"Zero Defects"
By Bob Krone, PhD
ASQ Fellow Member

Twenty-five years ago, 1980, Philip B. Crosby published Quality Is Free. When Deming, Juran, and Ishikawa had been focusing on the highly technical aspects of quality measurement and control, Crosby brought a simple but powerful message: “Quality is much too important to be left to the quality control department; senior management must commit to quality if things are to change; and doing things right the first time adds absolutely nothing to the cost of a product or service; a defect that is never created cannot be missed. Identifying and eliminating the causes of problems reduces rework, warranty costs, and inspection.” Crosby emphasized that doing things wrong makes costs skyrocket. And he agreed with Deming and Juran that management was the root cause of these problems.

The book gave corporate thinking new directions. It shifted the responsibility for the quality of goods and services from the quality control department to the corporate boardroom, attacked the entrenched notions of ‘good enough’ and Acceptable Quality Levels (AQL), and introduced Zero Defects as the only acceptable performance standard, setting the stage for the Six Sigma movement that has continued to teach defect reduction.

The Zero Defects concept earned much criticism in the 1980s and has not achieved universal acceptance by 2005. Critics claimed that Zero Defects in production and services was not possible to achieve and that unusual efforts to do so would actually decrease productivity by over engineering and applying energies to an infeasible goal.

But a Google search for “Zero Defects” on 15 December 2005 produced 2,710,000 hits and 12,500 pages in published books.  Crosby International remains active globally in sixteen countries and there are ISO registered companies using the Zero Defects in their titles. Zero Defects is a classic concept that gains momentum as science and technology advance.

In my “Space” Quality Classic (Inland Empire Quality Newsletter, Vol. 13, Issue 1, Jul-Aug-Sep 2005) I identified the issue of “How should ASQ plan for the future of work and service as the human breakout into space occurs?” (1). As time goes by the degree of non-productivity, waste, dangers and destruction associated with defects rises. Zero Defects should be one of the top criteria for the planning of the next great human adventure – into Outer Space.

Like many creative thinkers, Phillip Crosby was way ahead of environments and situations where his thinking was a perfect match. Zero Defects now has a permanent role in Quality Classics.

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(1) See Bob Krone, Ph.D. Editor, Beyond Earth: The Future of Humans in Space (CGPublishing, Inc, 2006, forthcoming). The subject will also be on the agenda for the 18^th Annual Quality Management Conference at Irvine, California, 1-3 March 2006.
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"Standards"
By Bob Krone, PhD
ASQ Fellow Member

The voluntary standards program in the United States was launched by Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover on 29 October 1921 (1). Industrial standards helped form the origin of the Quality Management movement. Chapter 10 of Dr. Deming’s classic Out of the Crisis is “Standards and Regulations.” (2). Dr. Juran’s Quality Control Handbook documents standards in assembly industries, for executive reports, for inspection costs, measurements standards, for product auditing and compliance and under government regulations. (3). Since then ASQ has become one of the world’s leading standards developer, but not the only one.

For instance, China’s Guofia Biazhun (GB) Standards system has over 13,000 standards over subjects like: Material Sciences, Health Care Technology, Metrology, Electronics, Jewelry, Road Vehicles, Shipbuilding, Wood, Petroleum and Military Engineering, just as illustrative examples.

Standards are accounting, far more than generally recognized, for productivity increases around the world. Just two major examples are civilian airlines and personal computers. Because of international standards millions fly around the world daily and the personal computers of hundreds of millions of people communicate daily. Compare that with the standards development in 1950 and speculate to 2050.

Three major standards web sites are:

• National Institute of Statistics and Technologies (www.nist.gov)

• American National Standards Institute (www.ansi.org)

• ISO International Standards Organization (www.iso.org)

On March 3, 2006 at the 18th Annual Quality Management Division Conference in Irvine, California Paul C. Palmes, Quality Assurance Director, Northern Pipe Products, Inc, North Dakota, described the past three years of development by a group of global experts of a new international ISO Guidance Standard -- ISO 10014. The purpose of that standard will be to help quality professionals and top managers to realize financial and economic benefits. And that goal is linked to the relatively new focus within ASQ on the Economic Case for Quality (4). This is a 2006 example of the fifty-year progression of the Quality Movement from products to services to strategy and policy. In the case of ISO 10014, as with many international standards, there will be national and international economic, social and political spin-offs.

 Standards clearly fit the Quality Classic criteria.

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"Teamwork"
By Bob Krone, PhD
ASQ Fellow Member

The most complex teamwork in today’s world is for space missions.  

ASQ presents twenty-four types of Annual Quality Awards (Quality Progress, August 2006, p.41-43).  Although many of them are awarded to individuals, none of them could have been won without teamwork.  The truth is that it is impossible for one person to achieve results in the public or the private spheres completely on their own.  One person may have an innovative idea or concept that earns support from colleagues; but implementing that idea takes many working as a team. 

Phillip Crosby wrote that the purpose of teams goes way beyond “the methodical creation of procedures and actions…..the real learning comes from the experiences that the team members themselves have….  Every person who spends time on a quality improvement management team will grow in his or her value to the company—and to himself or herself” (1) 

Almost twenty years ago Peter R. Scholtes, et al, wrote: “The main agenda of quality projects is to improve a work process that managers have identified as important to change.  The team studies this process methodically to find permanent solutions to problems.”(2) W. Edwards Deming wrote: “The aim of a team is to improve the input and the output of any stage (in the Shewhart Cycle).” (3)       ASQ’s International Team Excellence Award Process (www.asq.org) has five pages of Scoring Guidelines for evaluating team experiences. 

