Critical Evaluation of Literature on TQM and Radical Change - Essay Example

Critical Evaluation of Literature on TQM and Radical Change Insights on Change Weick and Quinn (1999) differentiate radical from continuous change.Continuous change, also called first order or incremental change, is ongoing, evolving, and cumulative, characterised by constant adaptation, idea generation and application. Radical change is second order or episodic change, infrequent, discontinuous, and intentional. It often involves replacing one strategy or programme with another, and usually results from unexpected shifts in external (competitors, markets, customers, technologies, and legislative climate) or internal (firm politics, knowledge base, or other uncertainties) factors. Radical change is usually emergent, spontaneous and unplanned, although Mintzberg (1989) noted that even carefully planned and executed change would have emergent impacts. Ackerman (1997) distinguished two types of radical change: transformational and transitional. Transformational change requires a shift in conduct that results in an organisation significantly different in structure, processes, culture, and strategy. Transitional change seeks to achieve a known desired state different from the existing one, examples of which are the basis of much organisational change literature (Kanter, 1983; Nadler and Tushman, 1989). Insights on Total Quality Management (TQM) TQM refers to a management process directed at establishing organised continuous development activities involving everyone in the organisation in a totally integrated effort towards improving performance at every level (Almaraz, 1994). It is a management philosophy and business strategy rooted in the works of Deming (1986), Ishikawa (1985), Juran (1988), and Crosby (1989). Hackman and Wageman (1995) lists TQM's four general principles: Success relies on every part of the organisation meeting the needs of both internal and external customers. Quality is an effect caused by processes in which the causal systems are complex but understandable. Most workers are intrinsically motivated to try hard and to do well. Simple statistical methods linked with careful collection and analysis of data can yield insights into the causes of problems within those work processes. TQM focuses on work processes, explicit identification and measurement of internal and external customer requirements, analysis of variances, use of cross-functional teams, management by facts (data), learning and continuous improvement, and the use of process management heuristics. Through data collection, analysis, hypothesis formation and testing, process changes can be devised and introduced steadily and continuously to improve quality. TQM and Radical Change Whilst radical change is episodic, emergent, second order, transitional or transformational, TQM is designed for continuous, planned, first order, and developmental change. Here lies a conceptual discrepancy that may lead us to conclude that having a TQM culture does not prepare a firm to manage the radical changes affecting it. TQM focuses on incremental changes to work processes designed for a given set of assumptions defined by customer needs, a legislative climate, and technology conditions. What happens if these assumptions undergo a radical change We review the literature on the issue and inquire if other change management tools may be more appropriate. Lewin (1951) conceptualised change as a three-stage process involving unfreezing (the existing organisational equilibrium), moving (to a new position), and refreezing (in a new equilibrium position). Schein (1987) elaborated that unfreezing involves disconfirmation of expectations, creation of guilt or anxiety, and provision of psychological safety that converts anxiety into motivation to change. Moving to a new position is achieved through cognitive restructuring, often by identifying with a new role model or mentor and scanning the environment for new information. Refreezing occurs when the new point of view is integrated into the total personality and concept of self and significant relationships. We apply this framework to study organisational reactions to radical change. Unfreezing: Redefining Strategies Firms facing radical change need to unfreeze some key elements of TQM: the emphasis on control, identification of change barriers, redefinition of quality content, and re-assessment of customer satisfaction. Sitkin et al. (1994) suggested that emphasis on control characteristics of traditional TQM is not well suited to conditions of high task uncertainty, a limitation that has not been recognised in the popular TQM movement. They added that although TQM's fundamental precepts can accommodate conditions of high uncertainty, the way these basic precepts have been articulated, extended, and applied has not reflected the distinct, learning-oriented requirements to cope with radical change. Firms can develop a broader, more theory-driven perspective on TQM that clearly distinguishes control from learning goals and that address limitations in TQM conceptualisation and application. Firms can also re-design TQM programmes to adjust to regulatory and market realities by identifying two major types of formidable barriers to change: industry-specific (affects all organisations in a line of business), and organisational (not specific to external environmental problems but may impede a firm's capacity to deal with any form of change). TQM re-design must adapt and anticipate emerging issues, and innovate in achieving economically and environmentally sustainable performance (Post and Altma, 1994). TQM's bias for process rather than content would not be of much use to firms facing radical changes, requiring a redesign of performance expectations. TQM must consider the firm's market advantage, product design efficiency, and product