R-E throws what you already have away. TQM documents what you already have to improve it. It is like learning to fire cannons by being a cannon ball, a waste. TQM, then R-E, then TQM . In short, TQM's continuous process improvement will not be enough to survive in the 1990s.
Radical change is needed.
Centralization Versus Decentralization . In Traditional Organizations, the trade-off is selecting between the lesser of two evils, that is either selecting decentralization which results in redundancy or centralization which results in unresponsiveness. The way out is through coordinated decentralization. In this approach, decision-making is relegated to disperses units to gain responsiveness and closeness to the customer and centralized units provide support to the decentralized units. The centralized units provide natural aggregation and virtual economies of scales such as fielding common systems, linking them with communications networks and providing central, integrated databases.