Is Sustainability the New Total Quality Management?
- Posted June 29th, 2011 by Sarah
Some have described sustainability as the mother of invention but, says John Elkington, quality falls by the wayside when management focuses solely on cost
by John Elkington - executive chairman of Volans, co-founder of SustainAbility, a member of the IIRC, blogs, tweets and is a member of the Guardian’s sustainable business advisory panel. (published 6/22/11 in guardian.co.uk)
As I pack my bags to fly back to London from San Francisco, they are significantly heavier. One reason is that they contain a huge piece of brass I just received from the American Society for Quality, the Spencer Hutchens Junior Medal. And because I had to kick off the society’s first pathways to social responsibility conference here, my brain is also a bit heavier – thanks to all the information I have had to absorb about the links between total quality management (TQM) and things I normally think about.
I started the quest with something of a prejudice. It had long seemed to me that the quality movement can at times aggravate the silo-ing that my concept of the triple bottom line has sometimes promoted, at least when poorly understood.
Consider the International Standards Organization. It launched its first quality standard, ISO 9000, in 1987, focusing on the management of quality in business. Later, in 1996, it came up with its family of environmental quality standards, starting with ISO 14001. And most recently we have ISO 26000, released in 2010 and designed to bring social responsibility into the fold. Continue reading blog
- Posted June 29th, 2011 by Sarah
- Categories: SRO · 1 comment »
June 29th, 2011 at 10:35 pm
Interesting to read the link he provided to the Korn/Ferry Institute article of the same name — from 2007! Wish more people had paid attention to it back then.