High Impact Quality:  Introduction (Continued) 

Quality.  A magic word that keeps your customers loyal, helps your business grow and makes your employees proud.  People throughout the community--friends, family, associates, and total strangers-- extol your products and services and seek every opportunity to buy from you, turning aside your competitors’ imprecations and deep discounts.  Money rains down on your good works like a luxuriant mist across the verdant plain.  Your employees smile.  Your customers smile.  You smile. 

You work hard, but the hard work comes easily, bringing a deep sense of satisfaction.  Results follow your efforts with a certain inevitability.  Not that there aren’t tough times, long hours, difficult decisions; but somehow enough of the twists turn your way that growing hordes of clients are glad you’re in business.  They trust your advice and value your products or services.  Your business is expanding steadily and you are making a contribution to your community, supporting your family, and putting a bit away for your turn in the sun as you pass along your business to the next generation.

Quality, high impact quality, is not quite as simple as a magic word or phrase, but it’s easier than you might think.  With this website you don’t have to be a statistician or a TQM (Total Quality Management) guru to gain an enormous advantage from the best thinking of the most experienced experts in quality.  We’re referring here to the successful owners of small businesses, companies, corporations, non-profits, and research institutions that actually deliver a high quality product or service every day.  We’ve chosen experts from a broad range of these organizations and included their insight and guidance throughout the site.

The Chairman of a wealth advisory firm talks about his commitment to helping clients build legacies for their families and their community.  The owner of an independent bookstore manages to thrive in a highly competitive business that is rapidly evolving technologically, but which still depends on the best personal service in the world to attract customers.  The President and Founder of a strategic planning organization explains how he provides insight and advice to some of the largest and most powerful brands in the world. The President of one of the world’s most respected executive recruiting firms provides his insight on the nature of leadership and the importance of cultural fit in effective organizations.  

With their lessons and examples in hand, you can focus on what you know best:  successfully running your business.  Many of the topics--customer focus, effective employees, client-focused leadership--are explained with increasing levels of complexity as you work through each chapter.  The first few sections of each chapter are common sense guides to direct actions that can be rapidly applied in any business situation.  As this website expands the latter parts of each section will delve deeply into tools, techniques and approaches that require considerably more expertise and investment.  For example, the section on Enhanced Value, will talk through some very simple examples that introduce the concept of thinking about business problems from the customer’s perspective.  The section will end with a non-mathematical discussion of applying control charts to determine the effectiveness of your sales team.  Additional references and resources will be provided on the High Impact Quality website that direct you to technical source books for those inclined to develop a deeper understanding of quality improvement.    

We’ve talked to hundreds of experts and spent thirty years testing their ideas in some of the largest and most successful companies in the world.  Equally important, these ideas have also been tested and evaluated in some of the smallest and most successful companies in the world.  Although quality improvement is often viewed as something of a luxury only large corporations can support, nothing is further from the truth.  Quality improvement is a management process of critical importance to small companies as well; something they cannot afford to ignore. 

Don’t feel obligated to read this material straight through in a few harried sittings.  This is a work in progress with more material forthcoming over the next few months.  In fact, we strongly recommend you enjoy a more circuitous route than forcing your way through as quickly as possible.  This site is intended to provoke thought, not sedulous grinding.  Flip to a topic here or there, look at one of the pictures or ponder a diagram.  Relax and enjoy.  Click on a few of the links and see what other readers are asking or saying about individual ideas or sections.  The website is linked to a discussion forum so you can ask follow-up questions of the author or exchange ideas with other readers. 

Sign up for the High Impact Quality website at this location:  http://www.highimpactquality.com/forum/index.php.  There are links to vendors and other websites with additional information that supplements the material contained in these few pages.  This is a moderated site with a permission-based sign-up process to ensure polite and professional conversations.  Please register your name at the site and permission to sign-on will be provided through a link sent to your email address. 

Skip around, flip through the book until you find something that strikes you as useful or thought provoking.  The goal of this site is to introduce a way of thinking and relating to complex organizations that creates extraordinary value for clients and customers--not to produce acolytes willing to buy the mug and wear the t-shirt (although we hope both may be available soon).  This work is intended to generate a way of thinking about problems, not to provide the solution to every problem that has yet to impact your business.

Okay.  You get it:  High Impact Quality helps you produce loyal customers supported by effective employees which results in profitable growth for your company and happy shareholders for your corporation.  You want it and you want it now.  What do you do?

This is a High Impact Quality guide, not a theoretical treatise.  High Impact Quality talks about the philosophy, theory, and principles of focusing on the customer, but it also says in very plain English, “Do this and you’ll get that.” 

In the following months an implementation plan will be provided as the website is expanded.  If you are in a crisis, you need to start bailing, not fixing the leaks.  The recovery plan will provide some suggestions for quick hits that may give you some breathing room until you can attempt a more deliberate approach.

Start slowly.  Integrating High Impact Quality into your organization or business is a long term investment of time and energy.  Full deployment in a large organization is a five- to ten-year effort, at a minimum.  Within the first three years you’ll make a huge amount of progress, transforming your organization and your results in ways your clients can only dream of at this point.  Five years out you’ll find that 25-50% of your organization really understands what you’re trying to do and are actively engaged in driving the change with you.  At ten years you’ll be inventing the next wave of High Impact Quality innovations and setting new standards yourself.  The worst possible mistake you can make is to rush this.  In reality, people just don’t change very quickly and you’re changing the way an entire organization thinks.  As you have time and interest, read through the rest of the website as it evolves and acquire more information about the fundamentals and principles behind the approach.  At some point you may want to take advantage of the numerous texts and articles about the statistical underpinnings of quality management or even dive into a few Six Sigma texts.  These resources and more will be listed on the High Impact Quality website.

Welcome to High Impact Quality, the essential core of what it takes to deliver great service and move your business to the next level of extraordinary customer relationships.