Interest in Total Quality Management continues to grow un-relentlessly throughout the globe. Indeed, TQM is not considered just as a powerful concept for driving the improvement of processes and operations in organizations, in the private or public sectors, but it is more and more accepted as a key driver for ensuring organizational competitiveness and the sustainability of corporate performance.

From East to West, North to South, and the uptake of TQM at policy level to help countries build the competitiveness of their industries has been astounding. There has been an upsurge for instance in the number of national Quality Award Schemes such as The Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award (MBNQA), introduced to stimulate continuous improvement, to encourage the transfer of best practices and to guide the growth and development of excellence in organizations so that they are fit to compete at a global and international level. More confidence and encouragement to stress on the importance of TQM and its viability as a serious management concept were received by the amount of evidence which is in the public domain and which demonstrates without the shadow of any doubt that TQM does pay off and that it can ensure performance sustainability.