Although business leaders and managers of the organization play the key role in company-level quality management (QM) realization, quality professionals should also find opportunities of their own in this connection. Critical questions for all quality experts include the following: What evidence is there that the quality professionals have taken seriously their challenge of QM? Have they stuck to considering their professional topics only amongst themselves at the levels of concepts, principles (i.e. philosophical), and tools? In itself, this is important too, but in order to bring about development, real endeavors are also needed. How could quality professionals grow in their modes of thinking and acting so that new development global and societal conditions (e.g. e-business) can also be taken into account as challenges in organizations' quality approach and to do that in an innovative way. How do quality experts understand the real needs of company leadership?

Nowadays quality experts' work requires wide multidisciplinary competencies including:
- Management practices of the own company, Modern business practices in general
- Management and leadership methodology, recognized QM methodology, Methods of organizational learning, Customer satisfaction methodology (including Kano methodology and CRM), Change management, Knowledge management means, Environmental management practices, ICT management, Information security, Risk management, Work philosophy
- Hoshin Kanri, Quality awards models, ISO 9000 standards, Benchmarking, Supply or partnership management
- Balanced strategy scorecard, Business process management and reengineering, Quality costing and activity based costing, Time based management
- Innovation methodology, Dependability methods, Documentation methods, Statistical methods

Thus proficiency of a quality expert includes two supplementary disciplines:
- Understanding the development of business fundamentals and emphases
- Facilitation of modern quality management and quality assurance principles and tools

Effective dialogue and cooperation is a necessity between business leaders and quality experts. Business leaders know the right things and experts know the best means to do things right. Business leaders are generalists and strongly individuals with strong organizational positions. Experts are specialists and deeply knowing individuals with low position-based authority. Company's future competitiveness is based on knowledge activated for quantitative and qualitative growth of the business. Investor's decisions are based on expectations on the company's growth and future-certainty. Company's market capitalization and e.g. position in recruitment market are greatly originated in company's intellectual capital.

Communication between quality experts and business leaders for quality integration implies that the experts are able to get business people committed to professional quality principles and methodology. This corresponds "selling" them expert knowledge. Also the benefits of the quality approach should be argumented to the business leaders and decision makers in a clear and interesting way. In fact, systematic selling methodology can be applied in this task. Very applicable is so called funnel-methodology originally developed by Jorma Kylander.

Quality professionals should continually maintain and develop their professional knowledge and abilities. For that purpose it is important to have a recognized company-internal expert network (e.g. BEST - Business Excellence Support Team) and also to keep contacts with external expert-colleagues world-widely. In fact, in modern organizations there are no more any particular fixed quality departments or organizations but expert services are arranged through a virtual organization solution.

Juhani Anttila