Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1259453
12 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2020 your job done if you do any of those three." We talked about it for a while, and I said, "The only way I'm going to take this on is if you ac- cept that there's only going to be one path, and that is to fix it." We had a good team of people that were go- ing to work for me. They found out within a few days that I was going to be their boss in- stead of their colleague, and we decided on a path forward with part of that path being that we were going to continue with TQM. TQM which had already been started by the previ- ous president. Here's where you have to be careful with some TQM things. TQM itself does not meet your goal, but it is a tool to help you meet your goal. We started to see that in the '90s and made the company meet all of the TQM standards. It doesn't solve anything, not if you're not making money. Instead, we decided to pay more atten- tion to TQM to gain new business and reduce costs. We did that, and it required us to put to- gether a plan that meant we were going to let go of a significant fraction of our employees. The corporation backed us on that plan and we found a way to accomplish it with little pain or suffering for the employees. But to give you an idea, many of the programs that we had put in under TQM were too expensive to continue. We couldn't have all of these TQM meetings. We had to have meetings on "How are we go- ing to get this piece of business?" At that point, we diverted away from the TQM program and worked more toward meeting the goal of mak- ing the company profitable, which we did in about two months. We went from running a significant loss to making huge profits in about 18 months. Then, we stopped even calling it TQM; it was just a way of doing business that met many of the TQM principles and goals. We treated people well. Senior people had to do their job and let those that work for them do their job. Goals had to be set, and meeting them had to be approved. Overall, we ended up being a very profitable company and con- tinued on for about 10 years until all of Morton International was acquired in 1999 by Rohm and Haas, it's now part of Dow DuPont. I put one of our senior managers in charge of TQM. Their job was to use TQM to get to- tal high-quality management not to meet the TQM standards but to meet the objectives of the company. Meeting the objectives of the company was the key factor, and it worked. Johnson: For you, TQM was applied to making sure that you were focused on a business ob- jective, not on the philosophy. Feinberg: Absolutely. And before that, it seemed to many of us who were executives there at the time that we were getting more focused on the philosophy of TQM than the goal of making the business grow profitably. Johnson: Deming packaged up his work and, for a variety of reasons, took it overseas. Japan was a great case study for TQM; those com- panies became large, nimble, and profitable. The transformation in Japan was described as "Deming's philosophy made real." As TQM came back to the U.S., it seemed like it was treated as a philosophy rather than a business tool. Does that ring true to you? Feinberg: We had some partners in Japan, in- cluding a joint venture with a Japanese com- pany using TQM as a tool, but not as the major goal of the company. This particular company we did a JV with was making equipment, and equipment was one of the few things we need- ed that we did not make ourselves at that time. We didn't want to be an equipment company; we were a process chemical company, but we needed equipment to use our chemistry. We'd have quarterly meetings to discuss our goals, and what I saw in them was exactly what we were doing; there was a total focus on the goal of the company. In that case, it was a goal of developing and designing new equipment that would work faster with higher yields and keep the cost constant or keep the cost lower if pos- sible. And they met that goal. Was it TQM that did it? I don't think we ev- er mentioned TQM in our meetings. We knew that they used TQM or some of the facets of TQM. And I'm not saying that TQM hasn't helped a lot of companies because it has. But