QUALITY MOVEMENT
Bill Mills Jr. founded
William Mills Advertising & Marketing in 1977. He has more than 30
years experience in advertising, marketing, and management in the financial
services industry. He currently directs the agency's management and
creative services and heads the William Mills creative group composed of
copywriters, art directors and production artists. He can be reached in
care of Credit Union News or at 3091 East Shadowlawn Ave. N.E., Atlanta, GA
30305-2411; (404) 261-4900.
And They Went Into The
Hills Seeking Wisdom
On a recent cold and
rainy day, my business associate's son and I drove several hours to visit
the advertising and marketing agency of a friend. Why we went and what we
observed may be helpful to you. We intended to make it useful by helping us
improve our performance.
My friend's agency is
located in an East Tennessee town with a total population about one-third
our downtown stadium capacity, behind main street and a tire store, across
the street from the Baptist church, in a nice small office building which
they own and are expanding.
Their agency makes a
profit which would be considered handsome in any metropolitan area, claims
to have a quality work environment with no stress, and everybody leaves at
5 p.m.
The morale seems to
be high and there is a feeling of strong teamwork. If you've ever worked at
an agency, this sounds like Alice in Wonderland. Furthermore, the agency
was given the No. 1 quality award by an industry consultant who evaluated
more then a thousand agencies.
"The
secret," my friend professes, "is that we instituted the Deming
Total Quality Management Program."
A former banker, the
owner said that the agency was suffering all those maladies so common to
the business, including financial failure. In desperation he was seeking
any method of enlightenment which might get him out of a failure situation,
when he attended a Deming Total Quality Management seminar. It was, to him,
like a religious conversion. He saw this as the salvation of the agency and
embraced it wholeheartedly. In his case, he was absolutely right.
If you are not
familiar with Dr. Deming, you will be interested to know that he is a
quality consultant in his 90's who is still extremely active. Although
little known in his native country for much of his career, Dr. Deming was
the architect of modern Japanese industry. More than any other single
person, he helped change the term "Made in Japan" from the mark
of a cheap, inferior product to the most desired and respected products in
the world. The most coveted award in Japanese industry is the annual Deming
Prize. Companies go to unbelievable lengths to win it because it signifies
the winner as "The Best of the Best."
Although he had
sparked a modern industrial miracle, Dr. Deming was relatively unknown in
the United States until the early 1980's when a television program on his
work was presented on public television. Since then he has consulted for
many of America's top companies and has conducted seminars almost nonstop.
Dr. Deming's
background is that of a statistician, and much of his work involves quality
improvement using statistical analysis. Once you have a reasonable
understanding of his theories, it is fairly easy to see how they might
apply in a manufacturing environment, but how could they apply to highly
customized service organizations such as advertising agencies or credit
unions?
If you think you will
find the formula in the balance of this article, stop here and save your
time. What we observed and learned from our friend and his associates was
only the tip of the iceberg. Even if we had stayed for a week, we still
couldn't walk away with the magic formula--because there isn't one. This is
frustrating to those of us who like formulas and quick-fix solutions, and
why more of us have not already embraced the program.
The fact is, the
Deming Program is not so much a program as it is a journey.
Many large and small
American companies such as Proctor & Gamble, Motorola, and Ford Motor
Co. have used the TQM Program, along with other efforts, to become globally
competitive and help reverse the trend of exporting jobs from the United
States. For example, Ford is competitive with Japanese car manufacturers in
both quality and the cost of labor per vehicle. Ford vehicles are
manufactured at an average of about $750 per vehicle less than General
Motors -- a significant competitive edge!
The nearest thing you
can find to a formula in the Deming TQM Program is its "Fourteen
Points and Seven Deadly Sins." Even after you have learned them, the
challenge is finding ways to implement the program.
If pressed to explain
why the program works (and not everyone successfully implements it), I
would say that two of its most important attributes are:
- It empowers every human
being to contribute to quality and success.
- It emphasizes constancy
of purpose to forever improve.
If
one of your New Year's resolutions is to improve, you might want to
purchase a copy of The Deming Management Method by Mary Walton, available
from most business bookstores.
I didn't mention the name of the Masengill Marketing
Associates because this is my column, so why should I give them the
publicity?
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