IBM Customer Driven Quality / MIT faculty week

Mid-1990s, when Tom was department head. MIT paired with IBM as part of an industry-elite-universities TQM initiative. Seventy-five MIT faculty spent a week at IBM's executive training center on the Hudson. The episode includes the 410K→320K headcount story and Tom's question about whether eliminating 90,000 middle managers revealed more problems escalating (answer: no).

The reason I did is, when I was department head in the 1990s, TQM was a big hot topic. Most of the faculty in the School of Engineering didn't know much about it. A lot of the faculty at Sloan knew something about it because industry was big on it. So I had a bunch of undergraduates in the Chipman Room and I said, does anyone know what TQM is? And some student in the back says it's B.S. There's a lot of truth to that. But the CEOs of some of the top companies had issued a challenge to MIT and another six or seven elite universities, and we were paired with IBM. About seventy-five MIT faculty, seven and a half percent of the MIT faculty, went and spent a whole week at the IBM executives training center on the Hudson River. Beautiful facility, the cafeteria food was fantastic, it was a fancy motel without the swimming facilities, and they didn't have the exercise facilities. But it turns out IBM was going to teach us total quality management because they felt it was so important.