Organizing for Continuous Improvement: Evolutionary Theory Meets the Quality Revolution

Abstract The producers of management advice operate in an economic environment where the tides of fad and fashion run strong. Frameworks, slogans, and buzzwords are brought forth in great profusion with attendant fanfare and claims of novelty. Although large rewards often accrue to successful fashion leaders, it is open to question whether organizations actually perform much better as a result of this activity. To the jaded eye, the latest widely acclaimed insight often looks suspiciously like a fancy repackaging of some familiar platitude or truism. Alternatively, it may be that this year’s fashionable ideas are genuinely valuable-but largely because they help to correct a misallocation of attention that was itself produced by an excess of enthusiasm for ideas fashionable in the recent past. Quality is now a very fashionable word in the management vocabulary. Not too long ago, Business Week devoted a special issue to “The Quality Imperative,” declaring in its introduction that a focus on quality is producing a “global revolution, affecting every facet of business” (1991:7). Skeptics are not hard to find, however.