reliability as key features of its programmes in addition to traditional focus on process efficiency (Reed et al., 1996). One particular problem is that many quality improvement programmes are wrongly classified as TQM. This loose adoption of TQM rhetoric, the absence of implementation of TQM principles, and a dearth of studies on behaviour change produces a gap in knowledge about effects of TQM programmes in the face of rapid change (De Cock and Hipkin, 1997). An exploratory study (Yasin et al., 2004) into the application of TQM in service organisations concluded that the latter are lagging behind their manufacturing counterparts in effective deployment of TQM programmes aimed at operational and strategic objectives. Giaever (1999) raised questions concerning TQM's innovative capability in a period of drastic change such as new technology, substitute products, and dramatic increase in prices of purchased goods. He warned that process ownership by employees might obstruct a radical redesign of processes (innovation) needed to cope with changes, supporting Argyris (1994) that TQM focus on employee satisfaction might be counterproductive, hindering the identification of fundamental problems and their solutions, and Perrow (1986) who indicated that the common belief that happy employees increase productivity needs to be refined. Moving: Seeking New Models Firms with TQM cultures can consider several models, those that incorporate new perspectives such as emerging capabilities and aligning performance measures and business strategy, or six-sigma, re-engineering or business process redesign. Day (1994) suggested combining the emerging capabilities approach with TQM to help organisations be more consistent with their market-driven business orientation, understand better what they do, and measure the bottom-line. This organisational orientation can help firms design change programs that enhance market sensing and customer linking capabilities, distinctive features of market-driven organisations. A comprehensive change program to enhance these capabilities must include diagnosis of current capabilities, anticipation of future needs for capabilities, bottom-up redesigning of underlying processes, top-down direction and commitment, creative use of information technology, and continuous monitoring of progress. McAdam and Bailie (2002) noted that the effectiveness of TQM as a model for business improvement is dependent on continual alignment between performance measures and business strategy in the face of a rapidly changing environment. Coping with radical changes that impact on business strategy should be an integral part of TQM within the firm. Firms usually resort to the six-sigma approach to cope with radical change. McAdam and Lafferty (2004) acknowledged increased organisational and academic interest due to growing competitive pressures and cited examples of large-scale improvements in defect and process measures attributed to this approach. However, they noted a shortage of critical studies on six-sigma beyond that of "how-to" and descriptive accounts that focus on measures and results rather than employee involvement and motivation. They explored the development of six-sigma from both a process and a people perspective and concluded that this can be embedded in the organisation by putting greater, or at least equal, emphasis on the people factor. Davenport (1993) cited firms that succeeded or failed in combining business change and technology initiatives. He highlighted the role of new organisational structures and human resource programs in facilitating process innovation, an approach that combines information technology and human resource management to improve business performance and help management lead the firm out of modest growth patterns and into highly effective competition. Built around new technologies and motivated workers, process innovation begins with a commitment to a strategic vision from senior management and is characterised by a vast scope that crosses multiple business functions and ambitious goals. Love et al. (2000) argued that because TQM's short-term benefits are relatively minimal in a world of radical change, more firms prefer re-engineering to seek radical performance improvements. They suggested that organisations considering implementing re-engineering initiatives should re-address their existing approaches to quality so that an adaptive learning TQM culture can be cultivated. Malhotra (1998) differentiated TQM from BPR using Davenport (1993) as in Table 1. He noted that BPR is getting reconciled with TQM towards a broader, more comprehensive process management concept by evolving from a tool to help firms cope with "radical change" to one that accounts for contextual realism (Caron et al., 1994). It is easy to confuse TQM with BPR. Walston and Kimberley (1997) likened BPR to 'TQM with steroids' despite what might be seen as basic conceptual differences between the two. Buchanan (1997) attributes to the lack of precision surrounding the focus and methodology of BPR the ability of politically motivated actors in the firm to influence change, shaping potential outcomes in their favour. Refreezing: Getting Down to Work Firms that have identified models of quality improvement need to execute revised strategies by revitalising the role of marketing in strategy execution, getting employees to buy into the new quality initiative - either the redesigned TQM strategy or BPR - and identifying clear strategies for sustainability. Revitalising the role of marketing in the strategy execution process is an important part of TQM efforts (Piercy, 1998). Reviewing marketing strategy implementation issues in a period of a weaker marketing paradigm leads to the emergence of a more effective processual view of the business. The author attributed firms' inability to cope with radical changes