During the 1950s, W. Edwards Deming championed quality management philosophies that helped Japan develop into a world-class industrial center. In 1954, Joseph M. Juran was invited to lecture by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers. His visit marked a turning point in Japan’s quality control activities. In 2005, Gordon Styles planted his own flag of quality in the East. Styles, however, did it by founding a high-tech manufacturing facility in Dongguan, China—not exactly known as a hotbed of quality exports.

The American economy is underpinned by networks. Road networks carry traffic and freight; the internet and telecommunications networks carry our voices and digital information; the electricity grid is a network carrying energy; financial networks transfer money from bank accounts to merchants. They’re vast, often global systems—but a local disruption can really block them up.

As manufacturing becomes increasingly oblivious of where one country stops and another begins, the responsibilities of quality managers have extended beyond the safely measurable and into the loosely regulated wilds of global competition. Quality control now requires a sense of how different cultures perceive the art of doing business. (Hint: It’s not always about teamwork and doing the right thing.)

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Particles of metal in children’s medicine. Adulterated baby formula. Spontaneously combusting smartphones. When scandal is only a tweet away, companies can’t hide from quality failures.

For several decades, manufacturers have been pursuing lean on their shop floors to reduce costs and improve lead times through waste elimination and process improvement. They have been less successful, however, in reaping lean’s potential benefits in their purchasing, planning, and supply chain operations, areas that promise significant potential improvement.

Do we have another automotive cheating scandal? Could helping our economy be as easy as just paying our vendors faster? Last week’s Quality Digest Live contained answers to those questions and a discussion between myself and my co-host, Quality Digest publisher Mike Richman. During the show, we covered:

“How Speeding Up Payments to Small Businesses Creates Jobs”

Pulling out of a country is an expensive proposition for a multinational firm, but it is sometimes required for the corporate bottom line. If the host country changes laws or even expropriates a subsidiary, it is often time to leave or divest.

When we talk about supply chains, we may conjure up images of manufacturing plants, warehouses, trucks, and shipping docks. There is another, truly unique supply chain for a product vitally important to healthcare and life, and it is very volatile at the moment: the blood supply chain.