Quality in Different Countries
The history of the quality movement and ethics reform go hand in hand in creating better Strategic Quality Management.
In the U.S. the history of quality thinkers and contributors starts chapter 2 in our text; ‘Strategic Quality Management’. In 1987 Dr. Deming received the ‘National Medal of Technology’, for his impact on quality in the U.S. The Deming Prize for quality was started in Japan in 1951, and the U.S. in 1980. A little slow on the up take considering most of the innovators in the early years were American. There are so many quality thinkers besides Dr. Deming, in the U.S. researching and writing book about continuous quality improvement and on personal and business ethics during the 1970s and 1980s I will only name a few. Dr. Joseph Juran had a plan he called the Quality Trilogy; quality planning, control, and improvement. He used a disciplined approach project by project. For Dr. Juran it was an ethics issue to meet customers’ needs with a quality product or service. Philip Crosby believed in measuring the cost of nonconformance or poor quality and building a companywide philosophical for quality, personal, and organization improvement (Pryor, White, & Toombs, 2007). All these quality processes requires ‘doing the right thing the right way the first time and every time’. In 1996 Brown identified four ethical approaches used in making judgments as to what is the right thing to do. #1: What is right is determined by an absolute, widely accepted standard that is independent of the actor. #2: The intentions or motives of the actor determine what is right. #3: The effects or consequences of the actions or choices of the actor determine what is right. #4: What is right is determined by the situation. In America these four approaches were added to Total Quality Management (Pace, 2007). The Japanese quality movement after WWII