to a disordered TQM focus on 'lean enterprise' and 'lean thinking' that led to downsizing and disappearance of the marketing function in many firms. Gatchalian (1997) emphasised that continuous improvement requires the participation of everyone to develop plans of continuous improvement. Employees and management must partner in meeting the ultimate goal of customer delight in the face of radical change, enabling the acquisition of knowledge and skills and fast but low-risk decision-making. Correct problem identification and rectification leading to continuous improvement can only be achieved through effective people empowerment. Newman et al. (1998) cited a major U.K. bank that achieved corporate transformation and dramatic improvements in service quality through a combined TQM-BPR programme focused on employee communications, work redesign, recruitment and reward processes, and the introduction of customer research-based quality standards. The transformation increased customer satisfaction and retention at a time of declining employee satisfaction. Sustaining TQM-based change management is a challenge facing organisations. Buchanan et al. (2005) identified several factors to sustain change, and suggested that in the face of radical change, working practices that fail to adapt are targets for change, and that stability is not a condition to be achieved but a symptom of inertia, a problem to be solved. They developed a provisional model of the processes influencing change sustainability and decay, highlighting dependence on multiple success factors: substantial, individual, managerial, financial, leadership, organisational, cultural, political, processual, contextual, and temporal. Critical Evaluation of TQM Practice Basic Case Facts I work at the XXX Bank in Northern Ireland. Historically, there have been four main banks in Northern Ireland but in past years some larger banks like the Bank of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the Anglo Irish Bank established their presence, concentrating on the business market and offering services threatening to gain market share at our bank's expense, whilst Alliance & Leicester and Abbey National became our main competitors in the personal banking market. Confronted with the entry of more established competitors offering a wide range of services, we decided to develop and introduce a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) banking strategy that we consider a 'radical change'. Many UK banks have adopted this strategy with varying degrees of success and similar TQM effects (Newman, 1998). To ensure success of the CRM strategy in our bank, which had a TQM culture in place, management made a series of decisions following the three-stage change model of Lewin and Schein: unfreeze, move, and refreeze. Planning and Executing Change Stage 1: Unfreezing The bank needed to unfreeze some key elements of TQM: the emphasis on control, identification of barriers to change, redefinition of quality content, and the assessment of internal and external customer satisfaction. Faced with certain competition from other banks, management crafted a competitive strategy that would bring us out of our comfort zone as an established local bank into a local bank that understood the growing and more sophisticated needs of customers. The toughest part was accepting that our customers' tastes were changing, now that they were aware of new products and services offered by competitors. We realised that unless we matched our competitors we would lose our customers. As our General Manager said in his interview (Appendix): "Our competitors are like sophisticated adults coming into town to teach our children new tricks, and unless we learn those same tricks and teach them to our own, we'll lose many of them, maybe almost every one" A major problem was that our General Manager was too autocratic for some of our employees. He behaved like a grade school teacher rather than the leader of a group of intelligent people, which we considered ourselves to be since most of us had an idea of what needed to be done. My colleagues and I regularly discussed our competitors and asked ourselves why we did not do anything to match them. As Buchanan (1997) pointed out, I now understand that our GM may have had a political agenda, slowing down the bank's TQM efforts to highlight his leadership role for the time when a more radical response to growing competition was needed. This worked to his disadvantage as our change management efforts encountered several difficulties arising from a lack of buy-in from our employees. Contrary to what Yasin et al. (2004) claimed, our service organisation was committed to TQM, and we were good at customer service. We just felt that some people in management wanted to keep things so they can exercise a greater degree of control, especially over processes more familiar to them, as Sitkin et al. (1994) argued. Following Reed et al. (1996), our market advantage and product reliability were key features of our TQM programme. We admitted we could always improve on process efficiency and needed to upgrade our information technology (IT) system. The radical changes we faced because of competition gave our management the financial justification to accelerate our IT investments. An important part of the first stage was levelling of expectations amongst customers, both internal and external, that we derived through internal and external surveys and focus groups. Thus our management secured buy in from everyone, although some dissension was unavoidable up to the end since some employees were sceptical of the whole effort. One of the keys was acknowledging industry and organisational barriers (Post and Altma, 1994) and agreeing on how these barriers could be overcome. During the early discussions, there was talk of a major BPR programme in the bank, which several