I
First Person
Firsthand lessons from experienced managers
How in the world, I wondered,
do we get bureaucrats to strive for
"continuous improvement^"
They invented the status quo!
Quality Comes to City Haii
by Joseph Sensenbrenner
Government may be the biggest
and the oldest industry in the world,
but tbe statement "I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you" is
universally considered a bad joke.
Increasingly, people don't believe
that government knows how to belp
or wants to bother. They find concepts like "total quality," "customerdriven," and "continuous improvement" foreign to everything they
know about what government does
and how it works. They wish government would be more like a well-run
business, but most have stopped hoping it ever will he.
Today, fortunately, a new channel
bas opened through which business
and progressive husiness practices
can have an impact on the cost, efficiency, and overall quality of government. This channel is the quality
movement-tbe rapidly growing acceptance of the management prac64
tices tbat W. Edwards Deming developed and persuaded Japanese
industry to implement after the end
of World War II. As more and more
U.S. industries work witb and profit
from Deming's techniques, we have
to wonder whether it's not possible
to develop a public sector that offers
taxpayers and citizens tbe same quality of services they have come to expect from progressive businesses like
Motorola and Westinghouse.
My answer to that question is yes,
it is possible. Moreover, while I was
mayor of Madison, Wisconsin from
1983 to 1989, I took several steps to
make it happen.
Mayor of Madison, Wisconsin from
1983 to 1989, Joseph Sensenbrenner
is now a consultant on the application of total quality management in
the public sector.
I acted in response to a changing
climate. Just as major corporations
like Ford and Harley-Davidson have
bad to improve or perish, so too the
marketplace now confronts governments witb shrinking revenues, taxpayer revolts, and a new insistence
on greater productivity and better
services.
"People are making comparisons,"
says one quality expert. "They can
call American Express on Monday
and get a credit card in tbe mail by
the end of the week, but it takes six
weeks to get a lousy driver's license
renewed. You migbt not think the
motor vehicles division competes
witb American Express, but it does
in tbe mind of tbe customer."
Welcome to Madison
These problems came alive for me
when I was elected to the first of
three two-year terms as mayor of
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
March-April 1991
Madison in 1983. As state capital and
home of the University of Wisconsin,
Madison smolders politically even in
quiet times. Although life had returned to relative normalcy after
the upheavals of the Vietnam War,
government was still on the defensive. The Reagan revolution was cutting sharply into revenues (the city
lost 11 % of total revenues between
1983 and 1989) even as our service
area continued to grow and costs continued to rise.
Madison's property-tax base is
constrained in two ways - naturally
hy the city's location on a narrow
isthmus, artificially by the volume of
land and buildings devoted to the
university and to county and state
government. By 1983, we were taxing taxable property nearly to its
limit and beginning to turn to controversial measures like ambulance
fees to make up the difference.
Budget hearings were hecoming an
annual nightmare. The people of
Madison did not want their services
cut or their taxes raised. In their view,
city services were in a steady decline
already, even as they paid more for
them. From what I could see, in
many cases they were right.
But I felt boxed in. My previous
managerial experience - as the governor's chief of staff and as deputy
state attorney general - was nearly
useless in getting a handle on the
mixed operations of municipal government. As deputy state attorney
general, I had run an office where I
was an expert on every aspect of the
work, and I practiced a good deal of
participatory decision making. As
mayor, I could not run an executive
office, deal with the city council, and
also be an expert on lawn cutting,
snow removal, and motor vehicle
maintenance. And it was out there
on the front lines that systems were
breaking down.
For example, a 1983 audit disclosed big problems at the city
garage: long delays in repair and
major pieces of equipment unavailable for the many agencies that used
Madison's 765-unit fleet of squad
cars, dump trucks, refuse packers,
and road scrapers.
The audit gave a depressingly vivid
and complete picture of the sympHARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
March-April 1991
toms of the problem (for example,
vehicles spent an average of nine days
in the garage every time they needed
work), but it offered no clear explanation of why things were so bad. Like
other managers in similar situations,
I felt inclined to call in the shop boss,
read him the riot act, and tell him
to crack the whip and shape up his
department.
Just about then, an assistant in my
office suggested I attend a presentation by W. Edwards Deming, the then
82-year-old statistician and guru of
the Japanese industrial miracle.
Deming's approach is no doubt
familiar to many businesspeople,
but it was unlike anything I had
ever heard. It sounded like common sense, but it was revolutionary.
