Quality, Strategy, and Competitiveness

Increased competition has been the impetus for many of the modifications taking place within American companies. The quality initiative is a major competitive challenge that requires many companies to reevaluate not only their basic operations, but their overall corporate strategies as well. Based upon information developed by Motorola, this article discusses how total quality enables a company to successfully compete with a variety of competitors even though the competitors may be employing quite different strategies. While quality is often perceived in terms of statistical methods, the importance of the total quality perspective lies far beyond just changing the operations of a firm. Perhaps more significantly, the total quality perspective transforms how companies think about their customers, competition, and the business environment itself.