employees saw as too radical, as De Cock and Hipkin (1997) predicted. Since we had a TQM culture in place, some thought that BPR was only an excuse for lay-offs or additional workloads without adjustments in compensation. Fortunately, our management decided that instead of BPR, the programme was presented as part of our ongoing TQM efforts. This may not have been precise as we shall soon see, but it worked. Having accepted that changes were inevitable, and that we needed to make adjustments in our organisation to the growing competition, we were ready for the next stage. Stage 2: Moving into Position In the second stage, the bank, which already had a TQM culture in place, refined our change model, incorporating new perspectives such as emerging capabilities and aligning performance measures to business strategy. To minimise misunderstanding, processual re-design was included as part of the ongoing TQM programme. We had a firm business strategy in place, the main features of which were to reach an asset size of XX million by maintaining a XX percent annual turnover growth rate and expanding to XX branches within the next five years. Our bank's employment was also projected to grow to xxx employees in five years. The arrival of competitors threatened the bank's business strategy, so we had to react by adjusting both our quantified objectives and the time frame established for achieving them. Early on, we had an idea of an emerging capability (Day, 2004) we needed to develop: CRM. We had already planned for it but in the face of radical change, management decided to accelerate its implementation on top of our existing IT system. We decided to develop a CRM System that would allow the bank to improve and monitor: Customer Intimacy: enable trends or information on contacts, strategy, accounts, and other customer issues to be logged. Marketing Intelligence: know the needs and preferences of existing and potential customers. Business Intelligence: know the capabilities of competitors, industry trends, and industry issues. Analytical Applications: allow customer data mining and analyses, full inventory of systems or services, and determine the efficiency of information systems and technology. We also learned that CRM is not as it is commonly mistaken just a set of computer applications or tools, but a set of activities devoted to managing the customer chain. It is more correctly a philosophy that when embraced, planned, and well executed will enhance the customer experience and provide competitive advantage (Beynon-Davies, 1998). At this stage, our bank refined its definitions of these four processes to fall within the scope of our existing TQM programme, giving us a very important insight: the importance of leadership in managing change. As already mentioned previously, our incumbent GM approached the change management effort in a way that was unacceptable to many. Fortunately, the other managers directly in contact with us did their work very well and were able to sell the big ideas. The change was presented as an improvement that would benefit us all, not only the internal but also more importantly the external customers to whom many of our front office workers had become familiar. This second stage required realignment of performance measures linked to CRM and business strategy (McAdam and Bailie, 2002), allowing us to develop a revised measurement framework that helped us assess the success of our change efforts. Everyone in the bank realised that the need to adjust constantly to dynamic and complex change would be part of our professional life and that unless we accept this as a fact, we would never find any work fulfilment. We also considered the six-sigma approach and several variants of BPR, but we never tried them as top management rejected these initiatives. We learned later that some managers within the bank found these approaches too sophisticated for our level of business operations and that adjusting to the new CRM might be complicated enough at this stage. This does not, however, preclude our using BPR in the future. Stage 3: Refreezing In this last stage, the bank management had to execute on our revised strategies. We decided to revitalise the role of marketing in strategy execution, solidified employee buy-in to the new quality initiative (the CRM system), and identified clear strategies for sustaining our efforts. We redesigned products and services to match or surpass those our competitors offered, relying on market studies conducted for the CRM programme (Piercy, 1998). Some products were new to us, so we had to learn how these tied in with our current menu of product and service offerings. We also segmented our customers into particular categories depending on their status: Large Business, Small Business, Agriculture, Professional Individuals, Students, and Senior Retired Individuals. We also developed a consistent approach to customers in each of these particular segments. The other concern was ensuring that the appropriate staff members were placed in customer facing roles. Then, a training program was developed not only for these customer relation staff members but also for all those in supporting roles at all levels of the organisation (Gatchalian, 1997). It was a massive exercise, and in the middle of the execution phase our GM was replaced. Although we thought this would derail the change management effort, we were surprised to realise that it was the key to accelerating successful implementation of our plans. His replacement was more collaborative in approach and achieved greater and faster buy in from everyone. The GM's behaviour was slowing down staff buy-in, perhaps because the devolution of the customer relationship function to front line employees threatened to diminish his (the GM's) pre-eminent role as the bank's face to the customers. Without the CRM system, the GM was the