leadership, change, and tqm: the lehigh university case

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LEADERSHIP, CHANGE, AND TQM: THE LEHIGH UNIVERSITY CASEAuthor(s): PETER LIKINSSource: Public Administration Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1 (SPRING, 1993), pp. 19-29Published by: SPAEFStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40862291 .

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LEADERSHIP, CHANGE, AND TQM: THE LEHIGH UNIVERSITY CASE

PETER LIKINS Lenign university

CORPORATIONS TO CAMPUSES: IS TQM PORTABLE?

The principles of Total Quality Management (TQM) as applied to manufacturing are by now familiar to most of us, at least superfi- cially. We realize that there has been some kind of revolution in the understanding of the concept of quality in industry with far reaching implications for such service organizations as hospitals, government agencies, and educational institutions at every level. We are told that the TQM concept is "portable" from one organization to another, even from such disparate organizations as factories and universities.

But the TQM concept is still developing even in the industrial setting and the transfer of these concepts to higher education is in a very preliminary stage. In what follows this author will explore in a preliminary way the principles of Total Quality Management as they might be applied to academic institutions with special reference to his experience at Lehigh University.

As we've all been told a hundred times, the typical American factory manager was pushing product out the door as his top priority 15 or 20 years ago, relying upon quality control inspectors to catch those products that deviated most flagrantly from specifications so they could be sent back for "rework" or discarded as scrap. Maybe 25% of the products failed inspection at the end of the assembly Une but they could be discarded without slowing down the production process (which of course had to run a little faster to meet shipping quotas with only 75% of the completed products good enough to ship). In those days, "good enough" wasn't very good at all by world standards and manufacturers in Japan and other more progressive countries demonstrated to our distress that they could meet quality standards that were unachievable in our factories and beat our prices at the same time.



(20) FAQ SPRING 1993

Only after years of rationalizing our failures did we finally come to understand that the Japanese had learned from W. Edward Deming, Joseph Juran, and others that successful manufacturing in the global environment requires a manufacturing system that reliably produces products of uniform quality that achieves continually improving standards of performance. So important is the insistence on uniform quality that every participant in the manufacturing process had to be empowered to stop the production process as necessary to make sure that every product came out right the first time with no recourse to rework or scrap.

Of course perfection is an elusive goal but such manufacturers as Motorola and IBM are now pursuing what they call six sigma quality so that even products six standard deviations below the statistical norm satisfies the performance requirements of the customer. (This means 3.4 defective parts per million, which is a whole lot less than 25%.)

The analogy with basic education is hard to ignore. We have grown accustomed to the notion that 25% of our youth will fail to graduate from high school, dropping out for later "rework" or "dis- card" into the unwashed heap of nonproductive citizens. Just as plant managers once explained their failure rate by complaining about defective raw materials and shoddy workmanship, we explain our drop-out rate by arguing that kids are not coming to school ready to learn and teachers are not ready to teach.

Recognizing the limitations of analogies, it is tempting to speculate about the lessons of the quality revolution in basic education. Might we minimize social costs by "getting it right the first time" with our kids as we now try to do with our manufactured products? If we are willing to alter the process to match the needs of each individual client being served, it is possible to educate 90% of our population to appropriate standards for high school graduation as required by the National Education Goals in the year 2000? If we commit ourselves to continuous improvement, might we some day set six sigma standards for achieving high school diplomas? And what can be said about standards of literacy and numeracy? Is it possible that TQM principles might revolutionize the service industry that is called "education"?

Of course it's easy for a university president to speculate about the applicability of TQM principles to elementary and secondary education just as it's easy for the plant manager to tell his suppliers what they need to do to improve the quality of supplies delivered.



FAQ SPRING 1993 (21)

Perhaps this author should let his brother, the superintendent of schools, address the portability of TQM to his environment and explore the applicability of these principles to the university domain where he has both the opportunity and the responsibility to practice what he preaches. What does all this quality stuff have to do with him and his job at Lehigh University?

