Guest editorial

Citation

Sinha, M. (2010), "Guest editorial", The TQM Journal, Vol. 22 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/tqm.2010.10622daa.001

Guest editorial

Article Type: Guest editorial From: The TQM Journal, Volume 22, Issue 4

About the Guest Editor Madhav Sinha is a major contributor to the theory and practice of quality control and total quality management (TQM) in Canada and known internationally as an expert and a pioneer in the field, Madhav Sinha has had a varied career experience of 45 years as research scientist, plant engineer, quality manager, university professor and government administrator. He has authored, co-authored and edited ten books, including a textbook, and over 50 research papers published internationally, some translated into foreign languages. He has received over 30 medals, honours, awards and testimonials for his contributions in the field of modern quality management, including the Distinguished Service gold medal, the highest award accorded by American Society for Quality for life-time service, Grant medal (for leadership in developing quality educational programs), Edwards medal (for contributions in application of quality control methodologies), Lancaster medal (for work in the international fraternity of quality), the Leadership Award from the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of the Province of Manitoba for outstanding work in engineering disciplines. Dr Sinha is an elected academician of the International Academy for Quality and founder President and CEO of Total Quality Research Foundation Canada, a non-profit organisation serving the knowledge-based industries.

The papers in this special issue of The TQM Journal have been selected from the presentations made at the “first” annual Canadian Quality Congress held August 2009 in the campus of the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. Under the theme, Quality, Innovation and Social Responsibility, approximately 200 delegates were in attendance from 23 countries from around the world. Nearly 45 highly qualified research papers were presented during the two-and-a-half-day sessions. This issue has only the papers from first cut; the others will come out through normal course of review process in the forthcoming months.

As the President and CEO of the Total Quality Research Foundation of Canada, a non-profit education organisation and a sponsor of the conference, it was a great pleasure and a thrilling experience for me to see the success of this endeavour. There was no shortage in the ability to access the talented pool of researchers to talk about quality in spite of the doom and gloom seen at the time and the news of global economic meltdown and a recession like no other right after the announcement of the conference. The crowds buzzing at the conference however, didn’t mind the recession. We heard them saying that people need quality more than ever before! It was also said that quality will remain one of the most important human satisfiers of all times and it is up to us to unlock the secrets of changing our own organisations, to discover what to change and how to change it to make the world a better place.

The papers in this issue are from authors considered to be the “out of the box” thinkers. To begin with, a European quality pioneer, Tito Conti, in his paper titled, “Systems thinking in quality management”, presents his latest thinking and research on the strategic role of quality in managing organisations and how important it is that major conceptual breakthroughs are required in moving forward. Among them, the first is the real incorporation of modern systems view; and the second, is the key role that joint quality and systems thinking plays in value generation. Managing quality thus needs to be revisited not only in the systems perspective and in the context of change, it must also be seen contributing to the overall management integration and in value generation.

In the next paper titled, “The relationship between job satisfaction and national culture”, authors Jacob Eskildsen, Kai Kristensen and Henrik Gjesing Antvor present a theoretical analysis of the influence of national culture on job satisfaction and other job-related aspects. The implications are that it is virtually meaningless to compare the results for a cross-national job satisfaction study without considering the impact that national culture has on the results. Furthermore, different cultures should be evaluated in relation to their ability to improve job satisfaction instead of being compared without taking into account the national culture.

A third paper titled, “Process management as a lever for managing social problems”, by Erik F. Steketee, shows how quality methodologies can help improve the processes utilised by civic governments for improving the service to the poor and the neglected ones in our society. From a series of pilot projects lasting up to many years, the data and the results show a unique contribution to the field of quality management with real life examples. Conclusions are derived that a huge number of benefits await those who want to use quality management tools and techniques for solving social problems. Another human challenge of quality management is identified in a paper by Rafał Haffer and Kai Kristensen titled, “People management as indicator of business excellence: the Polish and Danish perspectives”. This article has quite an authoritative data collection since samples are from the population of two countries.

We are told time after time that quality is all about top management leadership. author Robert Karaszewski in his paper titled, “Leadership in global business environment through a vision creation process”, describes the opportunities that he encountered first-hand in examining the functions of various companies at all constituent levels in all continents. He shares his experiences as to how fascinating it is that the personalities, qualifications and shared values of leaders at the helm have such a deep influence on the activities and goals of their companies in building a total quality culture. He also presents an examination of leadership styles through a vision creation process and emphasises the differences in leadership style from that of the Japanese professionals.

Performance measurement is the issue taken up by Roland Jochem, Martin Menrath and Katja Landgraf in their research paper, “Implementing a quality-based performance measurement system: a case study approach”. These authors propose their analytical findings by comparing the existing organisational practices with those having the label of “best in the class” as an alternative to the Balanced Score Card approach. The proposed performance measurement is designed to support company’s decision making process through target-oriented indicators that can be compared to the existing best practices.

I consider it a sign of the times that there is hardly a conference that I have been to in recent memory without a conversation on Six Sigma. Our conference was no exception. Daniel Firka in his paper, “Six Sigma: an evolutionary analysis through case studies”, uses a qualitative study of multiple cases from a wide variety of organisational styles by using the methods of interviews and questionnaires and finds out that there is a big complex landscape to talk about and furthermore “one size doesn’t fit all”. His research also discovers which variables are ultimately the most influencing ones in Six Sigma implementation strategy and how companies are coping with their frustrations in overcoming barriers on the path to improvement.

The paper by Kris Bonner, titled, “Performance and change management in the Province of Antwerp, Belgium” is about improvement in a government organisational setting. He stresses that although good case examples of quality improvement in governments are only “a few and far in-between”, we must understand the philosophy of the institution. Without that understanding, quality tools and techniques will be useless. If a change in culture is called a gradual process it is more gradual in governments. It requires a major commitment from top management. The author describes how to overcome challenges in a step-by-step process and how to strengthen the culture and keep top management engaged as real team players for the quality journey to prevail.

In the last paper, author Hector Hernandez’s article, “Quality audit as a driver for compliance to ISO 9001:2008 standards” presents an interesting case study validating that although the certification to the ISO 9000 management standard has now become obligatory requirement and a norm for industries to do business, the strategies and plans for sustained improvement require much more. It requires that the company’s quality system must have a program of continual quality audit and supplier readiness reviews at all time scheduled to be implemented in a planned and systematic manner. A concept called, “known maturity level” is put forward for process verification schemes aimed at closing the “gap” in the discrepancies found during the last audit and the present audit in order to confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of implementation of an organisation-wide quality system.

Finally, I have a few closing personal remarks. These are about my sincere appreciation and gratitude to all members of the Total Quality Research Foundation (TQRF Canada) board of directors and the National Advisory Council members of the Canadian Quality Congress (CQC) who have shared their valuable time, energy, ideas and experiences in starting a new initiative in Canada to enrich our collective knowledge. I also thank all reviewers and session managers who have helped in completing this task. I feel very lucky to have developed a very admirable and professional relationship with the staff of Emerald Publishing Group and in particular with Dr Alex Douglas, the editor of this journal and Ms Lucy Sootheran, the publisher, without whose help it would have been impossible to dream up the publication of this issue in such a short time. Let me also take this opportunity to welcome everyone to the 2nd Canadian Quality Congress taking place August 23-25, 2010 on the campus of the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. See you there!

Madhav SinhaGuest Editor