Management Team of Xerox

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 preeminent role as a market force. Largely anecdotal and lacking formal references or traditional scholarship

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able to produce better quality equipment at prices that actively competed with Xerox and its competitors. The result was a shocking one for Xerox, which began to lose market share. In the late 1970s, the company took action and instituted a commitment to quality that would enable it to transform its business. Although Kearns initially had the top priority as being one of improving profits, the top priority was soon changed to improving customer service. If customer service were improved, it was felt, the profits would take care of themselves. The entire quality program took more than four million man hours and cost more than $125 million, but it produced a 40 percent increase in customer satisfaction and a marked decrease in customer complaints. The orientation phase of the program took six months to complete, and four years was required to reach the entire organization with the quality message. Supervisors learned from their superiors, then passed the knowledge onto their direct reports. Managers became coaches, and a team approach was implemented. When employees noted that promotions were based on criteria not directly related to quality, the role model manager concept was implemented. This required new criteria to gu

Category: Business - M