American industry, he said, had
been living in a fool's paradise. In an
ever-expanding market, even the
worst management seems good because its flaws are concealed. But
under competitive conditions those
flaws become fatal, and that is what
we are witnessing as U.S. companies lose market share in one area
after another.
If there was a devil in the piece,
Deming said, it was our system of
make-and-inspect, which if applied
I
Applied to toast,
the government
approach to
quality wouid go,
"You burn,
111 sorope."
to making toast would he expressed:
"You burn, I'll scrape." It is folly to
correct defects "downstream"; the
critical issue, he said, is to get your
"upstream" processes under control
so you can guarantee the outcome
every time. To do this, an organization must create a culture of quality;
it must master proven quality techniques. Most important, it must
define quality - first, as continuous
improvement in pleasing customers
and second, as reducing the variation in whatever service or product
it offers.
As Deming described tbe organizational changes required to produce
his culture of quality, I found myself
thinking that this was, perhaps, what
I had heen searching for. It also
occurred to me that it would take a
revolution to get it. Autonomous
departments are the virtual essence
of government bureaucracy, so how
was I going to implement Deming's
command to break down harriers?
"Cover your ass" and "go along to get
along" are ancient tenets of the civil
service, so how was I going to follow
Deming's admonition to drive out
fear and license more workers to
solve problems? Most daunting of all
was his command to install continuous improvement not just as a goal
but as a daily chore of government.
My God, government invented the
status quo! And what were the voters
going to think of "quality" as a cost
item in a city budget?
The First Street Garage
These were some of my thoughts
as I headed back to city hall. But I had
another: there was nowhere else to
go. 1 had already seen that management by objective and threats of
audits were not going to produce
change. I might as well try it, I
thought. And the city garage, where
the rubber hit the road, seemed a
likely place to start.
The manager and mechanics at the
First Street Garage were surprised to
see the mayor and a top assistant
show up to investigate their problems; most previous mayors had
shown their faces only when they
needed a tankful of gas. Over the
next few years I learned again and
again the crucial importance of the
top executive getting personally and
visibly involved on the battlefield of
hasic change.
For the most part, the crew at the
garage were doubters. But when I
met Terry Holmes, the president of
Laborers International Union of
North America, Local 236, I looked
him squarely in tbe eye, pledged my
personal involvement, and confirmed his membership's central
role. He agreed to participate. We
formed a team and gathered data
from individual mechanics and from
continued on page 68
65
FIRST PERSON
the repair process itself. We found
thai many delays resulted from the
garage not having the right parts in
stock. We took tbat complaint to the
parts manager, who said the problem
with stocking parts was that the city
purchased many different makes and
models of equipment virtually every
year. We discovered tbat the fleet
included 440 different types, makes,
models, and years of equipment.
Why tbe bewildering variety? Because, the parts manager told us, it
was city policy to buy whatever vehicle had the lowest sticker price on
tbe day of purchase.
"It doesn't make any sense," one
mechanic said. "Wben you look at
all tbe equipment downtime, the
warranty work that weak suppliers
don't cover, tbe unreliability of
cheaper machines, and the lower resale value, buying what's cheapest
doesn't save us anything."
Our next trip was to the parts purchaser. He agreed witb the mechanic. "It would certainly make my job
easier to have fewer parts to stock
from a few reliable suppliers. But
central purchasing won't let me do
it." Onward to central purchasing,
where we heard this: "Boy, I understand what you're saying hecause I
bear it from all over the organization.
But there's no way we ean change tbe
i
We found one
chronio service
failure whose
cause and
solution were well
known - but no
one ever fixed it.
policy. The comptroller wouldn't let
us do it."
Enter tbe comptroller. "You make
a very strong ease," he admitted.
"But I can't let you do it because the
city attorney won't let me approve
such a thing." On to tbe city attorney. "Why, of course you ean do
that," be said. "All you need to do is
write the specifications so they include the warranty, the ease of maintenance, tbe availability of parts, and
68
the resale value over time. Make sure
that's clear in advance, and there's no
prohlem. In fact, I assumed you were
doing it all along."
Tbis was a stunning disclosure.
Here was a major failure of a city
service wbose symptoms, causes,
and solution were widely known but
that had hecome ehronie hecause
government was not organized to
solve it. No doubt there are dozens of
large corporations that have made
similar discoveries about their own
bureaucracies. (Indeed, Deming
would not he famous in tbe business
world if this were not the case.) But
for me - and, I later learned, for local
governments all over the country and
the world - tbis kind of discovery
was eye-opening.
