Aetna, Inc.: Total Quality Management

Organizations use different strategies to change the minds of the employees to, improve the performance and highest possible achievable quality. Involvement of all the people, machines, vendors, and artificial intelligence is known as ‘Total Quality Management’ (TQM). To involve all the associations in the organizational work for improvement of efficiency and effectiveness, the organization needs to change the mindset of the people involved in the process of improvement.

Figure 1 Organizational tools for changing minds

[Source: How do you change an Organizational Culture, Forbs, July 2013]

Any organization that is looking for the quality improvement using cultural import should use leadership tools, management tools and power tools mentioned

is a large health insurance conglomerate based in the United States. This company has been around since 1853, transforming from what was initially a fire damage insurance company into a leader in the health care insurance field. This transformation process had its moments where Aetna faced difficulty transforming itself to match the changing times. In late 2000, John Rowe, MD became Aetna’s 4th CEO in 5 years (Katzenbach et al., 2012). By the late 2000’s the culture in Aetna had gotten to the point where they were comfortable with mediocrity and unwilling to take risks. In fact, in May 2001, Aetna’s stock was selling at a low $5.84 per share but by January 2006, it had recovered to be at $48.40 per share (Katzenbach et al., 2012). This happened in large part due to the leadership of Rowe and the culture shift towards employee engagement that took place during this

Raising their minimum wage costed them $10.5 million (Katzenbach et al., 2015). However, the total turnover costs, factoring things such as training new employees, productivity, employee satisfaction, was determined to be $120 million. If by increasing their minimum wage, they would be able to make a dent in that $120 million (Katzenbach et al., 2015) from a business perspective, the logic was sound. If he could also increase employee satisfaction, he would also be increasing employee productivity.

The World Bank displays the organizational culture in a different and unique way. With the confusing goal of development, the organization has developed itself in the philanthropic underpinning. In the past century, The World Bank has implemented a great example of huge success. Markets like India, Korea, and China have become independent global economies just with the help of the