We can assume that humans learned to team up to meet their needs even before they developed language. Teamwork is a classic activity leadership has used in war and peace throughout history. Pioneers and practitioners of the Quality Sciences and Quality Management all recognized teamwork as essential for improving the quality of any system’s performance. 

Teamwork is a solid component of  our Quality Classics.

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1.      Phillip B. Crosby, Quality Without Tears: The Art of Hassle-Free Management, (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1984), pp. 107-108.

2.      Peter R. Scholtes, The Team Handbook: How to Use Teams to Improve Quality (Joiner Associates, Inc. 1988), p. 117.

3.      W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986), p. 89.

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"Projects: Juran to Six Sigma"
By Bob Krone, PhD
ASQ Fellow Member

The two most influential Quality Sciences pioneers were Dr. W. Edwards Deming and Dr. Joseph Juran.  They both consulted industry in Japan after World War II and spent their long professional lives creating Quality Control and Management tools that were fundamental to the development of Quality Sciences that are globally accepted in 2007.

But Deming and Juran approached the world of work with two quite different approached.  Deming was the theorist.  His Deming-Shewhart Cycle of Continual Improvement (PDCA); his Flow Diagram he taught the Japanese in 1950 and his later 14 Points for Transfer of Management were paradigm changes which have survived to today.  In Dr. Deming’s seminars he would tell participants “Always ask first if there is a system in place.”  For Deming the validated theory insures quality improvement.  He fully understood the statistically based tools but he designed them to implement his deductive and theoretical models. 

Dr. Juran took the more inductive approach.  He was a Project Manager.  He was less concerned about macro theory than Deming.  Juran’s definition of a project was “... a problem scheduled for solution.”¹  He invented a three component strategy for solving problems with projects.  He called it “The Juran Trilogy for Quality Processes.”  It was analogous to Financial Management.  The three parts were: 1) Quality Planning; 2) Quality Control; and 3) Quality Improvement.  Each of those major steps has several sub-steps.²

The Six Sigma approach to Quality has not ignored the Deming theories but has concentrated on Juran’s project orientation.  To achieve a Black Belt requires a large set of successful project analyses and solutions.

 Projects are Quality Classics which can be predicted to apply to the world of work in perpetuity. 

^1.  J.M. Juran, Editor in Chief, Juran’s Quality Control Handbook , 4th Edition, McGraw-Hill, 1988, p. 22.31.

^2. This Trilogy he summarized in a video titled: ”Juran on Quality Leadership.”

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"Purpose"
By Bob Krone, PhD
ASQ Fellow Member

Purpose has been a driving force for people and organizations for millenniums.  Quality Sciences and Quality Management pioneers formalized purpose for the analysis and improvement of organizations.  When W. Edwards Deming was creating his “Principles for Transformation of Western Management” he did it for the following purpose:

    “Western style of management must change to halt the decline of Western Industry.”^[1]

Deming’s first point of his “14 Points for Management” was: “Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service, with the aim to become competitive and to stay in business, and to provide jobs.”

Purpose is something one intends to get or do; intention; aim; resolution; determination; the object for which something exists or is done; an end in view (Webster’s New World Dictionary).  Socrates claimed that the purpose of philosophy is to enable the gain of self-knowledge.  Plato believed the purpose of philosophy was to discover reality or absolute truth.  Hegel said that the philosophy’s purpose is to discover the absolute truth in absolute form.  Helen Keller wrote that happiness comes from fidelity to a worthy purpose.  Modern spiritual philosophy sees the purpose of life in improving the environment and world condition for all beings.

Christian author Rick Warren published The Purpose Driven Life in 2002.  It was the best selling book in the world for 2003, 2004 and 2005 and has been translated into more than fifty languages.  The University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality and Healing researches the ways in which purpose dramatically affects aging.  And the Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada conducts a “Purpose of Life” essay competition.  (Info on each of the above can be found with a   Google search).

The last three years of my University of Southern California work (1989-1992) I was the Worldwide Chair for USC’s delivery of the Master of Science for Systems Management (the MSSM Degree).  University faculty hardly ever agree completely on a subject; but we had 300 faculty teaching 2,200 masters degree candidates at 70 locations around the world; and they all agreed that the overall purpose of Systems Management was the improvement of private and public organizations.

Purpose can be for good or evil.  Hitler’s purpose for the Final Solution was annihilation of Jews as competition for the Aryan Race.  I worked with forty-one career space professionals to create the 2006 book, Beyond Earth: The Future of Humans in Space^[2].  There was complete agreement that the purpose of creating human settlements in space is to improve humanity, and its environments, on earth and in space.

An essential action to sustain and improve the quality of  anything – from an individual life through business, industry, government, education, religion, entertainment, media or medicine – is to accomplish values analysis to obtain consensus for what is preferred for the future.  Purpose is inherent in preferences.  When you, as a leader, can create consensus for a purpose, the probabilities of future successes will be high. 

Purpose of decision makers has been the most influential variable in human history.  It will always be a Quality Classic.

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