1. Define what quality means to you and your customers, and how it can help to achieve your business goals and compete more effectively for market share.

2. Develop a strategy that defines a specific aspect of quality designed to provide a competitive advantage. Think outside the box; as you think about quality in your division, look at the bigger picture to address the strategy that will best guide your organization in the marketplace.

3. Focus all functions and levels of your organization on quality and continuous improvement. Build a companywide lasting commitment to the process of continuous improvement. Involve multiple departments in cross-functional quality improvements processes.

Kaizen Mindset

Kaizen Culture: 8 Key Elements

Implementing Kaizen: 7 Conditions

1. Use an integrated approach: leverage your service-profit chain; stress attention to details, but incorporate also competitive  benchmarking, evaluation and continuous improvement – all combined in an interactive process with your team members and customers.

  Areas Targeted by TQM in Japan

Build a measurement and benchmarking methodology that will rank you against the competition and provide a mechanism for tracking your progress both independently and in comparison to industrywide best practices. Measure quality improvements both in quality-specific terms and in terms of the impact it has on your short- and long-term business goals. Assess individual contributions to the quality process as part of every employee's periodic review.

Top Management must be completely involved in the quality improvement process rather than simply supportive of it. Allow for independent assessment of the company's quality management system, and its product and service quality, and act on the findings.

Give ownership for quality to your employees, encourage a continuous flow of incremental improvements from the bottom of the organization's hierarchy. Quality is not something that management can mandate or dictate. To gain employee commitment to the quality process, your company's management, control, and reward systems must be modified to give employees greater responsibility and opportunity to become quality and customer oriented and motivate them to strive for continuous improvement.

Make quality a religion. Make quality second nature of all your employees. Without it, all the corporate statements, procedures and standards will prove to be rules that are meant to be broken.