 
Toward a Quality Advantage
When a product or service invokes a pleasurable experience, when it is provided with little waste, and when it is reliable over time, we think of it as “quality.” When an organization reliably produces these experiences consistently, over a generation or more, it has achieved a “quality advantage.” Organizations that gain such an advantage grow and prosper, but such an advantage is difficult to achieve and maintain. Only a few organizations have maintained a quality advantage for more than a generation. Among the most celebrated are Toyota, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, Mayo Clinic, and Milliken Co. Without vigilance, even great organizations like these can lose their quality advantage over the course of just a few years. But constant cultivation of a quality advantage is the most reliable approach to being a great organization. This diligent approach stands in contrast to the pursuit of management fads prevalent in today’s leadership culture.
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Beyond Marketplace Advantages
What if we were able to see our major problems as “quality problems” that, addressed by knowledgeable leaders, are amenable to new solutions? For example, Alcoa and Milliken Co. have decided that employee safety is their most important “quality problem.” Applying quality principles, they have nearly eliminated work loss incidents – reducing their occurrence by more than 99 percent. In healthcare, some facilities have applied quality principles to make previously intractable hospital-acquired infections a thing of the past.
The principles that help solve these seemingly unsolvable problems need not be limited to business products and services, nor to worker or patient safety. Applying quality principles to all fields of human endeavor can save countless lives and trillions of dollars. To accomplish this, quality principles need to be widely understood. At the outset, they should be embraced by every business leader. In the long term, our challenge is to ensure that every leader of every organization will understand them. We can build this widespread embrace of quality principles only by ensuring that every university faculty member and graduate grasps them at a deep level. | |
 
The Juran Center supports achieving Dr. Juran’s vision for a Century of Quality by supporting three principal efforts:
- Constantly advance the core body of knowledge that underpins continuous advances in quality.
- Adapt and revise that knowledge so that leaders in every field can learn quality leadership.
- Help today’s institutions educate and develop the millions of new quality leaders that are required both to preserve today’s quality advantages and to ensure that new quality advantages grow exponentially.
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