IMPLICATIONS OF DEMING'S FOURTEEN POINTS

It is all too easy to write an essay about the virtues of Total Quality Management in university operations-easy, but dangerously misleading. Like most management systems, TQM embodies a good deal of common sense and anyone can apply the TQM vocabulary to universities without dispute as long as these principles are applied selectively. But there are some aspects of the TQM philosophy that would be highly controversial if transferred intact to the university's environment and we should face these dissonances squarely. A rather neat way to search for such provocations is through consideration of the canonical laws of the game known as "Deming's Fourteen Points" (see Appendix and Coate, 1990).

Many of Deming's points can be applied without controversy in higher education and should certainly be heeded. He calls for constancy of purpose for improvement of product or service and we do need to focus more sharply on understanding our mission and deliv- ering on our obligations to those we serve. Deming suggests also that we break down barriers between areas of our organizations and we all know that universities would function more effectively if we heeded such counsel. But two of Deming's Fourteen Points are so fundamental in their implications for universities that we dare not embrace them blindly any more than we can afford to ignore their implications.

Deming says, "Cease dependence on mass inspection" (Point 3). Would this imply the abolition of examinations and grades? Deming sees performance measures as indicators of the quality of the production process not the adequacy of the production product. Does this mean that those examinations we do undertake have the purpose of measuring the adequacy of the teaching and not the student? Is everyone who signs up for calculus expected to get it right the first time? Does everyone graduate and pass their Ph.D. orals when their time comes? This author does not think that we are ready for af- firmative answers to these questions in higher education, nor would




he propose that we should be. The questions must be asked but the answers may serve to illustrate the limitations of the direct transfer of Deming's Fourteen Points to the business of higher education.

Deming also says, "Drive out fear" (Point 8). Even setting aside the fear we all associate with final exams, we must recognize that a good university is a fearful place to be in if one is a young professor just starting a career. Outsiders think of "tenure" as job security for professors, but those of us inside the system recognize that the tenure process serves primarily to drive people out, even good people who are in the crucible of judgment found to be not good enough. A young professor in a fine university is not only reminded of the competitive nature of his profession but required to demon- strate superiority to peers of common age and discipline throughout the world! Young professors may enter a fine university with a realization that half will fail of tenure and in the process jeopardize not only their current jobs but their entire careers to which they have already dedicated some 15 years of education and professional service. In many American universities that we associate with high quality, the implementation of Deming's admonition to "Drive out fear" would be revolutionary.

Among Deming's Points is one with which we are naturally comfortable and it bears repeating here for future reference: "Elimi- nate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce" (Point 10). Among the slogans to be avoided, presumably, are those that relate to Total Quality Management.

Before leaving Deming's Fourteen Points, this author should take note of his emphasis on the institution of vigorous programs for training and retraining. Despite the fact that our principal function is education, a sister activity of training, those of us who work in the field must admit that universities are notoriously deficient in their commitment to training their own employees. Our culture is not comfortable with the idea that professors can be taught how to improve their teaching or that management is a learnable skill. We commit ourselves mightily to the task of learning about ideas, but we tend to be scornful of those who train people actually to execute specific tasks. Our great teachers are thought to be individuals with a natural gift for pedagogy and talented administrators are grudgingly acknowledged to have gifts of a lesser kind. We don't really believe that anyone can learn to teach or to lead an organization, so we give little attention to training programs for our own employees. If we take Deming's Fourteen Points seriously, we must reexamine this




cultural bias.

QUALITY PRINCIPLES IN HIGHER EDUCATION

It seems clear that we should avoid slavish adherence to the dogma laid down by the "quality gurus" for application to industrial organizations and seek instead to interpret the underlying principles in the university context. Perhaps the first of these principles is the need for each of us to define our institutional missions so we can develop that "constancy of purpose" that Deming incorporates in the first of his fourteen points. Universities in America have become very complex organizations, many of them operating as "multiuniver- sities" with diverse and conflicting purposes and objectives. We should each ask ourselves the counterpart to the corporate question: "What business am I in?"