This first exercise confirmed point
after point of Deming's paradigm and
suggested strongly that what worked
for husiness would work for govemment. To hegin with, tbe source of
tbe downtime problem was upstream in the relationship of the eity
to its suppliers - not downstream
where tbe worker eouldn't find a
missing part. The problem was a
flawed system, not flawed workers.
Seeond, solving the problem required teamwork and breaking down
barriers between departments. The
departments were too self-contained
to be helpful to one anotber, and
helpfulness itself - treating the people you supplied or serviced as "customers" - was an unknown concept.
Third, finding the solution meant
including frontline employees in
problem solving. The fact of being
consulted and enlisted rather than
blamed and ignored resulted in buge
improvements in morale and productivity. When we actually changed our
purchasing policy, cutting a 24-step
process with multiple levels of eontrol to just 3 steps, employees were
stunned and delighted tbat someone
was listening to tbem instead of
merely taking them to task.
They were so enthusiastic, in fact,
that they hegan to research the possihle savings of a preventive maintenance program. Tbey discovered, for
example, that city departments did
not use truck-bed linings when hauling corrosive materials such as salt.
Mechanics also rode along on police
patrols and learned that squad cars
spend much more time at idling
speeds tban in the higb-speed emergencies mechanics bad imagined and
planned for in tuning engines.
Various eity departments - streets,
parks, police - helped the First Street
mechanics gather data, and we ultimately adopted their proposals, ineluding driver cheek sheets for vehicle condition, maintenance sched-
I
We cut vehicle
turnaround time
fronn nine days to
three days and
saved $715 for
every $1 invested
in improvennents.
ules for eaeh pieee of equipment,
and an overtime budget to cut downtime and make sure preventive maintenance work was done.
The result of these ehanges was a
reduction in the average vehicle
turnaround time from nine days to
three and a savings of $7.15 in downtime and repair for every $1 invested in preventive maintenance - an
annual net savings to the city of
Madison of ahout $700,000.
The Second Wave
Despite the satisfying outcome of
this first foray into publie-sector
quality, I understood that we were far
from having enough knowledge and
experience to develop a program for
the entire city work force.
I attended a seeond, four-day seminar with Deming, and I enlisted the
support of university faculty and
loeal and national quality consultants. I also helped found the Madison Area Quality Improvement Network and recruited academic, professional, and corporate members.
Today it is the largest and most active community quality council in
the world. In the years that followed,
corporate and academic experts provided the eity with in-kind .services
that were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
March-April
1 went about setting up a formal
quality and productivity (QP) program that would eventually function
citywide. I hired a full-time quality
and productivity administrator - the
first sucb public-sector position in
the eountry - even though that
meant giving up one of the four policy positions on my staff. 1 also organized a QP steering committee of
top managers to direct the effort.
Originally, the committee itself was
a throwback to an older, hierarchical
tradition: all top managers. Within
two years, it replaced eight of its own
original eleven members with two
union presidents - Firefighters and
AFSCME - three middle managers,
two of our most enthusiastic frontline workers, and the president of the
city council.
The steering committee issued a
mission statement that envisioned
employee involvement, customer
input, continuous improvement, creativity, innovation, and trust. On a
more practical level, it said that the
hallmarks of quality in Madison city
govemment would he excellence "as
defined hy our customers," respect
for employee worth, teamwork, and
data-based decision making. We
called this foursquare commitment
the Madison Diamond.
Finding the lofty words was tbe
easy part; now we had to live up to
them. The first task was to recruit
the initial cadre of what we hoped
would become a quality army We set
out to identify pioneers in several
city departments - managers and
frontline employees with the imagination and motivation to lead tbe
way. Their most important characteristic, 1 found, regardless of political philosophy or training, was
a strong ego: the capacity to take
responsibility for risks, share credit
for sueeess, and keep one eye on
the prize. We found enough of these
people to begin a new round of experiments like our suecessful First
Street prototype.
This second wave included projects in the streets division, the
health department, day care, and
data processing. We expanded the
lesson we'd learned ahout purchasing at the First Street Garage to create a citywide "Tool Kit" program
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
March April 1991
that got workers directly involved in
choosing the most cost-effective
tools and materials for their jobs.
City painters picked the most
durable, long-lasting paints for city
housing projects, for example, and
police officers chose the equipment
they would be using every day in
their patrol car "offices." Selections
had to be made on the basis of hard
data, however, so mnning the comparisons became quality projects for
the employees.
In the health department, the challenge was simply to give citizens
quicker, hetter answers to their questions about clinies and programs.
