Building a bandwagon can re-light the quality fire at any company.
Stop blaming top management for all the things that ail the quality profession. While management is not blameless, they are more a scapegoat than a root cause to the problems in the quality profession. They need a reason to re-light the quality fire -- a fire that is being doused by quality busy work.
Top management buy-in and support of quality initiatives is an underlying theme of W. Edwards Deming's teachings. As a wholehearted Deming advocate, I think that Deming could never have anticipated the paperwork vs. quality assurance situation that exists today. It is time that the issue of "top management support" that Deming postulated needs to be re-examined. Prior to Deming's death, the quality movement was showing real, bottom-line results in organizations and ISO 9000 registrations had barely started in the United States.