Questions of mission or purpose must be addressed individually for each institution, and most of the value of the exercise is derived from the process of formulating statements of mission, vision, goals, and objectives. What follows is intended merely as a stimulus to that process, not in any sense a substitute.

Definition: "A university is a system with a purpose or set of purposes that can be reduced to providing people with benefits that are all related to learning. More specifically, those benefits are derived from activities often described separately as teaching, research, and public service, although in practice these learning activities are often interrelated and even integrated."

In applying TQM we begin with the identification of the purposes, benefits, and people served in the preceding definition. We try to understand those processes in the system that produce the benefits for the people and measure performance in terms related to the benefits and the needs of the people being served. We use cross- functional teams to analyze processes and empower people to change processes to improve benefits.

In the language of industry, we must pay careful attention to the wants and needs of our "customers" and the capacities of our "suppliers." Our "customers" include students, those who hire students, and those who "purchase" research or other services such as government agencies or corporations. Our "suppliers" are our secondary schools and community colleges for undergraduates, other colleges and universities for graduate students, and faculty. The principles of the quality movement require that suppliers be treated as partners,




not merely as disconnected sources of "supplies." If we take seriously just these few paragraphs and ignore for the

moment all of the methods of statistical quality control and prescrip- tions of the quality experts, we already have a full agenda for trans- forming the culture of the American university. If we can really get people to think about the purposes of the university and prioritize the allocation of resources (time, talent, and money) in accordance with those purposes, we will change the way we function in quite fundamental ways.

If we really begin to think about our obligations to provide benefits for people and relinquish the belief in ourselves as the final arbiter of quality in our universities, we will have accomplished a minor miracle. If we learn to view our colleagues in the high schools and colleges as partners with respect and appreciation for the impor- tance of their roles, we will not be the institutions that we grew into during our "glory days" when we held ourselves above such associa- tions. If we learn to ask ourselves why we do what we do and exam- ine with care our reason for being, the concepts of quality will be advanced in our ranks.

We will find in this process that the noblest of our purposes are preserved, but each of us will focus a little more sharply on the mission for which we are most qualified. We will recognize that our "customers" include people not yet born, the posterity to whom we owe a part of our legacy. Some among us might discover that the product of our scholarly research is unlikely to meet the test of time required for that legacy and that lesson signals an alteration of purpose with more attention given to research of more immediate utility. In examining our research mission we will seek to understand the objectives of those who finance our work and learn from corporate and government sponsors just what purpose they have in our sponsorship.

If it turns out that corporate sponsors value relationships with our people above the ideas purchased with research dollars, that knowledge can shape our deployment of graduate students and motivate faculty in new ways. If, in contrast, our sponsoring agency is really paying for the intellectual product of our research, then we might engage more professional expertise in augmentation of faculty investigation or forge a partnership with a government research laboratory. It is not the place of this author to answer these questions but only to suggest that pursuing the answers uniquely in each institution can lead to a refined understanding of the institutional




mission and to corresponding advance in the quality of the enter- prise.

TOTAL QUALITY COMMITMENT

Remember Deming's admonition to "Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce" (Point 10). With this advice in mind, the author has become uneasy about the tendency he sees in higher education today to march under a banner with the initials TQM emblazoned on it, engaging the peripatetic consultants, and reciting their ritual to a skeptical faculty. We need to be sensible about this quality movement and engage its principles without embracing its emerging dogma. In the university world the single word "management" elicits a negative response, and trumpeting the virtues of Total Quality Management may be counterproductive.

This author prefers in his own university setting to speak of the need for a "total quality commitment" which enables him to talk about systemic quality without "slogans or exhortations." Perhaps others will lead successfully under the TQM banner, but he prefers to foster the transformation of culture implied by our total quality commitment.