Employees began to sample and analyze the questions that were coming
in, then on the basis (if that data they
set up briefings for phone receptionists so they eould answer most questions directly. They also created a
clear system of referrals for more
complicated requests. Follow-up
studies showed considerable improvement in the department's level
of "customer" satisfaction.
By gathering and analyzing data, the day care unit shortened its
waiting list for financial assistance
hy 200 names, while data processing customized and thus greatly improved its relations with internal
customers.
^ I expected
opposition from
;, voters, city
council or our
14 unions. But the
resistance canne
from bureaucrats.
As with our first experiments at
the garage, the second wave of quality initiatives worked minor wonders in productivity and morale, and
they met with little resistance - so
long as the projects stayed small.
But as the program grew to involve
more departments and demand more
time of managers, opposition began
to emerge. 1 bad expected problems
from structural sources: the 14 different unions that represented 1,650 of
Madison's 2,300 employees,- tbe
strong civil serviee system that included and protected all of tbe city's
mid-level managers and most of Its
department heads; the 22-member,
nonpartisan city council (meaning
no partisan bloc for the mayor's
program); and Madison's "weakmayor" system of government that
invested little authority in the chief
exeeutive.
But it turned out that the city
council supported the program, and
the unions grew increasingly helpful,
The real opposition was not structural but bureaucratic. There were
individual mangers wbo could not
tolerate the idea of bringing their
employees into decisions or who
resented taking time to reassess tried
and true procedures. There were
employees who scorned the program
as faddish and who looked on enthusiastic colleagues as management
finks. There were cynics who tried to
exploit the program hy packaging
their pet projects as QP initiatives,
and I had politieal opponents in a few
departments who tried periodically
to entice some reporter into prohing
the "QPboondoggle."
Most surprising and disappointing
to me were the harriers ! discovered
between work units, including even
units in the same department. One
department head told bis middle
managers that be expeeted them to
deal with quality prohlems while he,
as he put it, "protected" the department from the rest of city government! He could hardly have devised
a better way to nip eooperation in the
hud and help problems multiply.
The most unsettling indication of
how far we had to go came early in
the program when all the individual
team members in our second wave of
projects independently resigned.
They felt their managers, who
should have been giving them guidanee and support, were simply cutting them adrift and thus setting
them up for failure and hlame. For
their part, the managers believed
that all they had to do was make an
initial statement of support and invite subordinates to "call if you have
a problem." Employees, of course,
took this to mean, "I expect you to
take care of it."
69
FIRST PERSON
"Cargill -1 haven't come to the punch line yet!"
I addressed this problem by discussing it directly with all tbe people
involved. I then restructured our procedures to require specific work
plans and regular, scheduled meetings between tbe frontline project
teams and their managers. Contacts
had to stop being intrusions into a
manager's schedule. They had to hecome predictable exchanges of information and assistance to which team
members were entitled.
Internal and External
Customers
The parts-purcbasing and preventive-maintenance improvements I
described at the First Street Garage
are examples of projects in one department that belped other departments do their jobs more efficiently.
Another example involved trash collection workers analyzing tbe pattern of injuries in their own work,
weighing and measuring the refuse
put out at the curb hy residents, and
studying the lifting requirements of
the refuse-packer trucks. Their proposals for restrictions on the size of
bundles and better design of new
trucks reduced neck and lower back
injuries, saved lost time, and made
working conditions safer, at no extra
cost to the city.
70
In another project, seven city departments tbat used maps in their
work got together, identified duplications of effort, and created a computerized database and a uniform map
bank available to all departments as
well as to Madison's private gas and
electric utilities.
Long lines of trash-filled trucks at
tbe city's recycling plant gave rise to
another project. Employees clocked
truck arrival times, noted how they
clustered, and proposed a staggered
schedule of trasb collections tbat
would cut waiting time. This proposal not only made the system more efficient; it also saved the money we
were thinking of spending on an expanded dumping floor. But until the
data had heen gathered, no manager
was in a position even to consider
such a solution.
In projects that serve internal customers, government workers benefit
directly at the workplace while taxpayers benefit from cost efficiencies
and more smoothly functioning institutions. But such initiatives rarely
make headlines, which go instead to
projects that serve external customers
and visibly change public-service delivery. In Madison, tbe most celebrated example was the creation of
the experimental police district.
During the late 1960s and early
1970s, violent antiwar demonstrations turned Madison into a kind of
battleground. At one point, the governor called in the Wisconsin National Guard to secure tbe university campus. The harsh tactics used
to put down these demonstrations
left much of the community witb a
distrust of the police.
