Quality as a cultural phenomenon: learn how to lead change

By William Seidman I had a great evening as presenter at a meeting of American Society for Quality, Portland Chapter last night, meeting with around 30 people from a wide variety of companies and industries including Boeing, Intel, HP, Kaiser Permanente, and FLIR Systems. The topic was “Quality as a Cultural Phenomenon.” I began by asking them if they thought quality was more than just analytic processes, and they all said yes. So then I asked, “What is quality, then?” and most commented about mindset and culture. But few actually spent much time on the culture versus just doing analytics. A lively discussion followed about why there is so little focus on culture. One main issue was they really didn’t know how to lead a culture change I followed this with the Cerebyte change model and the recent findings in this area. It was a great group asking good questions. The interactions were useful, positive and thought-provoking. Someone asked me to keynote another quality conference April 22nd – we’ll see if he really meant it!]]>