Measuring business excellence

This paper is prepared for the 1995 World Quality Congress to be held at Sheffield. It is based on the experiences of using TQM methods and tools over nearly ten years on a range of products and services, including software. In April 1993 the European Foundation for Quality Management held a research and training conference in Amsterdam; at one of the workshops, several European Business Schools presented research that showed there is not yet any solid agreement on the definition of TQM. Much of the research since then has similarly failed to answer this point. Given that there is no agreed definition then how can we, as practitioners, be expected to measure it ?