Quality: Past, Present and Future

Thank you very much for doing me the honour of inviting me to speak at your conference. I hope you will find what I have to say to be of interest and value to you. In assembling my thoughts for this talk I was very conscious of the cultural differences which will impact upon some of the things I might say. However, given the internationalization of business and the need to operate in a global market place, I was consoled by the thought that it is as important to understand any cultural differences and therefore motivations as it is to learn lessons from others and I hope you will feel you can treat what I have to say in that context. I am also conscious that this has been called a keynote speech, therefore perhaps, singling it out as something special – which it is not. It is just a talk about quality that is being given to a larger audience; for quality, the subject of my talk, is something that should just be a part of our lives, something we do naturally, and something we share. Most importantly, it is something in which none of us has any monopoly on wisdom and therefore any views or opinions I might express are just that – my views and opinions. And they have as much or as little credibility as the sense or not that they make. I am just grateful for the opportunity to share them with you, for it is through sharing that we learn and progress First, then, some history. I suppose the drive for quality began really in the rebuilding that was necessary in Europe and Japan in the immediate post world war two era, although it can be traced back very much further. My own organisation, the Institute for Quality Assurance dates its origins back to 1919 where it was born out of a press campaign to address the issues of quality in the manufacture of ammunition for the British army in the First World War. Known then as the Institute of Engineering Inspection, its title exemplifies what it stood for – the post production inspection of manufactured products – and that was quality and where quality stood for the next 30 or so years. That said, there was in the 1920s a development with the realization of a concept of a reliability focus. However, it remained focussed on conformity of products without really taking into account the customer’s needs. It was the engineer of the company who defined the rules to which the product had to adhere.