Teaching quality management in schools

As I continue with my traveling, I keep asking myself the same question over and over “why people can not use simple quality management skills to improve their lives?” I am not talking here about quality management at corporate level, no I am talking about quality management in everyday life, how people can use simple life management skills to relief their sufferings.

Why people cannot understand that by respecting traffic laws, they will get to their destinations faster and with less energy used. Driving in some cities in the developing world is a nightmare, a daily struggle for the commuters. No one respect traffic laws, no police or the police force is not sufficient to enforce traffic laws. As I commute daily in some of these cities I ask myself “why they cannot see what I can see? why they cant see the obvious?”

Struggling with traffic is only one of the difficulties people in major cities in the developing world face in their daily lives. Watching how people live in this part of the world, led me to make one conclusion, spending millions of dollars or even billions of dollars in projects to improve the lives of the people in the developing world will lead to limited results.

While in most of the developed countries, school age children learn the first basic skills in quality management, “to form lines, to respect traffic laws, to keep their school and neighborhood clean, to eat healthy food etc.”, I have never noticed these types of skills being taught at schools in developing countries, or at least even if these skills are taught to the children, they have no place to practice them nor they are encouraged by the outside world to practice these skills.

So the governments and people in general need to understand that to improve their quality of life, quality management skills must be start at early ages with school children and than it must be reinforced by the society at large. Spending billions of dollars in building better infrastructures must be accompanied by developing quality skills in school children.