Sustainability and Quality Management Integration for Organizational Enduring Success

Abstract

The merging of sustainability principles and quality management practices to create key paradigm for business that goes a long way in ensuring long term excellence and resilience in today’s fast paced, dynamic global business context. This foundational work examines the synergies between two critical domains of organization, exploring how to balance an organization’s quality initiatives in light of sustainability goals towards integrated performance gains and long term value creation for all relevant stakeholders.In a world of environmental issues, social responsibility pressures and more heightened stakeholder expectations, today’s forward thinking companies are coming to the realization that accounting for short term financial numbers is no longer good enough; they need to start taking into consideration higher order values such as social and environmental responsibility, as part of a broader discussion of their (dis)engagement with stakeholders at every level of the supply chain. An aligned approach, where sustainability objectives drive quality management systems, can set the companies on an interesting path of innovation, efficiency and competitive differentiation through new avenues.The evolution of the quality management philosophies is traced, the origin of the sustainability movement is tracked and the relation between these two areas is illuminated. In the following, we review some of the more practical approaches for integrating sustainability into core process as well as explore leadership impact in building a culture of continuous improvement and responsible stewardship and show some cases that have tried to marry quality excellence with sustainability principles.Overall, this comprehensive end of the guide gives the readers the opportunity to come out into a sophisticated view about how a successful merge of quality management and sustainability can transform organizational transformation, value creation in stakeholders and for business success in the long run in an increasingly growing world.