The officers themselves felt battle
scarred and alienated from the city
they were hired to protect. When a
young police chief named David
Couper arrived in 1972 witb newfangled philosophies of conflict management and citizen service, he was assailed with a series of grievances and
lawsuits from veterans on the force.
Couper, a former marine, responded to these tests with what he now
calls a typical military approach:
"You'll be nice to citizens, or you'll
have hell to pay!" Tbis got him
nowhere, of course, and after several frustrating years he took a sabbatical, rethought bis management
approach, and familiarized bimsclf
with Deming's quality gospel. He
then decided, as he puts it, "to run
tbe department for the 95% who did
tbeir jobs well, rather than write tbe
ruLs for the 5% who were difficult."
He identified progressive officers
interested in transforming the department and rebuilding community
confidence. Together they created an
elected employee policy-making
council, a committee to look at the
department's future, and a police
mission statement tbat made peacekeeping the department's primary
role and put law enforcement second.
This was a risky move, considering the probable reaction if people
thought tbe police were neglecting
detection and apprehension, hut the
new strategy had hroader implications. It meant the department could
deploy resources to work on the
underlying causes of crime, interact
with schools and neighborhood organizations, develop relationships with
minority and student leaders, and put
a higher priority on outreach. Most
important, perhaps, it created the
"constancy of purpose" that Deming
has always put first on bis list of techniques for achieving total quality.
continued on page 74
CARTOON BY GEORGE DOLE
FIRST PERSON
In 1986, Couper and 50 police volunteers decided to test tbe new mission statement. Tbey believed that a
decentralized police district with a
neighborhood headquarters would
lead to more effective peacekeeping
by giving better service to residents
and by encouraging officers to
"adopt" the neighborhood and vice
versa. Police precincts were an old
idea, but this was different: officers
in the district would elect their own
captains and lieutenants, determine
their own staffing and work schedules as a team, and network with
neighborhood associations to set
law-enforcement priorities. Having
worked witb Couper for 14 years, tbe
union bad learned to trust bim, and
it accepted the idea.
Several months of surveys and data
analysis resulted in the Madison
Experimental Police District on the
city's South Side, with its station
house located in the aldermanic district of a relatively junior member of
the city council. Because the officers
had done tbeir homework, they were
ahle to nip In the bud an effort by the
council president to locate tbis political plum in her own ward. Tbey
could sbow that their proposed location provided the best service to priority areas and populations, including the elderly, as well as the fastest
access to all parts of the district.
Soon, South Side residents were
seeing their police on tbe streets, at
neighborhood meetings, and at their
doorsteps to interview them ahout
their concerns. Home burglaries decreased 28% between 1986 and 1989,
while the rest of the city saw a 15%
increase. Otber statistics were equally impressive. Dollar savings included the reduction of overtime to 200
hours for tbe whole experimental
district in 1988, eompared with 980
hours for an equivalent number of officers from the central office. This
savings was achieved after officers in
the district ran a study of the kinds
of calls tbat kept police on duty beyond tbeir regular shifts. They discovered that a high percentage of
such calls were not urgent, so they
arranged with dispatchers to put
tbese calls on a "B" list if they came
in less than 45 minutes before the
end of a shift. When new officers
74
came on, they would take those calls
first and attend to them at regular pay.
Although this triage meant some
delay in police response for some
police customers, I never received a
single complaint about it. Tax dollars
were saved, and surveys showed that
citizens were satisfied with police
service and tbat 85% of officers in
tbe special district bad bigher levels
of job satisfaction tban in their previous assignments.
Remaking City Government
As the business reader knows,
Deming-style quality is not a quick
fix or a magic bullet; it is a top-tobottom revolution in the definition
of "business as usual" that takes
years to accomplish. There's no reason in the world to think it can be
done more quickly or easily in government than in industry. But in
Madison, we saw encouraging gains
in just a few years.
Some wary union leaders and
members turned out to be among my
strongest backers. Terry Holmes, the
tough master mechanic and longtime union president, became a
staunch ally. "Before the quality program, all we did was put out fires,"
he once told me. "Morale was low.
The message from management was,
'You don't know wbat you're talking
ahout. Do as you're told."' Once the
program was well under way, however, the message became, "You and
your teammates understand your
work better than management ean.
Tell us how to help you do it better."
Some managers who were initially
highly skeptical became advocates of
the program over time. Speaking of
his own subordinates' quality team,
one department bead told me, "I bad
a 'show-me' attitude for three years and they finally showed me."
