ABSTRACT
Total Quality Management (TQM) wants everybody’s focus on the organization’s central missions; it deploys public, visible information systems to let each person and team know what’s important and how we’re doing. A few campus pioneers began their TQM effort in the 1980s; the big wave of interest kicked in during the 1991-92 academic year. TQM, as campuses are indeed discovering, is not some bite-sized management fad like MBO. To the surprise and delight of many of its campus initiators, the “human side of TQM”—especially the idea of working in teams with real authority—has struck a positive chord, to the frequent happy improvement of work processes and morale. The pessimism about TQM’s arrival in higher education comes from a comparison with its adoption in industry. Motorola and Xerox remade themselves into “high-performing work organizations” because they absolutely had to; it was change or die.
