The November 2004 issue of Quality Progress magazine features an excerpt from the latest book from Armand and Donald Feigenbaum, The Power of Management Capital. The subject centers on how an alignment between management and quality improvement initiatives can benefit today's companies.

The connection of quality with innovation in management, which is a key factor in "the power of management capital," has been essential in defining the future growth of the quality field. Today companies that place emphasis on management and quality innovation are continuing their technical emphasis and periodic upward reporting to senior manage, but they also see quality as a fundamental strategy for their competitiveness. Collaboration between senior management and quality professionals is essential to attain competitiveness just as working closely with their marketing, financial, supply and technology professionals has in the past. This balance in emphasis is a key reason for the profitability and growth of many organizations in recent years.

The article points out that today's demanding markets make quality an enormous competitive advantage for companies that approach it strategically. The key is to build bridges among the diverse quality improvement islands that have come to exist in many companies. Those bridges make a company's management of quality resources a sum, not a difference.

The results of a large multi-market corporation which led a strategic quality transition stressing strong customer value satisfaction are described in the article. The integrated strategic, technical and operational alignment of quality helped create significant company sales growth because of increasing customer satisfaction, which also reduced the costs of poor quality to 5% as a percentage of sales revenue. This compares with costs of 20% or more of sales revenue in less well-aligned competitor businesses.

As the requirements for quality continue to increase, the escalating demands for capitalizing management leadership excellence in companies reflect the increasing breadth and complexity of the American and global economy. Taken together, they represent the future growth of the quality field and a wealth of opportunities for quality professionals

For a complete text of the article see the November 2004 issue of Quality Progress magazine - a publication of the American Society for Quality (ASQ).