For these principles to be adopted in a university, they must be understood and adopted (or adapted) by all the independent actors in the university and that means virtually everybody. If these principles are understood in practice, they will be learned by our students who will then bring this understanding to their future employers. Conversely, if we teach this stuff and don't practice it, our students will notice and draw their own conclusions to our detriment.

We must understand that "total quality commitment" means quality everywhere in our curriculum and our research laboratories as well as in the business office and plant operations. It means quality in our athletics programs where too many among us have lost sight of our purpose. It means quality service in our libraries and the health center. Total quality commitment means quality everywhere for everyone, from the food service center to the Nobel laureate's laboratory. A total quality commitment will not come quickly or easily but is worth striving for.

LEHIGH UNIVERSITY: OUTREACH PROGRAMS

In Lehigh University there is an unusual amount of "outreach"




activity and perhaps this has given the institution an unusual opportunity to advance the quality concept:

o The Small Business Development Center has served local businesses for over a decade and operates today out of the Musser Center for Entrepreneurship.

o The Ben Franklin Partnership Center was established in 1983 to strengthen the competitiveness of Pennsylvania based companies, primarily through technological innova- tion.

o The Manufacturing Services Extension Center has since 1983 been helping the smaller manufacturing companies in the region to modernize.

o The Iacocca Institute has for the past three years been sponsoring initiatives designed to strengthen the competitiveness of American based companies in the global econo- my, primarily concentrating on two thrust areas: manufacturing and education.

° Competitive Technologies, Inc. is a new venture at Lehigh University keyed to the development of federally sponsored partnerships involving universities with business and education.

All of these enterprises involve faculty members but stand apart from the traditional structures of the university and expand the service dimension of its mission. Each operation can serve others by providing information about specific strategies such as TQM and, in the process, feed back the quality principles to more conservative sectors of the university.

The Ben Franklin Partnership Advanced Technology Center works closely with the Manufacturing Services Extension Center to provide TQM training programs to Pennsylvania companies.

Pennsylvania Congressman Don Ritter has been a quality advo- cate nationally and has been working with the Iacocca Institute to transform Lehigh Valley into Quality Valley USA, relying substan- tially upon the quality programs of the Ben Franklin Center and the Manufacturing Services Extension Center.

All of this adds up to an enormous amount of quality activity in the Lehigh University orbit. But what about the university itself? Is it just merchandising quality in the marketplace or does it take it home with it too?




LEHIGH UNIVERSITY: QUALITY ON CAMPUS

In the operations of Lehigh University the quality movement is still in its early stages and probably in its first half-decade as the TQM people would interpret its behavior. It has announced no revolution, of course, and doesn't intend to do so. But no one can escape the realization of change which envelops all in the university.

Probably the most visible evidence of change in the university's culture is a new preoccupation with mission statements and alterna- tive visions of the future. Lehigh's provost and this author conducted a series of workshops and retreats during the past year to explore the present and future dimensions of the university as a whole. After a summer retreat for a few days with trustees and benefactors joined by university people, an eight-hour workshop was held for management and then a series of six 5-hour workshops open to all employees and selected students.

Altogether about 500 people participated in small-group discus- sions of the current strengths and weaknesses of the university, the critical external threats and opportunities, and the vision all must share as all move forward. Many goals and objectives were proposed as these workshops progressed and in the coming year the workshops will consider priorities for all of these goals and objectives. The university wants to expand the participation of students both to hear their ideas and to contribute to their education.

All of these words would mean little if there were no deeds to match. The university has made progress, particularly in the management structure and resource allocation systems for the university as a whole, but it has far to go. There are four vice presidents at Lehigh today, half as many officers as served at that level a decade or so ago. There are fewer managers at lower levels too; the university is trying to manage better by managing less.

The faculty are more deeply involved with those activities that generate revenue, including student recruiting and fund raising as well as research support generation and economic development.

