Not Just the Next Abbreviation: With CRM, They Got it Right

Over the course of the past 20 years, professional services firms have jumped on the abbreviation bandwagon with a succession of emerging management trends, only to disembark once they discover that the latest three-letter trend doesn't deliver the results they were hoping for. What most firms don't realize is that these trendy MBA or “management by abbreviation” tools ' including total quality management (TQM), management by objectives (MBO), and now, client relationship management (CRM) ' are best viewed simply as ways to operationalize common sense. With no disrespect to the proponents of MBO, common sense applies; it is easier to manage when you have an objective in mind, than to manage for some random, ethereal goal. Similarly, TQM brought a concept to the management table that became our new common sense, though it should have been our common sense all along. In the aftermath of World War II and with the continued emergence of assembly-line production into the U.S. economy, manufacturers installed quality controls at the end of the assembly line to ensure that every product coming off the line was perfect. Faulty products were then put off to the side to be fixed later. W. Edwards Deming turned the quality paradigm on its head with the TQM model he devised. In a TQM system, each person on the assembly line thinks of the next person on the line as a “customer,” and makes certain that a perfect product is provided to that “customer” every time. Another important flaw with the conventional assembly line was that only the plant managers were empowered to “pull the cord” that would stop the line and allow problems to be resolved. In Deming's TQM model, every worker on the line is empowered to pull the cord and fix something so that the customer is better served. TQM became the new common sense, as it does away with the need for artificial quality control at the end of the line, and replaces it with a far more rational system.