Top Managers and TQM Success: One More Look After All These Years

The 1990s have not been good to TQM: A survey of 500 executives in U.S. manufacturing and service firms indicated that “only one-third believe that TQM made them more competitive;” ¹ a survey of 100 British firms that had implemented quality programs found that only one-fifth believed that their programs had “a significant impact;” ² an American Electronics Association survey revealed that use of TQM by member firms dropped from 86% in 1988 to 73% in 1991 and that 63% of the firms reported that TQM failed to reduce defects by 10% or more, even though they had been in operation for almost two and one-half years on average; ³ McKinsey & Company found that two-thirds of the TQM programs it examined had simply ground to a halt because they failed to produce expected results. ⁴