Evolution in Quality Thinking : A Revisit

Quality thinking has been there as a human endeavor ever since humans started thinking of ways and means of satisfying their (primordial) needs. The search for better things and better ways of accomplishing tasks has always been on their agenda and probably this ‘quality thinking’ propelled human civilization to progress. The authors attempt to trace this evolutionary history of quality thinking to unravel the layers underlying this phenomenon. In the area of managerial thinking, the thinking domain spans over profit thinking, product thinking, process thinking, employee thinking, and customer thinking. Within the spatial thinking process itself, the spread is across inside thinking, inside-out thinking, outside thinking, outside-in thinking, standards thinking, and best-practices thinking. Over the dimension of enterprise value chain, the thinking process spans across input thinking, output thinking, output-input thinking, outcome thinking, and input-output-outcome thinking. The thinking process meanders over scale thinking, scope thinking, pace thinking, and lean thinking in respect of enterprise parameter thinking. An understanding of the aforementioned typology of quality thinking enables us to delve deep into diverse aspects of quality thinking. It is the inexorable integration of the four-way quality thinking that would catapult an organization up on the ladder of world-class quality thinking. The paper addresses these core concerns in quality thinking, and qualitatively charts and captures enterprises on quality thinking map