chief figure that somewhat limited the bank's ability to interact with as many customers as possible, and this may have accounted for our inability to set and achieve over-arching objectives in the past. Another important decision made was to ensure that an appropriate development programme was put in place for continuous learning, as suggested by Buchanan et al. (2005), to assure the sustainability of our TQM efforts in the light of the changes that were taking place. In addition, we developed a system of customer surveys that monitored both external and internal customer satisfaction and retention as part of the bank's Marketing and Human Resources (HR) strategies to improve our services and systems. The bank upgraded its IT systems to increase the number of delivery channels available and made improvements in our product suite. What Happened Next: Success The bank's CRM system has been fully implemented for two years as of the date that this paper was written. The management, our employees, and more importantly our customers deem the changes to be a success. Our customer surveys showed that we are hitting our targets in terms of attracting new customers and retaining our customer base. We are also selling more new products. Best of all, bottom line improvements are evident. Thanks to the training programmes, our learning curve was manageable and we minimised transaction and business-related errors. We lost very few of our profitable customers, but we hope to win them back as we make refinements and improvements in our CRM system. We also learned that we could build on a TQM culture in place and use TQM concepts to respond to radical change. Whether the exercise is called BPR or a redesigned TQM (looking at Table 1, what we did seemed like a combination of both), this is secondary compared to the ability of the organisation to capitalise on having a learning and adaptable culture in place that is focused on customer needs. As we learned from developing our CRM strategy, a quality effort can succeed with right leadership. Amongst all the lessons learned from the experience was the importance of management leadership in coping with radical change and executing our business strategies. We all realised the magnitude and seriousness of the challenge facing our bank some two years ago, but we were able to get through in a positive way because of how our management took very good care of the people factor. In a service organisation such as ours, I learned that any well-thought out TQM (or I might even venture to say, BPR) programme would only be as good as the quality of the people who carry it out. Reference List Ackerman, L. (1997). Development, transition or transformation: the question of change in organisations. In Organisation Development Classics, ed. D. Van Eynde, J. Hoy, and D. Van Eynde. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Almaraz, J. (1994). Quality management and the process of change. Journal of Organisational Change Management, 7 (2), 6-15. Argyris, C. (1994). Good Communication That Blocks Learning, in What is a Learning Organization Harvard Business Review Reprint, 1997, Boston. Beynon-Davies, P. (1998). Information systems development: an introduction to information systems engineering (3rd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Buchanan, D. A. (1997). The limitations and opportunities of business process reengineering in a politicised organisational climate. Human Relations, 50(1), 51-72. Buchanan, D., Fitzgerald, L., Ketley, D., Gollop, R., Jones, J.L., Lamont, S.S., Neath, A. and Whitby, E. (2005). No going back: a review of the literature on sustaining organizational change. 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Total quality management - empirical, conceptual and practical issues. Administrative Science Quarterly, 40 (2), 309-42. Ishikawa, K. (1985). What is total quality control The Japanese way. New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Juran, J. (1988). Juran on planning for quality. New York: Free Press. Kanter, R. M. (1983). The change masters. London: George Allen and Unwin. Lewin, K. (1951). Field theory in social science. New York: Harper Row. Love, P.E.D., Li, H., Irani, Z., and Holt, G.D. (2000). Re-thinking TQM: toward a framework for facilitating learning and change in construction organizations. The TQM Magazine, 12 (2), 107 - 117. Malhotra, Y. (1998). Business process redesign: an overview. IEEE Engineering Management Review, 26 (3), Fall 1998. McAdam, R. and Bailie, B. (2002). Business performance measures and alignment impact on strategy: the role of business improvement models. International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 22 (9), 972 - 996. McAdam, R., and Lafferty, B. (2004). A multilevel case study critique of six-sigma: statistical control or strategic change International Journal of Operations & Production Management, 24 (5), 530 - 549. Mintzberg, H. (1989). Mintzberg on Management: inside our strange world of organisations. Chicago: Free Press. Nadler, D. and Tushman, M. (1989). Organisational frame bending. Academy of Management Executive, 3, 194-202. Newman, K., Cowling, A., and Leigh, S. (1998). Case study: service quality, business process re-engineering and human resources: a case in point International Journal of Bank Marketing, 16 (6), 225 - 242. Perrow, C. (1986). Complex organizations: a critical essay. Random House. New York. Piercy, N. F. (1998). Marketing implementation: the implications of marketing paradigm weakness for the strategy execution process. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 26 (3), 222-236. Post, J.E. and Altma, B.W. (1994). Managing the environmental change process: barriers and opportunities. