By Castle "Skip" Newell, III

The accelerating pace of business calls for a new model of the corporation, one that focuses on knowledge and people, the ultimate creators of value to deliver customer-demanded quality. This calls for a new understanding of interdependence and opens the door for knowledge as the "hidden asset" in the next wave of the global quality movement.

Quality and its various proponents over the years have made this issue one of the most confusing and frustrating ones that has ever come onto the business scene. Customer service doesn't make quality a thing unto itself; we know there's no point in beginning a love relationship with the customer if we don't make a profit or meet the company's goals and objectives. What really matters is delivering customer value in the next era, and that can be just as confusing as all the latest theoretical business books that jam the bookstore shelves.

The American Customer Satisfaction Index, coordinated by the American Society for Quality Control and released in mid-1996, shows a barely passing grade at 1.1 percent - a disturbing indicator, as it was lower than in 1995. In the final analysis, what matters is how well a company satisfies its customers' needs and wants.

Customers want a total customer value package. When it comes to quality in the marketplace, the only thing that matters is the customer's experience. How are we going to "up the ante" in the global quality movement to meet these expectations in the future?

Delivering a complete customer value package will take a combination of tangibles and intangibles, experiences and outcomes - all designed to win the customer's approval and thus secure the right to survive and profit in our marketplace. We'll have to do this by bundling the product into a customer package consisting of processes and practices, and intangible features and benefits that take longer for a competitor to duplicate or surpass.

To define the next global quality movement out on the wave, the incredibly creative, yet unseen world of quantum physics will possibly combine with the larger role of the individual within our organizations. In fact, the Newellian Paradox states that as the technology revolution gains velocity and momentum, the role of the individual's thought power and knowledge creation will increase. The faster we receive technology and information, the more we will need to be grounded in leadership, creativity, ethics, spirituality and free-form conceptual thinking to solve problems and achieve job and life satisfaction.

The role of the individual in the next global quality movement becomes more important as technology advances -- whether from the field at Kitty Hawk or from the Iron Age we're leaving now. The process of individuals expanding their knowledge base is how society will be able to use the forces of technology to avail ourselves of the ability to understand the change needed to stay competitive in moving markets.

My company's studies of the revolutionary nature of quantum reality and of the possible links between quantum processes and our own brain processes may give us the conceptual foundations we need to bring about a positive revolution in business and society.

A name for this next stage of global quality delivery and understanding might be quantum value. It is posed as a formula (K+C)E = quantum value. It means adding value to information to make knowledge and adding creativity to knowledge to make added value. Knowledge plus creativity times unique life experiences equals quantum value for the 21st century. It's the ability to create huge new value in the new era.

Quantum value is a framework for understanding intellectual capital, or what I call "wetware." Quantum value is making a total humanistic company for the New Age by awareness and education of quantum value theories. Quantum value is a philosophy for doing business in the 21st century and delivering much more customer-perceived value than will be needed to stay competitive now and in this next era.

The quantum value individual for the 21st century must understand creativity and its source, how to value knowledge awareness and have a highly prized life-experience component. Quantum value brings about a total human being for the 21st century by teaching organizational knowledge, customer service focus, soft and intangible assets, new age marketing, visionary leadership, conceptual free-form thinking, creativity, team thinking and customer-defined quality.

Quantum value individuals in an organization who are "dipped" in this philosophy will be able to deliver quantum customer value and affect the company's abilities by increasing internal competency levels, adding to the number of completed new products per year, increasing the capability for huge new arenas of teamwork, and pushing our ability to develop and maintain closer customer relationships over time. Quantum value understanding can result in more revenue per employee and more income from new revenue streams.

Our task to stay competitive will have to include the quantum value understanding that by working down into the tiniest particles of an organization, which are its individuals, then developing them, training and teaching this philosophy, and by giving them a new self-awareness of knowledge and creativity and unique life experiences, they are going to be capable of delivering what we're going to call quantum customer value in the next era. By going deeper inside our organizations to create awareness of quantum value, (K+C)E =QV, we can deliver quantum customer value and become survivors in the marketplace.

Castle Newell, III is a business strategist and principal with the CPA and Consulting firm of Zainer Rinehart Clarke DFK in Sonoma County, Calif. He has been a frequent speaker to APICS groups, hosts a radio show called The Business Hour -- Conversations with a Corporate Medicine Man, and works out on the frontier of the co-evolution of business ecosystems.

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