Close your eyes and make a mental list of companies worldwide that use quality as their strategic weapon for achieving value for shareholders. Chances are you have some great examples, but most likely it’s a small list. Given the huge number of companies in every industry that aren’t on your list, I'd like to highlight an aspect of corporate governance that deserves much more focus than it receives in most organizations.

Do boards in the companies you know do a good job representing their customers as key stakeholders? We’re talking about the customer who pays for the company’s product or service here. Why don’t we have more names on our lists? Isn’t this a great opportunity for sustained financial performance just waiting to be tapped across industries and countries?

Perhaps you missed a few names, given the one-minute constraint you were working with. However, the responsibility for your short list, in large part, lies with companies’ boards. What is a board’s role in helping companies make quality a key strategic weapon? For this article, “quality” means the combination of product or service quality, customer-focus, productivity, cost and waste awareness, and continual improvement.

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