It is briefly described the historic evolution of management paradigms with the goal of facilitating the understanding of changes ocurred in the field of management and quality management during the last decades; its current state is characterized and its main components are exposed as well as the basic principles of total quality management. The significant crisis of developed countries in the middle of the 70’s generated a true revolution in terms of management and it was marked by the reduction in size of productive units and by management verticality and at the same time for the search of a greater involvement of workers in the company’s life through the creation of working teams and so on. Quality management has gone through different stages since its birth among which we find: quality control of the product, quality control of the process, strategic planing of quality and total quality mangement. Among the main components of total quality management we have: leadership, employee acknowledgement and rewarding, training, customer’s approach, strategic planning, and benchmarking.