A few years ago, I was working with a high-tech company that had built market leadership around world-class product quality, then lost it. Several years prior, the company had gone through a cost-cutting exercise. One outcome of the exercise was a decision to outsource engineering on core products, and while this accomplished the objective of increasing margins for a short time, the brand’s differentiated reputation eroded fairly quickly, market share dwindled, and sales discounting pressure grew.

Gain executive sponsorship, but how?

I was reminded of this while working on the LNS research, “Quality Management in the Board Room: Building the Executive Business Case for EQMS.” As a part of that research, we’ve quantified the effect of top-executive sponsorship on quality maturity. Companies with top-executive sponsorship have, on average, adopted three times as many quality best practices as those without this sponsorship.

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