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EOQ Congress, Helsinki 2016

Quality Management and the Silent Crises of the World

N. Ramanathan

Advisor (TQM), SRF Limited, ram@100water.org

Abstract

The world has seen some spectacular crises. Recent ones include the freefall of the financial

markets in 2008, and the ongoing climate warming challenge, not counting intermittent outbreaks

of wars or terrorist strikes.

Nevertheless, humans today experience a lifestyle that surpasses anything history has witnessed.

Life spans are longer, average heights higher, and nutrition levels superior. More are literate, and

there is ever-growing consciousness about human rights, slavery or forced labour has nearly

disappeared, and racial or religious discrimination is less pervasive. And the world has gotten

more mindful about safety, health and our environment. The United Nations declarations regarding

environment and the human condition, including the agenda for 2030, raise our hopes.

All this is not to say that other crises are not looming under the surface. Along with good health we

also have the rise and rise of cancer, diabetes, heart disease and obesity, all of which coexist with

hunger, malnutrition, and sporadic episodes of new infectious diseases. Inequalities have risen,

and too many suffer from dire poverty in a world of plenty. Processed food may be implicated in

our healthcare crisis, and the extensive use of chemicals, including endocrine-altering ones,

threatens our health and degrades our ecosystems. The world is choked with indestructible

polymers, while diverse other wastes - including nuclear – threaten our existence. Our generation

has also reason to worry about how the rate of depletion of resources, including forests, marine

resources or species will impair life for succeeding generations. And so on.

The question is: Has incomplete application of quality management contributed to these troubles?

On the one hand, fair success is attributable to quality - by its current definition, which

underscores fulfilment of customer requirements. On the other hand, quality has also been defined

as ‘loss to society’ – though ISO 9000 touches upon society only peripherally – and such loss

surely includes the enormous waste we see? After all, quality management is meant to accomplish

quality economically – by eradicating waste. Judged this way, how far has quality management

helped mitigate harm to society?

Clearly, we need a new definition of quality that puts societal requirements in the forefront and

heeds the requirements of future generations.

This paper investigates some of the ways in which quality management has contributed, and

explores new pathways for quality to help create a planet sustainable to living beings for a long

time.

Keywords:

Societal quality, Silent crises, Definition of quality, Integrated TQM

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1. Both Successes and Crises:

On the average, it may be said that humans today experience a lifestyle surpassing that of any generation in

history. We eat more nutritious food, are taller, live longer, with more human rights, and more tolerance

and freedom, again, on the average. We are more educated and are more conscious of the world as a whole.

The use of child labour, proscribed under International law, has been curtailed. Despite all the violence we

witness or hear about, we know that a fewer proportion of the population were killed by violence in the 20th

century than in past centuries (Steven Pinker, 2011). The world has gotten together through the United

Nations and made collective declarations for the welfare of all, starting with the Universal Declaration of

Human Rights (1948). There has been the Stockholm Declaration on Environment (UNEP, 1972), the

Brundtland Commission report on Environment and Development (1987), the 2030 agenda for sustainable

development (2015) which follows the earlier millennium development goals (2000), and the Paris

agreement on climate change under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (December 2015).

Nevertheless, crises brew. Some, like the 2008 global financial crisis – Freefall, as Stiglitz (2010) put it - or

the ongoing wars and terrorist threats, migrations into Europe, or climate warming, seize the headlines.

Others, overrun by news of the moment from the media, escape due attention from world leaders. These

concerns include deforestation, water shortage, marine depletion, extinctions, hazardous wastes, plastic

waste, and chemical contamination in body products and more importantly, in the food we eat. These

probably have led to the unrelenting rise of ‘lifestyle’ disorders like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity,

allergies and mental illnesses, even as potential new contagions lurk underneath. There is also the failure of

the world to achieve the UN Millennium Development goals (2000) with regard to poverty – 800 million

are still destitute, even as income inequalities climb worldwide (IMF Report, 2015).

2. The Contribution of Quality to the Successes:

In many ways the second half of the 20th century may be termed the era of quality, especially for the

corporate world. Watson (2014) has called the period 1951-1987 as the Age of the Gurus. Quality ideas

travelled from the United States to Japan, where it took centre stage with CEOs. They then returned to the

United States, arguably saving many businesses from capitulation, and then spread to Europe in what

Watson calls the Age of Quality Models, and one might add, standards. In its illustrious history, quality

management has morphed frequently, evolving from a statistical approach to a holistic way of management.