As a result, Lehigh is more student-centered than it was five years ago and less faculty-centered. Such changes are not always created with enthusiasm but they follow directly from the conscious consideration of the principles of Total Quality Management. As president, this author finds that he doesn't have to provide the answers if he can get Lehigh's people to ask themselves the right questions: What is our mission? What vision do we share for the




future? How do we get from where we are to where we want to be? How do we evaluate our progress? The answers are different in different sectors of the university and all find themselves struggling to enhance simultaneously the many faces of quality at Lehigh.

Lehigh's leadership group of a dozen people is called the Presi- dent's Council and it is at this level that the lessons of the quality movement must first be addressed. The next step is cross-functional teams throughout the university, building slowly to maintain the integrity of the process and learn as it progresses. The planned commitment to the quality principles in the curriculum awaits successful recruiting of the right faculty leader in the College of Busi- ness and Economics and that member will join the university plan- ning team as well.

The Third National Symposium on the role of Academia in National Competitiveness and Total Quality Management was hosted at Lehigh University in July of 1992 with the theme "Quality of Action in Academe." The Lehigh story was shared with the partic- ipants and the university people learned from others who were, in some cases, more advanced in their progression through this process. In learning from each other the Lehigh people expect to progress further along their chosen path, exploring the many faces of quality in academe.

ONE PROFESSOR'S PERSPECTIVE

This author experienced a sense of breakthrough when a senior professor in the philosophy department sent him a copy of his new textbook called The Great Conversation. In his inscription he wrote the following: "To Peter Likins, who believes with Socrates that the unexamined university is not worth governing." This author hasn't told him yet that Socrates was taking the first step in Total Quality Management.

REFERENCES

ASQC/FICE (1988). PROCEEDINGS OF THE MAY 26, 1988 SEMINAR PROPOSING A NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL QUALITY INITIATIVE.

ASQC/FICE/COPA/NCATE (1989). SUMMARY PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECOND NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL QUALITY INITIATIVE (NEQI) CONFERENCE.

Coate, Edwin L. (1990). IMPLEMENTING TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT




IN A UNIVERSITY SETTING. Corvallis: Oregon State University.

Deming, W. Edwards (1982, 1986). "Out of the Crisis." Cambridge: MIT Press. FOUNDATIONS OF QUALITY (1991). QIP, Inc. and PQ Systems, Inc. 10468

Miamisburg-Springboro Road, Miamisburg, Ohio 45342.

Goldratt, Eliyahu and Jeff Cox (1984). THE GOAL. Croton-on-Hudson, NY: North River Press,

National Quality in Education Consortium Newsletter, available from Professor Forrest Gale, Defense Systems Management College, Room 202, Building 202, Fort Belvoir, VA 22060-5426.

Senge, Peter M. (1990). THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE. New York: Doubleday. Taylor, Arthur R. (1991). "How We Practice What We Teach." JOURNAL OF

QUALITY AND PARTICIPATION 14 (March):78-81. Tribus, Myron (1990). QUALITY FIRST: SELECTED PAPERS ON QUALITY

AND PRODUCTIVITY. Washington, D.C.: National Society of Professional

Engineers. Walton, Mary (1986, 1988). THE DEMING MANAGEMENT METHOD. New

York: Dodd, Mead or reprint, New York: Putnam.

Ziemba, Susan (1990). TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT RESOURCE BIBLIOGRAPHY. Haverhill, MA: Northern Essex Community College, Center for Business and Industry.

APPENDIX: DEMING'S FOURTEEN POINTS

1. Create constancy of purpose for improvement of product or service. 2. Adopt the new philosophy (of total quality management). 3. Cease dependence on mass inspection. 4. End the practice of awarding business on price tag alone. 5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service. 6. Institute training. 7. Institute leadership. 8. Drive out fear. 9. Break down barriers between staff areas. 10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the workforce. 11. Eliminate numerical quotas. 12. Remove barriers to pride of workmanship. 13. Institute a vigorous program of education and retraining. 14. Take action to accomplish the transformation. (Deming, 1982, 1986:23)



leadership, change, and tqm: the lehigh university case

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