Customer‐driven Strategies:Moving from Talk to Action

Highlights the difficulties of implementing a quality programme within a company from the experiences of two chief executives. Illustrates that 80 per cent of companies which try to implement a quality improvement effort fail at the first attempt. Describes the reasons why and what can be done. Essentially quality can help the organization execute strategy by making it much more concrete and deploying it to every person who needs to implement it, and quality provides a means of saturating the organization with the voice of the customer and the voice of the employee, which leads to far better communication about the key priorities for improvement.