Quality has the wrong name

In many ways it is too bad that no one has come up with a new name for quality. The name quality as we know it has its roots in quality control. Quality police tried to make sure that products did not ship with serious defects. No one really liked the quality police, in spite their good intentions. Quality was like a fruitcake, everyone said good things about it, but no one actually ate it.

Soon the quality police realized that checking for defects at the end of the process was not slowing the number of defects found. So they started working their way upstream. The idea was to stop the defects by going to their source.

It has taken many years, but just like mapping the headwaters of the Nile, by starting at the end of the river and working upstream, the quality police found the source of their quality defects. And just like the Nile, it turns out there is not one source but many. What the quality police discovered is that every activity within a company is directly related to the final quality of their product and service. The quality police have even discovered ways to define all of these activities so that quality is automatically built into them. This is the stuff of legends.

But no one outside of the quality police knows of these discoveries. Why? Because quality has the wrong name! If someone today made a fruitcake that actually tasted great no one would ever know. Quality is still associated with the quality police. No one else will touch it. Total quality management, along with policy deployment, six sigma, lean, and other quality initiatives can transform any company into a global powerhouse. But no one knows this because it is called quality. It’s time to give quality another name.

Comments

[Maurice]

You are spot on, Larry. How can these methodologies ever be adopted on a wide scale basis if they are associated with quality control as opposed to business leadership and basic operating management techniques?

[Gene Rowland]

The reality is that Quality is often used to refer to the environment, the workplace, the processes, and the management. In an earlier life as Plant Manager for a large truck plant, I learned that: If I concentrated my efforts on the Quality of the work experience (the treatment of,safety of, and listening to the workers); And, if we concentrated on the resources and methods to make the product right the first time; Productivity just happened.