It got combined with Total Productive Maintenance, introduced in the late Sixties, with Nippondenso

clinching the first Award in 1971 (Nakajima, 1988), and Toyota Production System (Lean, as coined in the

west by Krafcik, 1988) as integrated TQM (Ramanathan, 2002), and lately in the West as Lean Six Sigma.

Nevertheless, though Watson would name the current period the Age of Inclusiveness, it seems that quality

has generally receded as a core concern of top management, tending to become a delegated initiative.

At its peak, Quality as a discipline can claim the principal credit for the turnaround of Japan’s post-war

industry from slovenly goods (exemplified in the 1955 Hindi film song Mera joota hai japani – implying

shoddy Japanese shoes – see link) to world-beaters in customer satisfaction. In America, quality helped

avert catastrophe for many companies - Xerox, for example (Kearns & Nadler, 1992). Quality levels have

risen around the world, together with customer expectations. Globalization has meant that there is no place

to hide for domestic manufacturers. Product development times have been compressed. Even initial failures

of new products have diminished. Concepts like attractive quality, first used by Kano, find world-wide

resonance. Though moderately, there has been some diffusion of quality concepts into health care as well.

3. Societal Quality:

Quality has been through several phases. Taguchi proposed defining quality as the loss to society from the

time a product is shipped – bringing society into the equation (literally so: L=D2C). Kackar (1986)

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extended Taguchi’s loss function to include the loss to society while a product is manufactured. A number

of writers have since incorporated the Taguchi loss function as part of quality of conformance, as for

instance, Garvin (1987) in his eight dimensions of quality. Shiba and Walden (2001) trace its progression

in a series of ‘fitness’ terms – fitness to standard, to use, to cost, to latent requirements, to corporate

culture and to societal & global environment – the last two in this series being part of ongoing evolution.

Deleryd (2015) also brings up the concept of quality as it has evolved over the years, ending with

‘societal satisfaction’, which he assigns for tomorrow. ISO 9000:2015 also brings up society in its

definitions of quality, albeit peripherally.

Juran, in his lectures to Japanese executives in 1954 (Kolisar, 2008) assigned the doctrine of quality as “the

ethical imperative for the senior executive.” Short-changing customers, after all, has an ancient history. “In

the watch trade,” wrote Charles Babbage (1832) about trade in England, “the practice of deceit, forging the

marks and names of respectable makers, has been carried to a great extent…” In the 21st century, Xiao Fen

(2015) has in a candid report on China’s plans to upgrade quality asserted China’s resolve to “consider the

illegal record on quality as an important part of corporate integrity rating, build systems of quality blacklist,

increase efforts to combat and punish illegal and counterfeit brand of quality behaviour.”

The murky saga of ‘sub-prime’ or ‘toxic’ mortgages (Stiglitz, 2010) was centred in the United States but

led to global financial collapse, and may be called a quality failure, with more than a hint of unethical

behaviour. Governments bailed out the aberrant companies which freely used the largesse towards more

dividends and bonuses. From sub-prime mortgages we have moved to sub-prime automobiles with

software doctored to defeat emission tests.

In the midst of great improvements in quality, there have been far too many instances of product harm. The

Minamata mercury poisoning episode of the 1970s (Allchin, link), the 2008 milk scandal in China (Forbes),

and the less well known predicaments in Europe with medicine quality going awry (European Medicines

Agency, 2011), two US fast food giants getting caught using expired meat in China outlets (Bloomberg,

2014) are but examples of quality vulnerabilities that occasionally steal headlines from the more prominent

recalls of the automobile industry. There are two kinds of problems here –unintended consequences due to

the state of knowledge; and laxity, or worse, lack of integrity.

These examples demonstrate a need for embedding social quality into the very fabric of quality

management, not treating environmental issues as separate (as in the practice of designing metrics for

quality, cost, delivery, safety, and morale – QCDSM). A product that poses hazards not just in its use, but

in its manufacture or post-discard stages cannot be said to meet quality requirements. Kano (2004)

proposed ICM-QCDEX, an integrated customer focused management that simultaneously addressed

QCDE, and also integrated TQM with other approaches.

