The Xerox company in the 1980s experienced the sort of problems faced by many companies in a changing economy -- sharply declining market share and declining profits. The company addressed its problems with a management change, altering the leadership style and the way the leadership viewed the business climate and addressed business problems and issues. The result was a more successful operation. Other companies have used similar strategies to reshape management for a leadership structure more dedicated to quality than to responding to crises.
Rank Xerox is part of the multinational parent company, Xerox Corp., and both faced a decline in profits after having been the market leader in plain paper copiers. The company was not prepared for the influx of competition from Japan. Xerox decided on a survival strategy involving quality improvement both as a marketing goal and as a process for internal change, and this approach has helped revitalize Xerox's approach to marketing, human resource management, and operations around the world. The method undertaken is called leadership through quality, and it corresponds to a management approach known as total quality management (TQM). In this regard, Xerox has succeeded against an increase in competition from Japan by borrowing certain management ideas from Japan and turning them to new use.
In the Xerox case, it took some time for the company to recognize the problem and to develop a strategy for coping with it. At the end of the 1970s, the company was at the end of a product cycle, and the product range was comparatively badly differentiated in terms of functional benefits and price. Management first looked inward at the company's productivity and pricing strategies. What really changed the way the company was managed and the direction in which it was moving was a new approach to quality improvement, and this involved the establishment of a market sensing process Xerox called ...