This Thanksgiving, 2020, is unlike any in our living past. Yet we are still healthy, continue to teach (albeit differently), and have much to be grateful for. So I thought I would share with you and your students my memories of a friend and mentor, Philip Crosby, who died almost 20 years years ago. Crosby is famous for his dozen books on management and quality, starting with his classic 1979, Quality is Free, published by McGraw Hill.
Crosby guest-lectured in my MBA classes every semester for a decade and I required my students to select any of his books and write a 1-page report on how they personally benefitted from his insights. To this day, if you visit management offices of quality-conscious manufacturers worldwide, you are likely to hear the words “zero defects” and “do it right the first time,” with Crosby’s 4 absolutes of quality as their cornerstones.
Here are his words about that 1979 book: It goes back to how people think about quality. Conventionally, quality is always looked at as goodness, as gold-plating. Quality is viewed as an expense, a trade-off, something that you have to spend money on. But you can’t manage with goodness as your definition of quality. Quality is conformance to carefully thought-out requirements. So quality is free because it is already built-in. The expense of quality is nonconformance.
Crosby believed that workers are not the problem with quality–that they pretty much do what management tells them to do. He wrote: “People think that quality is some undefinable thing that you only know when you see it. Yet quality requirements are clear. They talk about vague things like delighting the customer, but you can’t tell people what that really means, so you can’t manage that way.”
His 4 absolutes are: 1. quality is conformance to requirements, not goodness.; 2. the basic aim of quality management is prevention, not appraisal; 3. that zero defects is the performance standard, not some acceptable level of defects like 6-sigma; and 4. the measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance.
Time flies by, but Crosby’s books are always worth a second read.