4. The Silent Crises:

Why has quality fallen off the CEO radar in this early 21st century? For one thing, the core concerns have

shifted away from survival through quality. This had been the fear in Japan in the 1950s, in the United

States in the 1980s under siege from Japanese products, and in Indian manufacturing reeling from abruptly

liberalized imports and foreign investments in the 1990s. The world has other worries now. Of these, two

which occupy the minds of corporate leaders are:

1. Globalization, where the rich countries hold the cards, has led to unprecedented volatility in currency

rates, interest rates and commodity prices (Stiglitz, 2006) – often dwarfing improved quality and

efficiency in its impact on profits. Further, the 2008 collapse of the financial markets seemed to prove

how venal companies and financial streets can be. The credibility of MNCs is at an all-time low even in

developed countries, as witnessed in anti-globalization protests.

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2. What is more, science has realized that the world has been living off its future – a Ponzi scheme, as

Lester brown (2009) puts it - depleting resources, clogging the earth with wastes, exposing humans and

all living things to toxic chemicals, which are part of seven global concerns (Ramanathan, 2012), as is

the more scary heating of the earth with greenhouse gases.

In response, many companies have been lobbying their governments to protect their turfs, running PR

campaigns to deny their responsibility and even to sow doubt on scientific findings in the vein of a U.S.

cigarette maker declaring infamously in 1969 that “doubt is our product,” and that it is “the means for

establishing a controversy.” Climate science denials exhibit the use of the same method (The Guardian,

March 2015).

Omitting climate change and toxic financials, to forestall which better quality management could have

helped, we are concerned in this paper with the comparatively less visible and audible crises of the world.

There is a role for quality management –with its strong theory backed by powerful PDCA based execution -

to help mitigate these impending crises. We cannot rely on practical experience alone as it is the source of

almost “every major systematic error which has deluded men for thousands of years.” (Polanyi, 1958)

4.1 Crisis1: The Food We Eat:

Take industrial bread. What would be the requirement of the customer? Taste, freshness, appearance and

texture? The manufacturer has requirements of ease in production - the speed with which the dough rises or

bakes, for instance. To this end, and to ensure longer shelf life (maintaining apparent freshness for long),

the manufacturer adds a variety of chemicals. (The Internet has many sites and scholarly articles on the

subject.) Did the customer ask for calcium propionate, potassium sorbate, sodium benzoate,

azodicarbonamide, diglycerides, glyceryl disteartaes, and a host of other chemicals? Does the eater know

what the side effects of these chemicals might be? Do the authorities or the companies that use these

chemicals know either? This is what Braungart and McDonough (2008) describe as Product Plus –the

customer gets more than he asked for – even if that more might only do harm - from causing attention

disorder in children to being plain carcinogenic. In the United States, the FDA appears to confirm effects

only on ‘average’ people (a hypothetical five-feet-seven white male weighing 157 pounds, writes Klein,

2014), and this hardly says anything about children, the elderly, the sick, or about intergenerational effects,

but tolerances are fixed anyway and deemed safe.

Now take the process of extracting cooking oil (madehow.com). Typically, the oil seeds are ground into a

meal and heated, in which condition a screw press squeezes out their oil. The oil cake is then processed by

solvent extraction (usually, hexane). While most of the solvent evaporates in the process and is recovered

for reuse, the oil has to be boiled by steam to recover the rest. Then the oil is heated to about 85degrees

Celsius with sodium hydroxide, and the saponified material is recovered for soap. After washing to remove

soap traces, the oil is heated again by water to about 95 degrees Celsius for degumming, and then it is

bleached through activated carbon or clay. Finally, steam is passed over hot oil at about 225 degrees

Celsius for deodorizing it. This is an alarming example of Product Plus. The oil comes to the store with a

long shelf life, odourless and colourless. It has been thermally and chemically treated, but labelled

disingenuously as ‘refined’.

A special case in cooking oils is the so-called Canola oil, aggressively promoted by Canada. In many

countries the labels do not disclose that it is rapeseed oil, which is usually industrial and inedible, but has

the approvals for sale as cooking oil, by using genetically modified seeds and harsh oil extraction methods.

What is the case for using only cold pressed and ‘unrefined’ oil? Will this become a quality issue only

when a battle is fought over the potential risks in using ‘refined’ oil?

