After combing through a successful company’s financial history and seeing gains in both sales and profitability year after year, it can often be difficult to suggest there is still opportunity for improvement. Even more challenging can be convincing the personnel who produced those lucrative results that improvement is possible. Despite this, successful businesses must continually strive to improve, often in ways they don’t know exist. This stimulates invention, increases barriers of entry into the marketplace, and builds value at all levels.
If you search the web on the topic of quality improvement, you will find hundreds of theories and models that have been developed by a multitude of authorities on the subject. With every credible theory comes an equally impressive list of critics. Using the third part of Joseph Juran’s Trilogy on managing for quality, I will attempt to debunk what I feel are the top five myths of quality improvement as they relate to the restoration industry.