time taken to design, develop, or produce products and services. Because a team may not include a representative of management, the dividing line between labor and management often becomes blurred in practice, as workers themselves begin to solve organizational Thus, adoption of TQM generally requires Cu tural change within the organization as reexamines its past methods and practices in light of the demands of the new philosophy.a six Unfortunately, TQM programs, or other quality-assurance strategies such as sigma(an effort to make error-free products gg.9997 percent of the time, or just 3.4 errors per million opportunities) have not been the final answer to customer satisfaction and productivity improvement. In many cases managers view quality as a quick fix and are disillusioned when results prove difficult to achieve. It gen- rally takes three to five years before quality management programs become insti- tutionalized, 37 and some CEOs and managers are unwilling to make that kind of commitment. When such initiatives do work, it is often because managers have made major changes to their philosophies and HR programs. In fact, organizations known for the quality of their products and services strongly believe that employ ees are key to those results. On the other hand, defects don't matter much if a company is making a product no one wants to buy.