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Next, consider the packaging of breads and cooking oils. Breads are typically wrapped in polyethylene or

polypropylene. For cooking oils, PET, PVC, or PP is the preferred packaging material. None of these

degrade. Plastics are forever, says Weisman (2007). No plastic ever made has gone away, without

incineration. On top of that there are concerns of antimony and phthalates in these plastics. One paper

(Tawfik & Huyghebaert, 1999) says that butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) and butylated hydroxytoluene

(BHT) were found to leach out from plastics films into vegetable oils. These issues cause anxiety. They do

belong to the realms of social quality.

The food processing industry may plead immunity on the ground that it satisfies consumer tastes and

complies with regulations. But since when has conforming to laws been accepted as sufficient quality? The

simple act of eating bread or using oil in cooking suddenly takes a disquieting turn, fraught with dangers we

were never warned of.

There is a chance here for quality managers to apply the correct definitions of quality, and trigger product

development programs that make these and other foods safe and nutritious for consumption.

Crisis 2: Depleted Resources:

At the beginning of the 20th century, the demand for automobile tyres led to the clearing of Amazon forests

for rubber trees tapped by Zapara people in chains, in what was a ‘rubber genocide’ (Weisman, 2007). The

Zapara remain marginalized to this day. It is a pattern that has been oft repeated in the industrial age.

Business as well as farming requirements have actuated the worldwide depletion of forests, accessible fresh

water, fossil fuels, minerals and metals, top soil, and marine life, while also accelerating the extinction of

species and loss of bio-diversity and degrading of arable land through salinization and acidification. These

are but ways in which Diamond (2006) has argued that collapsing societies have “undermined themselves.”

None of this loss to society is costed. No balance sheet reflects the reduction in these asset values. More

galling, countries subjected most to depletion of their resources are often not even industrial – theirs is but

to serve the rich. In a moment of candour from the business world, Oystein Dahle of Exxon Norway is

quoted (Brown, 2009) as saying: “Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the

ecological truth.” Stiglitz (2006) calls the offending MNCs “international environmental bandits” for whom

“there should be no safe haven.” But there are!

In terms of Systems Thinking (Senge, 1990), this problem is treated as an archetype labelled ‘tragedy of the

commons’, wherein members of a community don’t feel the responsibility to wisely use shared resources.

The Hofstede model (see link) maps cultures on many dimensions and shows for instance that while

consumption is skewed to restraint, say, in Japan or India, indulgence is the practice, say, in the United

States. There is in fact an emerging body of discipline on sustainable consumption and production, with a

UNEP ten-year framework of implementation. It is not to be feared that all this is heading to austere living.

The aim is to be thriving in “simplicity, or living in harmony with heaven and earth.” (Trungpa, 1984)

The adoption of the principles of social quality would result in recognizing the loss to society of its

resources at every stage of production and use. Exhausting the resources of the earth can be ended - after

all, eradicating waste is core to management the quality way.

4.2 Crisis 3: A New Chemical Warfare?

It was Rachel Carson’s meticulous scientific documentation in Silent Spring (1962) that had turned the tide

for environment, causing not just the ban of DDT by many countries, but also the enactment of a string of

laws, and ‘blessed unrest’ (Hawken, 2007). An important point Carson had made was the need “to detect

injury before symptoms appear,” because “we will not know for a generation or two what the effects will

be.” She also declared that “the first necessity is the elimination of tolerances on… highly toxic

chemicals.” These requirements have in general met with denial from the scientific and business

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communities. Sometimes, the use of dangerous chemicals is shifted, for instance, to Africa. Kenya’s export

of flowers to Europe, for example, is predicated on the use of the deadly pesticide Dieldrin (banned in

Europe). The flower industry also uses the fumigant methyl bromide, the strongest of ozone destroying

compounds (Weisman, 2007).

The world faces a near insurmountable problem of waste disposal. There are automobile piles and

refrigerator mountains and tyre hills. Landfills not only cost money, but they could be hazardous too. The

wastes we throw carry heavy metals like chromium, lead, antimony, cadmium and zinc, which are near

impossible to recover and diverse toxic chemicals that may be carcinogenic, teratogenic or mutagenic.

Their incineration can produce dioxins. “Recent studies have found hormones, endocrine disruptors, and

other dangerous compounds in bodies of water that receive ‘treated’ sewage effluents.” (Braungart &

McDonough, 2008) Sewage as well as medical waste, and plastics seem to find their way to water bodies.

