In 1921 60% of all cars bought in the US came from one company: Ford. The kind of success that Henry Ford, Durant, and Sloan had first, and other US manufacturers shortly after, was to be suddenly swept aside by a leaner, faster, fitter, Japanese car industry. How?

There is a story (unattributed) that a Deming student when asked to explain ‘why Deming mattered’ replied along the lines that after WWII but before Deming Japan was allowed to manufacture plastic dog poop, after Deming they owned the American car buyer. (Deming himself was revered in Japan - he was honored with the Medal of the Sacred Treasure by Emperor Hiroshito Showa in 1960). Whether the dog poop tale is apocryphal or not, the facts speak for themselves.

In 1947 Japan exported a grand total of TWO cars for the whole year.

By 1962, Japan was the sixth largest manufacturer of cars worldwide and by 1964 this had increased to 1,000 motors a month to the US alone. But it took to 1980 until it became the worlds leading producer of automobiles. Quality has proven to be a real driving force behind creativitity and a provable repeatable process; and repeatable results ain’t bad. Through the drive of extraordinary men such as Soichiro Honda and his partner Takeo Fujisawa at Honda, (who broke the conventional old school ties as they were working-class boys made good) who were manufacturing 1.2 million motorbikes per year by 1961, and the other major players Nissan-Datsun, (now with the first non-Japanese CEO and a truly outstanding one at that in Carlos Ghosn) Toyota and Mitsubishi (Thanks to Tomio Kubo’s expansion strategy in the 1970s).

Let’s look at a contemporary example of quality elsewhere.

Sunny Fresh Foods in Monticello, Minnesota handle some 20 billion eggs a year - which is manufacturing at its most intense - no delayed stock here. Recently, they received the Baldridge Award for quality from the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in 2005 AND a 100% customer satisfaction rating from their many large organization contracts. (They’re also two time winners - they received the Baldridge Award previously in 1999). To top this off we see best practice in worker care in repetitive work. They rotate the workstations of every worker every twenty minutes, not only preventing boredom and repetitive injury but also decreasing accident rates and risk through lost hours; that’s no mean achievement.

So what’s happening?

As quality systems became more and more popular in the 1990s they also became a route to success that led to shifts in economic paradigms. Governments worldwide woke up and grabbed the initiatives back from business and consultants in the 90s. There are now a growing number of government based initiatives to push quality and its effects into the overall economy of nations. Quality has become a strategic tool that reduces financial risk. Interestingly it is being applied to inflation and other broad economic indicators. The United Kingdom, for example, has government initiatives pushing Prince2; Finland, 6Sigma; and in the US, the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Awards. This is given by the President and Secretary of Trade. In 2005, the award was given by the present incumbents George Bush and Carlos Gutierrez to six US enterprises. None of them are Fortune 500 names. Companies such as DynMcDermott who maintain the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (The proof of quality is in the results; within 5 days of Hurricane Katarina they had relocated from New Orleans to Beaumont, Texas and were delivering crude from reserves to compensate for lost production from the Gulf of Mexico), a Lexus car dealer in Plano, Texas, and a healthcare and two education organizations.

Additionally, the world of work has changed.

From the 1820s right through to the 1970s the Industrial revolution dictated styles of work and organizational manpower was cheap. Semi-skilled. Replaceable. The 1970s saw a huge upheaval in Western industrial behavior with accompanying strikes and global unease. This was caused by a seismic shift towards knowledge workers. Crudely put for huge swathes of people we stopped get paid for brawn, and started getting paid for our brains.

Even butchers, sewage workers, shop workers, assembly line workers, to name a diverse bunch, suddenly shifted from a physical to a more intelegant approach: butchers had EPOS (Electronic Point of Sales Systems), sewage workers, contra-flow and pathogen and biochemical oxygen demand, shops in retail and wholesale had JIT and Lean Manufacturing principles thrust upon them by suppliers (As well as internally), and assembly lines had the full force of 60 years of Quality Management gurus. From Walter A Shewart, W Edwards Demming, Joseph M Duran, Lawrence D Miles, through Robert H Hayes, Philip B Cosby, and Armand V Feigenbaum; and in particular Shingeo Shingo, and more interestingly, Yoshio Kondo, all focused on manufacturing as a human initiative within an industrial process. (For an instant snapshot of the approaches of these authors grab the instant iGuru guide from the Business Intelegant Guru Guide at http://www.intelegant.org)

So quality has a real top line and bottom line effect. But quality cannot be at the expense of the human; as shown at Honda, Sunny Farm, and DynMcDermot it is the people and their solutions that are driving repeatable processes forward.

You are now paid for your brain. And creativity and quality and intelegance must walk hand in hand.