Eagar TQM origin story — Chipman Room undergraduate exchange

Tom recounts asking undergraduates ~20-25 years prior what TQM was; one answered "it's BS." Tom's response — "you may be right, but why do top CEOs believe it's a revolution" — frames the entire course this semester.

So I'm going to be teaching Total Quality Management, and I'll get to that tomorrow. Why am I teaching Total Quality Management this semester? Because I've been listening to Total Quality Management for years. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, when one of the heads of department, I actually had a bunch of undergraduates in the Chipman Room, and I said, have any of you ever heard of Total Quality Management, what is it? And one of the students says, "it's BS." And I said, well, you may be right, but why do some of the top CEOs of the country believe it is a revolution in manufacturing? So we're going to spend six hours exploring what it is and whether it's a revolution. And the bottom line is, you're both right. It is both. It has some real content, and so I'm going to try to help you understand which part is which. And Simone — there you go, he can tell you what he's doing.