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Although it seems to be a familiar old term, Total Quality Management (TQM) is a
relatively new concept in the United States (US). Although it is a familiar phase to most
people in business, it is one that most people cannot accurately define. In this paper, I will
be discussing the concepts and origins of TQM and how it compared to different forms of
management.
Total Quality Management has only been in the United States since the 1980s however, it
has been around much longer. After the end of World War II, the Japanese were looking to
boost their sluggish economy as well as to lose their reputation for poor quality products
that they had gotten on the world market. Many Japanese companies began to look into a
new concept called Total Quality Management. TQM focuses on getting all of the
employees of a company to work as a single unit and removing the focus from individuals
and placing it onto the process. If a product is produced with flaws, there is never a search
for who is to blame for those flaws because it was the failure of the entire company not
just an individual. All of these thought processes helped Japanese companies to begin to
produce some of the highest quality products anywhere in the world.
TQM is looked upon by many Americans as the "Japanese way" of doing business but in
the 1980s people began to realize that the Japanese imports were beginning to sell more
than the US made versions due to the higher quality of the Japanese products. Prior to