In 1987,1 offered my five best managers merit raises from a special pool
of money I had set aside for recognition. To my astonishment, all five
refused the money. To single them
out as heroes, they said, would be setting up a star system and, by implication, denying credit to the efforts of
their teams. Wbat people wanted and
needed was regular, daily feedback
about the things they were doing
well, pats on the back, notes from the
CEO or, in this case, the mayor. They
were performing as teams and they
wanted to be recognized as teams.
We made immense progress in tbe
six years I was in office. By the end of
1988, we had trained 75 team leaders
(who have a stake in the outcome of
team decisions and who lead team
meetings) and facilitators (who come
In 198Z I Offered
merit raises to
my five best
managers. All five
turned them
down - and for
good reason.
from other divisions or departments,
have no stake in decisions, and take
special responsihility for maintaining group process). We had also developed nearly two dozen projects
and produced good enough results to
warrant inviting all of the city's departments to apply for what we
called "transformation status."
Transformation status meant a
long-term, departmentwide commitment to the new management practices, including continuous quality
improvement and training for all
employees in quality-improvement
skills and data-gathering teehniques.
The first two departments to accept
the challenge were the police department and the Madison metro bus
system. A year later, tbe streets division and the health department
joined them.
When I left office in 1989, Madison
city departments were running between 20 and 30 quality improvement projects at a time, five agencies
were in transformation, tbe city was
giving training in quality to every
municipal employee, joint efforts
were under way with several state
agencies eager to follow our lead, and
eity workers left and rigbt were continuing to invent service improvements for internal and external customers. If I ever had questioned the
feasibility of applying Deming's principles to public-sector services, my
doubts had long since vanished.
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW
March-April 1991
In politics as in business, however,
nothing is simple. On the plus side,
my quality program was streamlining Madison city government, and though I insisted on giving credit to
the people who earned it - producing political capital for me. In my
1989 reelection campaign, I received
the rare comhined endorsement of
the unions representing police officers, sheriff's officers, firefighters,
and streets maintenance workers.
Local papers praised my efforts to
modernize puhlic-sector management, and the nationwide State and
Loeal Government Labor-Management Committee, organized by
AFSCME, tbe AFL-CIO, and tbe US.
Conference of Mayors, singled out
Madison's accomplishments in a
television documentary tbat was
broadcast across tbe country on
Lahor Day.
But this recognition was not
enough to win me a fourth term.
Other political factors were more
compelling. There was my incumhency itself - no Madison mayor had
heen elected to a fourth term in
more than 50 years. There was the
reemergence of a popular mayor of
yesteryear in the field ot candidates.
And, most fatefuUy of all, there was a
major money referendum on the ballot. The issue was a lakefront convention center expected to cost $46
million. I believed the center was
important for the eity; many others
did not. I campaigned hard for the
center as well as for my reelection,
and we hoth went down to defeat by
nearly identical margins.
I take consolation in tbe fact the
election was not a referendum on
the quality and productivity program.
To the degree tbat QP played a role,
it was an asset, and even though I
lost, I believe the culture of quality
that my administration introduced
into city government will survive,
maybe even flourish. The city departments tbat embraced it and saw
its power are still active believers,
and my successor bas given QP his
cautious support.
Implementing a Deming quality
strategy is not simply a matter of
adopting a new set of slogans or a
new accounting system. It's a matter
of radical restructuring - part sociology, part systems theory, and part
statistics - all aimed at liberating
human ingenuity and the potential
pleasure in good work that lie at
least partially dormant in every organization.
It may appear that corporations are
in a stronger position to implement
Deming's methods than are governments. Market forces exert great pressure on businesses to undertake fundamental change for the sake of
efficiency and survival. But governments today are under equally ferocious pressure to economize. Deep
federal deficits, state and local budget-balancing requirements, and the
trials of finding revenue in times of
economic contraction or slow growth
will make life challenging for state
and local government managers for
years to come.
My experience in Madison convinces me that quality-oriented businesses can contribute to keeping the
public sector strong and efficient. As
taxpayers, as providers of goods and
services to government, and as community citizens, businesses bave a
direct interest in lending a hand. If
businesses insist on quality, offer
tbeir expertise, share their training
programs with government executives and team leaders, and search for
quality programs to translate into
puhlic operations, the payback can
be substantial. Who knows - we may
actually get governments that are
there to help us.
V
Reprint 91208
"Sayyyyy... do you know anything about budgets}
CARTOON BY MORT GERBERG
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