the
world have not deployed this methodology extensively.
Six Sigma is designed to improve processes and so is another improvement approach that
gained popularity in the 1980s. Kaizen was developed after 1946 in Japan but received
significant international attention in the 1986 when Masaaki Imai published his book Kaizen:
The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success. I have had the pleasure of spending time with Mr.
Imai both socially and at his Kaizen Institute from the mid 1980s into the early 1990s.
But there was someone else who was unknown in the quality world at that time who would
accomplish little in his lifetime but who would eventually have a greater and more lasting
impact on excellence as we now know it than some of the gurus. His name was Malcolm
Baldrige and he was US Secretary of Commerce when he died from a rodeo accident in 1987.
More conveniently, he was a close friend of President Ronald Reagan. It was President
Reagan’s last year in office and so he did not have to worry about politics. He wanted to
honor his friend who had died suddenly while serving in his Cabinet. When he learned that
Malcolm Baldrige had been promoting a national quality award, Reagan asked some
members of Congress to pass a law creating the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.
More importantly, Reagan insisted that only the best companies could win it. The concept of
‘world-class’ was overnight elevated to the level of the most prestigious business award in
the country. A chemist (Dr. Curt Reimann) at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) was given the responsibility to develop the award process and manage it.
He astutely realized that the award would never endure if it was based on subjective
judgment of quality experts who each had a differing view of the definition of quality. Dr.
Reimann also realized that there were several differing schools of thought as to the best
approaches to achieve excellence. For examples, the gurus each advocated vastly different
approaches. To counter this, Dr. Reimann consciously decided not to follow the approach of
any one expert. He interviewed them all and then he wrote the first version of what we now
know as the ‘Criteria for Performance Excellence’. Dr. Reimann also designed the Baldrige
assessment scoring guidelines to not be prescriptive. One of the key advantages of making
the Criteria non-prescriptive was that organizations did not have to change their cultures to
pursue excellence. This was counter to what others had long advocated and it was less
threatening to managers and leaders who wanted to achieve excellence but who had difficulty
The Evolution of Excellence – Paul Steel – 25 July 2008 Tehran, Iran
making the leap of faith to change their organizational culture without clear evidence that it
would be valuable to do. Dr. Reimann did something else with the Baldrige Criteria that has
resulted in a major change in how excellence is pursued. He made Leadership the first area to
be addressed when being assessed. The big question was: Why had nobody effectively done
this before?
Dr. Reimann is arguably responsible for the most remarkable breakthrough in the history of
the evolution of excellence due to his work in 1987 but the world would not begin to become
widely aware of it until the next decade and much of the world still has not understood its
value.
The 1980s were exciting times for those of us in quality and it is difficult to succinctly
summarize what happened. From my perspective, the pursuit of excellence began to shift
strongly away from its operational processes boundaries to a ‘total’ focus where everyone
and all processes were to be included. Do you remember which guru emphasized the
importance of a ‘total’ approach to excellence?
So, now you have seen the future of excellence and like the mural in the Cincinnati Train
Station, the future of excellence was predicted decades ago but few of us realized. To the best
of my knowledge, the one person who saw it first in 1951 and who has practiced it for
approximately sixty years is a long-time friend and my former boss – Dr. Armand V.
Feigenbaum.