Fusion Management: Harnessing the Power of Six Sigma, Lean, ISO 9001:2000, Malcolm Baldrige, TQM and Other Quality Breakthroughs of the Past Century

RMA Journal, The, Dec, 2003 by Mary Beth Sullivan

Stanley A. Marash, Paul Berman, and Michael Flynn, ISBN 193219102X, QSU Publishing Company, 2003.

Companies can eliminate wide variation in quality program results by fusing strategic, tactical, and operational elements of previously proposed quality disciplines, say the authors of Fusion Management. The synergies evolve to drive success. The book dissects the major quality management strategies used by companies today (or, as Dr. Marash calls them, the quality improvement "programmes du jour"). Fusion Management attempts to specify a continuous, ever-evolving management system that uses the best of past strategies in a new way, a way that won't fail and won't fall into disuse over time. This book provides a fairly detailed description of most of the major quality improvement programs in use today, and Dr. Marash and his colleagues do a good job of highlighting the issues that individual firms face in executing these programs. But the concept proposed in the book--Fusion Management--can be criticized on the basis of many of the same criticisms leveled at other quality initiatives.

* The process itself might easily become overblown within an individual company. There simply does not seem to be enough focus on generating specific results.

* Fusion Management cannot be the right process for all organizations. Fusion Management focuses on enterprise-wide quality engineering, and enterprise-wide anything can be far more than is needed to deliver the quality advantages sought by many companies. The degree of quality improvement desired, and an individual company's specific quality improvement needs, should drive decisions regarding the most appropriate approaches, tools, and methodologies.

Fusion Management does a sound job of summarizing the intelligent work practices of prior quality improvement approaches and postulates some sound principles in its own right--good reasons to read this book for those considering a quality improvement program. The authors conclude that management strategies fail because organizations want the quick fix; they adhere to the instructions but not the philosophy. While we don't disagree with this statement, it's far too general to describe why results vary widely in the industry. If we were to generalize here, we would assign blame to the lack of clarity around quality's role in the value chain and a lack of clear vision on the part of company leadership regarding the expected outcomes of quality improvement programs.

Mary Beth Sullivan is a partner with Capital Performance Group, a management consulting firm specializing in the financial services industry.