Nuclear wastes are not as safe either as they are touted to be. The abnormal rate of growth of cancer cannot

be delinked from all this.

Air pollution – especially in large cities like Beijing or Delhi - have hit the headlines. The EPA in the

United States lays standards for particulate matter, photochemical oxidants, carbon monoxide, sulphur

oxides, nitrogen oxides and lead. These are directly the products of industry, but paid for in ill-health by

citizens.

As this paper is more about the silent crises, we skip the unspeakable industrial disasters, the mother of all

being the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy, which remains uncompensated for.

The Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) says that its registry carries 109 million unique chemical

substances. Of over 100000 chemicals manufactured only a tiny fraction has been tested for toxicity. Even

more than carcinogenic chemicals, the endocrine disrupting ones pose grave danger. In 2014, Sweden was

to sue EU for delay in stopping the use of such chemicals in disinfectants, pesticides and toiletries.

Concerns included finding double-sexed fish, and effects on fertility of young boys and girls (Report, The

Hindu, 2014). Yet, according to the World Wildlife Fund only 14% of the chemicals used in the largest

volumes have the minimum amount of data publicly available to make an initial, basic safety assessment.

The Hannover Principles (McDonough, 1992) of design include the elimination of the concept of waste. In

terms of quality management, if a product causes an accident, it has always been understood to be a quality

problem. However if it causes even large scale environmental and health damage it is not held to be a

quality issue. The need to enlarge and mainstream these issues into the scope of quality is clearer by the

day.

4.3 Crisis 4: Diseases

The share of communicable diseases as cause of death has been falling steadily, even in developing

countries, even though, as periodic episodes warn us, dormancy in this regard may be disrupted any time.

On the other hand, most likely, a greater than ever proportion of world population today suffers from heart

disease, diabetes, cancer, allergies and obesity. Some 15 million new cancer cases and 8 million deaths are

reported per year (Cancer Research, UK). Some 370 million are diabetic. 17 million die of heart disease.

“Allergies are increasing. They affect as many as 30 percent of adults and 40 percent of children,” at least

in the United States, says the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. 13 percent of adults over

eighteen were obese in 2014 (WHO). On top of this are mental or neurological disorders that affect around

450 million currently, and will afflict, according to WHO, one in four people in the world at some point in

their lives.

In the current economic dispensation, drug companies have no motivation to spend on research for reducing

communicable diseases, which are being conquered through the exertions of WHO and other responsible

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institutions. (Witness the suppression of polio or guinea worm, or the eradication of small pox.)

Paradoxically, they have no motivation to eradicate lifestyle diseases either, and so they concentrate on

drug use as the solution. Serious reforms are needed in corporate practices including advertising of

medicine. The structure of medical care, as Gawande (2014) points out, may be “inflicting harm on

patients” and forgetting that the task “is to enable wellbeing.”

Can quality management remain outside this framework and yet retain relevance? Working on reducing

indiscriminate use of chemicals, and finding inexpensive product development methods for affordable

treatments are amenable to the methods of quality management.

4.4 Crisis 5: Population and poverty

Whether it is the WTO, or the Paris Agreement on climate change, countries negotiate what they consider

to be of advantage to themselves. The powerful countries dominate these forums, and the developing

countries take what they can get. We have globalization without a world government, and in fact, much

unilateralism; and it is obvious that the global financial markets are not working well (Stiglitz, 2006). What

happens in the US or Europe can impact other countries adversely – witness the sub-prime crisis, or climate

warming. There is a case here for international agreements to prevent ‘beggar thy neighbor’ policies.

It is known that income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, is worsening (IMF, 2015), and that

this is affecting economic growth. It is recognized by the UN as well as by economists that extreme

poverty that afflicts some 800 million people today has to be eradicated if environmental restoration is to be

made possible.

This calls for radical change in the way international agreements are arrived at, and the assumption of

responsibility by developed countries for the present state of the world in most aspects. The developed

world, in turn, is actuated by the corporate lobbies which fund political candidates. To make the market

economy listen to the voice of the planet, the systems must be call for pricing scarce resources, and

stopping their plunder.

Measurements and the careful selection of control points are very much in the sphere of quality

management. In the least, GDP has to be supplanted by other measures, carbon has to have a uniform tax in

the world, environmental taxes must be built into WTO agenda, and an international fund has to be set up

based on ratios achieved (Ramanathan, 2015). The December 2015 Paris agreement unfortunately skirts all

these options.

