Traces fifteen years of attempts at Total Quality Management in the United States, explains its successes and failures, and provides examples from industry, the professions, and government Although long revered in Japan, quality guru W. Edwards Deming remained almost anonymous in the U.S. until recently. Ironically, Joseph M. Juran, who some argue deserves even more credit than Deming for the "quality revolution," is still relatively unknown. The Juran Institute is his consulting firm specializing in total quality management (TQM) systems. Under the institute's auspices, Main, a former member of Fortune 's board of editors, reports on the status of TQM in the U.S. today. Having interviewed hundreds who have been involved with implementing TQM within their own organizations, Main documents successes and, more important, failures in the effort to improve quality and change thinking. Even some of those who were successful early on continue to find obstacles; others have suffered letdowns after their initial bursts of enthusiasm. In what may be one of the most important of the many books on quality, Main shows others how to learn from those efforts. David Rouse A journalist's objective and informative report on total quality management (TQM) in the US over the past 15 years. Drawing on the resources of the Juran Institute (a Connecticut-based consultancy that underwrote his research), Main provides a wide-ranging, jargon-free briefing on TQM's past, present, and potential. At the outset, he assesses the factors that induced American enterprise to add quality assurance to its operating manual during the 1970s. These range from the inroads made by Japanese suppliers in domestic markets to recurrent oil crises and the desire to gain or maintain a competitive edge. The former Fortune editor goes on to document the frequently ineffectual efforts of pioneering corporations to embrace TQM, an eye-of-the-beholder concept that requires top-down attention, employee involvement, customer orientation, and the use of tools (benchmarking, control charts, statistical measurements) that he fears are beyond the capacities of ill-educated US workers. Main next provides an anecdotal audit of companies that have made a success or failure of TQM. Among those singled out for accolades are Banc One, Ford Motor, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Motorola, and Xerox. The ranks of the fumblers include Caterpillar, Florida Power, GM, IBM, and Southern Pacific (several of whom are past winners of the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award). Covered as well are services (airlines, finance, insurance, telecommunications), the professions (education, law, medicine), and government. Among other advantages, Main concludes, TQM can afford committed organizations a focus (i.e. clients, consumers, or the tax-paying public) they previously lacked, enhance labor's loyalty and competence (though Main worries about the impact of mass layoffs in the name of cost containment), put a premium on genuine leadership, and otherwise yield handsome returns. Accessible, down-to-earth guidance on a demanding oversight philosophy that, for all its recuperative powers, promises the commercially challenged neither quick fixes nor instant salvation. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Marshall Loeb Managing Editor, Fortune Here, finally, is a book that tells what really happened in the companies that have turned to total quality management -- the mistakes they made, the disappointments they suffered and, for those that did it right, the rich rewards they earned. -- Review Jeremy Main is a former member of Fortune magazine's board of editors. He has reported on a wide range of quality programs throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. The Juran Institute is one of the leading quality consulting firms in the world. Chapter 1 The Beginning An Emotional Experience In the beginning came disbelief. Then denial. Then terror. American executives who visited Japan came home in shock, trying to grasp the implications of what they had seen, and unable at first to get the people at home to believe their stories. Great American corporations that bestrode the world -- Chrysler, Ford, Xerox, among others -- began to think the unthinkable, that they could be driven out of business. They did not say it out loud then, but they knew it in their hearts. By the late 1970s, Japan had pulled so far ahead of them in quality, in productivity growth, in developing new products, and in understanding the market, that some American businesses were no longer competitive even in their home market. In Japan the quality movement was born out of the destruction of its economy in World War II and the island nation's absolute need to live by exporting, which forced Japan to discover new ways of working. American business, so sure of itself, so set in its ways, so successful for so long, could never have embraced total quality management without also experiencing a profound