Where Most Needed

In a paper relevant to charitable as well as for-profit business, David Strang of Cornell University and Robert Davis of McGill investigate the growth and decline of the 1990s management fad of Total Quality Management or TQM. 

The significance of the paper for the charitable world is in identifying the proliferation of generalist consultants as a hindrance to the diffusion of innovations that require skill in implementation. The authors identify the absence of professional credentials in the consulting field as a contributing factor to the boom and bust cycle of management fads. 

The solution that the authors offer is that managers should insist that consultants have a strong technical grounding. "Better to do nothing than rely on superficial knowledge," they suggest. 

Current areas of application for these observations about fad surfing in the charity industry include board governance, nonprofit technology (NPTech, community informatics, and Web 2.0), social enterprise, and volunteer management (where there is a heated debate on some e-mail lists over whether professionalism is even desirable).

The paper, "When Fashion Is Fleeting: Transitory Collective Beliefs and the Dynamics of TQM Consulting" appears in the April/May issue of Academy of Management Journal (subscription required) or you can take a look at this long press release or Phred Dvorak's story in the Wall Street Journal (subscription) or this brief in US News & World Report.  The really expert can find it on the Internet, but it's not publicly linked. 

TQM provides a good example of the fad cycle because it involved a technical side (statistical analysis of business processes) and a behavioral side (organizational factors like teamwork and business culture).  They tracked the number of references to TQM in the 1990s as well as the consulting firms that identified it as a practice area. 

Staring in aeronautics industry journals in the late 1980s, references to TQM then started appearing much more frequently in more and different kind of publications without a technical focus leading to a sharp peak in 1993.  The decline in mentions in non-specific journals is also steep, though not quite as steep as the increase. 

Throught this the period studied, the types of consultants offering TQM services in a consulting industry directory changes, moving from firms with specialty experise to generalists consulting firms (at the peak of popularity) and then back to the specialty firms as time goes on.  The large increase in specialist consultants peaks a few years after the peak of mentions in general publications and then shows a steady decline, but an increasing number of specialty firms continue to appear. 

The authors draw a connection between the drop of mentions of TQM with stories of failures of implementation.  They look at various hypotheses about the possible reasons for the pattern and conclude that the most plausible explanation is that the sudden entry of generalists without strong grounding in the technical aspects of the technique leads to failures, disillusionment, and rejection of the technique by superficial adopters.  Meanwhile, the specialist firms are more skeptical about adoption, but have more success with implementation and become dominant over time in a reduced market.