We have to continue to address quality of governance, of education and health care. We must come back to

the ethical imperative of quality.

5. New Quality:

The Brundtland Commission Report (1987) of the United Nations called for “meeting the needs of the

present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Inasmuch as this

report addressed the needs of people, it is also a precursor to a new definition of quality.

IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature in its 1991 publication Caring for the Earth,

asks for “improving the quality of life while living within the carrying capacity of supporting ecosystems.”

Notably, the implication is that humans can flourish in a well preserved planet.

The United Nations Environment Program, UNEP, developed in the year 2012 a ten-year framework of

programmes for sustainable consumption and production. Here too, the belief is that humans can produce

and consume without depleting the earth.

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To bring centrality to social and multigenerational concerns, a more far-reaching definition of quality

(Ramanathan, 2008) is called for. Quality, then, is to:

Under such a definition, how would industry worldwide fare? We are talking here of not only the food

processing industry, but the gamut of industrial agriculture, the drug industry, corporate medical care, the

chemical industry, the mining and fossil fuel industry, energy producers, and yes, the engineering industry

with automobiles at its core. In fact, every business and indeed every government will have something to

answer for.

It is time for a new era of quality. It is time for new discoveries, approaches and innovations that will lead

us closer to Ishikawa’s vision (1994): “If every nation plays its part in promoting quality control, the

world will find peace, and its people will be able to live together harmoniously and happily.” The mission

of a reinvented discipline of quality management (Ramanathan, 2008) could be “to build a world that will

preserve the earth, create good health, respect all, and assure quality of life without endless growth.”

We have to act at multiple levels – global, regional and national; at the level of provinces, towns, villages

and neighbourhoods; and of course with the entire world of business, and institutions of health care,

education and non-governmental organizations. At the global and national levels we need “a clear

indicator of our proximity to dangerous levels of environmental damage.” (Stiglitz et al, 2010) There is in

fact a measurement of the ecological footprint to indicate the amount of regenerative capacity of the

biosphere we use up.

In the light of our knowledge of the state of the earth, this paper now explores a few modest pathways for

quality management to serve as a basis for larger debate.

6. Some Pathways:

Mainly as illustration, we describe five approaches in the spirit of foregoing definitions to a composite

application of quality management, treating sustainability issues as an integral part of quality.

6.1 Design for freedom from wastes and toxins:

Braungart & McDonough (2008) in Cradle to Cradle (C-to-C) “see waste as a nutrient for what’s to

come,” and not as something to be disposed into a ‘grave’ – buried in landfills or cremated in incinerators.

Our current designs have spawned generations of us used to putting waste ‘away’. The environmentalist

reaction has been to ‘reduce-reuse-recycle’. But as C-to-C shows, most recycling is actually down-

cycling, as in the case of recycled paper or plastics, and exposes us to more toxins during recycling, use,

and eventual disposal. The C-to-C response would be to design products that can be returned to the

biosphere as ‘food’, or as inputs to other products through genuine recycling, or even up-cycling. An

example of upcycling is Toyota’s hint about developing a car that would act as an air cleaner, releasing

exhaust that is cleaner than ambient air. Assembled products like cars or TV sets have to be designed for

disassembly – so that they are not discarded as unrecoverable hybrid wastes. Such recycling can be

furthered by digitization or artificial intelligence in design, operation, diagnostics, and maintenance and in

disposal.

To avoid plastics, Peesapaty (see link) has experimented with ‘edible cutlery’ to replace plastics that are

often used in food stalls and even in flights.

Fulfill stated, implied and latent needs of customers in a manner that preserves the earth not only for future generations of humans but for all living things.

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In design, causing less waste is commendable, but less can often be the enemy of zero. ‘Less’ should be a

transitory phase to eradication. Quality management has vast experience with product development as

well as waste elimination. What is needed is to reorient the metrics, to identify the environment-connect

over the life cycle and set objectives at the design stage. Target Q, very much a part of TQM based

development activity, will need to be enlarged to include social quality aspects like resource depletion and

wastes over the entire life-cycle. This could directly impact the use of dangerous or dubious chemicals

and consequently, on lifestyle diseases.