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 7(4), 64-81. Reed, R., Lemak, D.J., and Montgomery, J.C. (1996). Beyond process: TQM content and firm performance. Academy of Management Review, 21 (1), 173-202. Schein, E. (1987). Process consultation, vol. II. Wokingham: Addison-Wesley. Sitkin, S.B., Sutcliffe, K.M., and Schroeder, R.G. (1994). Distinguishing control from learning in total quality management: a contingency perspective. Academy of Management Review, 19 (3), Special Issue: "Total Quality" (July), 537-564. Tidd, J., Bessant, J. and Pavitt, K. (2001). Managing innovation. Chichester: Wiley & Sons. Walston, S. and Kimberley, J. (1997). Reengineering hospitals: experience and analysis from the field. Hospital and Health Services Administration 42(2), 143-63. Weick, K. E. and Quinn, R. E. (1999). Organisational change and development. Annual Review of Psychology, 50, 361-86. Yasin, M.M., Alavi, J., Kunt, M., and Zimmerer, T.W. (2004). TQM practices in service organizations: an exploratory study into the implementation, outcome and effectiveness. Managing Service Quality, 14(5), 377 - 389. Appendix Notes of the interview with Mr. Terence Cosgrave, former General Manager, XXX Bank, conducted on 2 May 2006. How did you classify the type of change the bank was facing Definitely, it was a combination of a transitional and transformational change, a radical change in the face of new competitors with more sophisticated products and services offerings. We knew they were coming, but we never realised they would do it so soon. Fortunately, we had a plan in place and only had to fast track the whole thing, though we knew we had to batten down the hatches and go full steam ahead. How did you decide on the management strategy to adopt in the face of such change We had a TQM culture in place so it was quite easy to decide on this, but there were some quarters asking for a complete BPR initiative that I thought was too radical for the firm. Adopting a CRM strategy was already in the works a few years down the road as we had just upgraded our IT systems then, but we saw that if we are to compete, we needed to adopt a disciplined way of going about it. Our people were familiar with the change management frameworks of unfreezing, moving to a new position, and then refreezing, so we translated this new threat into a set of clear strategies and got ourselves to work. The deadlines were compressed, we assessed our resources, learned that we could go for it, and so we did. I remember that I told our people in a staff meeting that our competitors are like a bunch of slick city-bred adults rushing into town with a bag of sweets and tricks, ready to teach our children new tricks, and unless we learn those same tricks ourselves and teach them to our own, they will end up taking every one of them. We seriously thought that we would lose every one of our customers unless we did something. Please explain these steps - unfreezing, moving to a new position, and refreezing - in the context of what we did at the bank. Unfreezing basically means rethinking our assumptions, processes, our knowledge of what our internal and external customers really want and what would give them delight and satisfaction, taking into consideration what our competitors had to offer. We knew we had to match them, so we had to consider our business strategies and align everything with what the market would be demanding. Moving into the new position required us to choose which of the models available could be used to get us to where we want to go. We had a TQM culture in place, we had several options to choose, and we had an opportunity to either go for everything and change and re-engineer everything or to follow our previous strategy of making incremental improvements. In the end, we decided on what could be called a combination of TQM and BPR by accelerating the implementation of our CRM strategy. The key, though, was building up on what we already had. Refreezing means putting the changes in place and installing the system needed for the sustainability of the effort. We also had one in place based on what we did in the past, and since CRM promised to be a very effective way of getting to know our customers better, we came up with more sophisticated surveys that measured everything that we needed to improve our services to them. Note that we were moving from a mostly personal relationship experience to one that would be powered by IT, so we had a whole lot of other issues to deal with like trust and confidentiality and all that. What in your opinion were the factors that led to your departure from the bank before the full implementation of the TQM plan I think I rubbed several people the wrong way, mostly those who worked with me. One problem we foresaw with a quasi-BPR programme marketed as a TQM programme is that we were going to have a lot of friction that has something to do with the differences between these two change management strategies. For example, BPR is top-down, TQM is bottom-up; BPR is employee, IT, structural related, whilst TQM is processual, mathematical, and cultural. Of course, there were a lot of fireworks, but I would like to think that I managed it well, relying on a good group of managers who reported to me. My replacement, I learned, has done well, and that the CRM strategy is working. I knew it would. Pity I wasn't there to see it, but I've got a bigger bank to run now Wish you all the luck, Luke, and extend my regards to John! Table 1. Comparison of BPR and TQM Process Improvement (TQM) versus Process Innovation (BPR) TQM BPR Level of Change Incremental Radical Starting Point Existing Process Clean Slate Frequency of Change One-time/Continuous One-time Time Required Short Long Participation Bottom-up Top-down Typical scope Narrow, within functions Broad, cross-functional Risk Moderate High Primary enabler Statistical control Information Technology Type of Change Cultural Cultural and structural [Source: Davenport (1993, p. 11) from Malhotra (1998)] Read More