Leadership and the ISO Management System Standards

Leadership: Meetings – A necessary Evil? Meetings – we all have to live with the idea of attending meetings during our careers. It starts at a very early stage in our careers, when we attend staff meetings, production meetings, etc. The further we progress through the ranks, the higher our position, the more meetings we have to attend. But why are there so many meetings, and more importantly, are they actually always necessary? Are they always productive? According to anthropologist Helen Schwartzman, meetings in the organization have a “sense-making” purpose.   The meetings make the organization visible to its members, as well as making the members aware of their purposes and actions, and their relationships to other members. In companies we have many different types of meetings. Each has its own purpose: Board meetings Management meetings Staff meetings Team meetings Etc The question is: Is it possible that meetings can be counter productive?   If many auth...

The last blog that I posted quoted some information from a book by Philip B Crosby, titled “Quality is Free”. In the opening section of the book, Crosby makes the following statement: “Quality is free. It is not a gift, but it is free. What costs money are the unquality things – all the actions that involve not doing jobs right the first time”. Crosby goes on to say that not only is quality free, it is "an honest-to-everything profit maker”. But there is a problem for many organizations. How do we measure the costs of quality? Typically organizations look at things like the number of customer complaints, defect ratios, products returned, field failures, warranty claims, etc. So, how does this relate to accurate financial reporting? In many organizations it does not. Financial statements are very precise when it comes to things like inventory, sales figures, marketing costs, employee compensation, etc. But quality? It is reported as “good”, “not quite on par”, “deteriorating”, ...

  Thoughts on Top Management and Quality Management How do members of top management know about their responsibilities as far as quality is concerned? This is a very valid question. The easy answer is that they should know, since it is in the best interest of the organization that they are managing and leading. But really, how are they supposed to know? Philip Crosby in his book “Quality id Free”, hits the nail on the head when he states that part of the job of top management is to make certain that all parts of the job of management is to make certain that all management functions must have the opportunity to perform their responsibilities , also as far as quality is concerned. He further states that the problem is that most of the people arrive in top management positions by making their way up through a single division of the organization, such as finance, human resources, engineering, operations, etc. These are limited, specific functions, and these people may not have any i...