6.2 Manufacture with Social Quality:

Here is a small experiment in ‘Company C’ that makes tyres. Environmentally, tyres are a nightmare over

their lifecycle, but for this illustration, we will let that pass. Take the final curing of the ‘green’ tyre in a

hot curing press. Company C integrated all social quality aspects into its evaluation and improvement of

this process. Necessarily, this is at the stage of making things ‘less’ rather than elimination.

Heat in the curing process is provided by superheated steam. Through innovative insulation of moulds not

only outside but even in parts of its innards, the platen and platen cover temperatures were reduced,

leading to lessened steam use. Other improvements made yielded lower amperage, lower compressed air

pressure, and increased life of the lubricant (which has to be sent to a Government run disposal unit). On

the side, luminosity at the work spot was doubled through natural lighting and de-cluttering. These steps

are but the beginning. The goal is to massively contribute to cutting the environmental footprint, and this

also slashes costs of course, as most quality improvements in production do.

Take a machining operation: What are the wastes produced? What are the resources consumed? How

much greenhouse gas is generated? What is the effect on pollution? What are the potential health hazards?

How can each of these be measured and reduced? These questions could be pretty much standard for any

operation. They could form an integral part of any TQM, TPM, Lean or Six Sigma kind of initiative.

They could be integrated with the Global Reporting Initiative (2006) for sustainability reporting

guidelines.

6.3 Green Buildings without toxic off-gassing:

Gleaming glass fronted offices and apartment complexes abound in most cityscapes. The concept of green

buildings has caught on, part of which effort is to make them energy neutral. The Hannover Principles

(1992) argue that they should in fact be net contributors of energy. Further, as C-to-C points out, the

design of green buildings is often focused on energy savings, but misses out on the many toxic substances

in virgin and recycled materials that are off-gassed into buildings that are kept closed. Thus the choice of

building materials and their lifecycle footprints have to be built into the design.

In conventional apartment complexes, residents can do much to slash energy use, water use and car use,

while collecting rain water, composting organic waste, using solar power, responsibly segregating plastic

and other wastes, and so on. These would improve the quality of life in the apartments, while causing less

harm to the planet.

Quality management methods, here too, are directly applicable, and are opportunities in the mini-scale.

6.4 Sustainable Uplift of Communities:

Typically, eradication of poverty in villages is a governmental task. Zaidi et al (2010) present the case of

a company, SRF, which joined hands with NGOs to transform a clutch of impoverished villages situated

in degraded land. Through repeated PDCA cycles, the teams created self-help groups of families and

women, and got the villagers to level 583 hectares of rutted land, created about 100 embankments where

water could be stored, helped with plantations, raised the water table continually over years, increased the

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per capita income appreciably, and developed self-confidence in the villagers. The direct involvement of

the villagers themselves was a key factor, in the true quality way.

There are many such success stories around the world where committed organizations have shown the way

to reduce maternal and infant mortality, and in raising illiteracy. However, these are independent projects,

depending on the ability and passion of individuals, and cannot be called systemic, which is a necessity for

practicing quality. This too is an opportunity, to develop a quality-based model for such social work.

6.5 Cities that are self-sustaining:

Cities, as they are built, import nearly all their water, and dispose them off as black water. They also

import all their food. They import materials of construction, destroy soil, use high-energy transport, and

pollute the air. How about a city that cleans and reuses all its water, and growing most of its food? And

how about being self-sufficient with solar or wind energy, and using mainly local materials, and

promoting bio-diversity in its parks as Roberto Brulo Marx (See UNESCO link) did in Brazil? How about

converting all of its internal passenger transport, to the extent they are not by walk or bicycles, to electric

vehicles using renewable sources of energy, or other means which might become available in the future?

Here again, the first challenge for quality management is to reset the metrics by which cities are judged

and ranked, and perhaps rewarded by the international community. Metrics that have to go south include

water and food imports per capita, fossil fuels and non-renewable energy KWh per capita, index of bio

diversity, and so on. The techniques of quality for design, program management, policy deployment and

daily management will all help.

7. Conclusion:

It seems that a constructive first step would be to declare a new definition of quality with the core concern

of sustainability integral to it. Thereafter, the metrics and key performance indicators would acquire new

looks. Tackling the new challenges may open up newer methodologies and newer techniques, both

quantitative and semantic. The world has changed since quality management first evolved. It must

embrace today’s concerns even if there seem to be no welcoming arms to receive it.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

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