HKSQ WQM Seminar – The Culture of Quality Research Study

HKSQ organized a series of quality related activities in World Quality Month (WQM) and the 1st WQM event was a seminar named “The Culture of Quality Research Study” which was co-organized with ASQ-HK and ISE Dept., PolyU. This study aimed to understand the importance of culture of quality and its impact worldwide, ASQ has partnered with Forbes Insights – the research arm of Forbes Media – to investigate ways organizations can strengthen quality and the bond between what is said and what is done.

Before the seminar, Minda and I took a photo with our guest speaker Mr. Ronald Kingen.

In the beginning, Dr. Albert Tsang (Former Chairman, HKSQ) briefed HKSQ and ASQHK background as well as the coming activities. Then he introduced our guest speaker – Mr. Ronald Kingen who is Founder and President of the Continual Value Improvement (CVI) Group with over 40 years of leadership experience in global organizations. He is a Past President and Chairman of the Board of ASQ.

Firstly, Mr. Ronald Kingen explained why explore culture of quality. He quoted CEO of IBM (1993-2002) statement that “What I learned was corporate culture is not part of the game. It is the game.” Then he also quoted CEO of GM (2014) that GM focused on costs in the past and own makes the customer ‘our compass’.” Peter Drucker said “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”

It expected that the benefits of Quality Culture included “Innovate”, “Benefit from technologies” and “Optimize risk-taking”. Moreover, the propose and objectives of the whole concept of this research were to find the way making your organization better, constantly improvement and moving organization to the next phase.

The following diagram showed the survey composition in both Forbes for C-Suite & Senior Executives and ASQ for Quality Professionals. There were some key findings which summarized as follows:
i) Customers’ demands are a main driver of a quality culture
ii) Quality vision and values are clearly stated
iii) Greater than 50% plan to increase investment in quality in the next 18 months and 17% of which call the investment ‘substantial’.

However, Exhibit a Quality Culture of organization rating that CEOs & C-Suite (75%) and ASQ for Quality Professionals (47%) had different views. It may because CEOs & C-Suite tended to receive filtered big-picture material that had been ‘prettied up’ for management.

Then Mr. Ronald Kingen mentioned the drivers of company to pursuit of quality and the top three factors included Customer Demands, Effectiveness & Profitability, and Competitive Differentiator. Respondents rating had 76% effective to identify customer needs and expectations for quality; and had 63% effective balancing value perceived by customer against delivery costs.

We had a tea break.

After tea break, Mr. Kingen discussed the incentives used for quality culture included regular performance reviews, internal award, etc. It was observed world class company responded higher percentage than the overall. Then we also discussed how to link KPI to Quality.

Finally, Mr. Kingen introduced some warning signs of a weak culture of quality and the number one was CEO & Senior Executives rarely discussing quality!

Q&A session: many of participants discussed how to enhance culture of quality in the company so as to “Live in the culture and Work the talk”.

Mr. Peter Fung (Chairman, HKSQ) presented a souvenir to Mr. Kingen.

We have dinner with Mr. Ronald Kingen to thank you for his seminar to share the most recently ASQ research for our members.

Reference:
HKSQ - http://www.hksq.org/
ASQ Online Self-Assessment - http://asq.org/culture-of-quality/