The quality business is all about producing a quality product, right? By that I mean a product that looks and performs just like it was promised. Well, based on the amount of poor quality items and service that I see the quality business is apparently not doing a very good job. I’d guess that there are at least 180,000 souls who make their living in the quality business—inspectors, quality engineers, quality managers, Black Belts, scrap dealers, and lawyers. Despite their efforts, product quality in the United States and in the world is not good at all, in fact it stinks. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

Example one

No, I’ll let you find your own. Do a web search for the word “recall” and stand by for a shock. Just about every major business has a recall; stuff they sold and now have to take back, or fix. Millions of trucks, thousand of baby items, drugs, washing machines, a zillion pounds of hamburger—all are being recalled because of poor quality. Didn’t they know how to make those products right in the first place? We have been making automobiles for a hundred years. Why can’t they be made right? Recall a million trucks? Wow! If tons of hamburger meat are tossed out, it makes one wonder about the tons and tons before they got to the bad product.

Example two

Way back in 1969, as a board member of the American Society for Zero Defects, I had the job of selling the government on the zero defects idea. I made up a presentation for President Richard Nixon. It was all set when world events took over and left me sitting outside the White House with my presentation under my arm. I still have that presentation material. The title is “There is a Quality Crisis in America.” And you know what? If I changed the president’s name from Nixon to Obama, I could give that presentation today. Hmm,  I wonder… well, anyway, I could have given the presentation without any changes to presidents Ford, Reagan, Clinton, George W., and his daddy. From a quality standpoint, not much has changed between Nixon and Obama.

Was it always that way? Did quality always stink? I don’t know. What I do know is this: as long as I have been in the business, it’s been an uphill battle to get a quality product out; a battle with all those folks who—for some unknown reason—don’t consider quality important. And I’m not alone. I’ve talked with hundreds, maybe thousands of quality managers throughout the years. Every single one had a quality horror story. They spend their days, their weeks, their whole careers fighting to get people to do the right thing and to do it correctly. Is that the way it should be? Why do we even need a quality staff? Can’t people do their job without someone looking over their shoulder?

I’ve worked for three major corporations and the U.S. Army. Out of that mix, one corporation and the Army really cared about quality. I left the Army to join RCA as corporate director of quality improvement. Little did I know that it was a suicide mission. I was actually called into 30 Rock, and chewed out by top management for spending a couple hundred bucks on a pamphlet to promote quality. RCA management didn’t care about quality, and due to lousy quality and lousy management, RCA is now gone.

RCA is not a special case. Very, very few corporation managers really care about quality. They say they do—they trot out their motherhood quality policy—but they don’t really mean it. I hear their screams, but I’m right.

It’s just been reported that Toyota might have hidden information about its quality problems. Is it the first to do that? Come on!

So, why is there still a quality crisis in America? Do we need more Black Belts? Quality managers? Inspectors? I can sum it up the problem in three words, “The Big Boss.” There’s an old saying in the quality business, “The product looks like the management.” The products of every business look just like “The Big Boss”—who may be the CEO, the president, and even the plant manager. Somebody is at the top of every organization and that somebody determines the quality of the product. I wonder if they are proud of the way they are viewed by others. I’ll bet it’s not fun explaining the recall of one million trucks to the board of directors. 

The problem is that “The Big Boss”—and most of the little bosses—are more interested in the stock price than the defect level. That’s the way they were brought up and trained. They don’t understand that the stock price and the quality level are directly connected. Ask Toyota. Profit is important and necessary, but profit at the expense of quality spells disaster. It’s like the no-free-lunch mantra,“Quality is free,” but you have to do something to get it and to keep it.

So what’s the answer?

The cure for lousy quality is simple and easy. “The Big Boss” only needs to establish the correct performance standard and provide the wherewithal for quality to happen. It’s as simple as that. If you’re The Big Boss, do it. If you’re not, shove this article under his or her door.