During the 1980s, much of American business focused on improving its quality process in order to better compete with the Japanese. Great attention was paid to issues such as just in time inventory, total quality management and quality circles, and the American quality expert Deming was both hailed and vilified in the press for having introduced fundamental quality concepts to the Japanese some years before. David Kearns was CEO of Xerox Corporation during the 1982 to 1990 period, a time when the company whose name is synonymous with photocopiers faced intense competition not only from American competitors such as IBM and Kodak, but also from the Japanese. During the 1980s, the company undertook a rigorous quality program designed to transform the way the company did business. At the beginning of the 1990s, the transformation was complete and the company had regained a dominant position in the market.
Kearns documents the changes that occurred at the company in Prophets in the Dark, written with David Nadler, an independent consultant. The book is written from the perspective of the ultimate insider, and certainly portrays the management team of the 1980s in a favorable light. However, the book also contains a great deal of history about Xerox and explores how the company could be blindsided by its competition to the point that it nearly lost its pre eminent role as a market force. Largely anecdotal and lacking formal references or traditional scholarship, the book is nonetheless a valuable history lesson in how even the largest American corporations can transform themselves into companies which are able to achieve high levels of quality.
The issues in the book come down to a few: focus, quality, long term commitment and understanding the business environment.
Focus is important because it is easy for a company such as Xerox to lose the focus, or mission, that it has in the market. At Xerox, management became compl...