Qualityworld
Soapbox: Derek Deighton
It is often said that the past is another country, and this is especially true of business management. Gone are the days when the customer was king, and the Department of Trade and Industry was driven by quality and gurus, like Deming and Crosby.
Today, we live in a more complex world where the customer is no longer king, only a very important stakeholder in a confusing mix of social, environmental and economic drivers – the triple bottom line, as coined by John Elkington in 1994.
Over the past 15 years, quality management has been overshadowed by the concept of sustainable development, successfully driven to prominence by excellent people who generally live outside the box of the established business paradigm.
While thinking outside the box for those trapped within it is an ideal to strive for, people outside commonly do not understand the drivers and constraints, or speak the same language, of those inside.
What is badly needed are a few key words in common and I believe these can be found within the 'language' of quality.
When a Japanese engineer, Genichi Taguchi, was attempting to give quality a mathematical basis, he made what I consider to be a seminal statement: 'Less than perfect quality creates a loss to society.'
Herein lies the link between the languages of quality and sustainability, as any process that contains losses is by definition unsustainable, be it a machine such as a clock or an eco-system.
The existing business paradigm, which we cannot change on a time scale relevant to the present rate of environmental decay, is based on financial metrics – which are the costs of less than perfect quality – of not doing the right thing right, every time.
These costs can be social, environmental or economic failures within the organisation and can be continually reduced by application of the plethora of business tools developed over the last sixty years.
Under the heading 'Taking responsibility for what we do' in the current Prius brochure it says Toyota's product and technology development can be summed up in two words – 'zero-ise' and 'maximise'.
Toyota is striving for zero impacts on the environment and maximum satisfaction, fun and excitement. That is, to maximise added value while minimising the loss to society. This approach has taken Toyota to world leadership in mobility.
The final step will be to sell mobility as a service rather than a product. Concern with language may sound pedantic to many readers but the fact is that the sustainability message is not currently reaching out to a mass audience.
While it is increasingly recognised that 90 per cent of small businesses in the UK do not understand the language of sustainability, they do speak some dialect of the language of quality. Quality and sustainability are the two sides of the same coin toss it and you can only win.
Derek Deighton is founder of Trailblazer Business Futures, a company that teaches and informs organisations about the technologies that will be required in the age of globalisation. For more information contact e: derek@trailblazer.co.uk or visit www.trailblazer.co.uk
