ASQ Influential Voices - March

March post “How do you “sell” quality?”
Paul Borawski, ASQ CEO

Because of my job as a Professor, I have the chance to be, each single day, a “Quality Evangelist” – in my classes and in the conferences and workshops that I attend around the world. Additionally, with my research and publications that I and my students conduct everyday in order to help companies to better understand and better use the quality concepts, I try to help the companies and the society to understand that we will not have a future if we do not have quality and that the future of quality belongs to us and depends on us. One of the most important contributes that we need in the forthcoming years is that the companies top management and the quality professionals use the same “language” – when this takes place we will assist to the full integration of quality in
the companies management – the “ideal scenario”.

Quality should be continuously understood, assimilated and implemented, both in public and private organizations. However, each one of us is responsible to push and pull quality forward, doing always more and better.

Based on a research project that we have conducted in Portugal entitled “The Future of Quality in Portugal” (Saraiva et al., 2010), I would like to point out that:

- The trends of the Quality Movement will be gradual and aligned among all the countries.
- We will assist to the implementation of a more globalize quality among the organizations.
- The public policies with impact in the quality area should be improved, being more intense and more close to the quality promoters.
- The organizations will be the key interested part in the promotion of the Future of Quality.

As I’m an engineer, I like to use some complex mathematical expressions in order to solve problems. However, I think that the Future of Quality will significantly depend on the fulfillment level of the following simple mathematical expression (Saraiva et al., 2010):

Future of Quality = Do it well x Do it better x Do it different

References

Saraiva, P., Orey, J. Sampaio, P., Reis, M., Cardoso, C., Pinheiro, J., Tomé, L., “The Future of Quality in Portugal”, Portuguese Association for Quality, Lisbon, 2010.