“The Magic Quality Pill”

Leaders get what they ask for, so ask for zero defects.

Long before Six Sigma; long before SPC; long before ISO, TQM, TQC, ZD, and Mil-Q-9858A there were quality products. Quality meaning both goodness and defect-free. Look at furniture made around the time of the America Revolution. It was excellent. Fine inlay, precision joints, superior finishing. The same with fine jewelry, tools, and buildings. Why was that? I’ll tell you, it was what the leader of the work being done wanted.

In every organization, the leader creates the quality standards (what the product should look like), and the performance standard, (how many defects are okay.). It’s the same today; regardless of the complexity of the product, the leaders get what they ask for whether they want it or not.

This is true with sports teams, schools, government agencies, banks, hospitals, fast food joints, classy restaurants, philharmonic orchestras, and so on. More about orchestras later.

Many years ago I was asked to make a presentation about zero defects (ZD) at the Army Commander’s Conference, an audience made up of about 500 colonels and generals. I had four weeks to get ready and I spent every second of my life working on that presentation. My boss, a colonel, told me to forget the romance and techniques and get the message down to one sentence. "Why does ZD work?”

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Comments

Magic Pill

The interview with Eugene Ormandy was a real treat. It is interesting to hear Ormandy speak of the "environment" and "intolerance for error" in orchestral music. In our organization, my department is the pilot project for an intended organizational lean transformation. What's not often appreciated is that we are doing this pilot on top of a failed Six Sigma program. Much of the difficulty relates to our unstated default culture of blame and punishment. It's not so much that this default culture was deliberately put in place. It's more like it is already generally there in the world of work and we all are born into it. Disabling the default culture and putting in place an alternate culture of participation and collaboration is one key role of a leader which you succinctly describe as the Magic Pill. I know something about pills :-). In medicine, there is a saying: "people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care". This is another facet of the Magic Pill diamond. Love your columns.

Zero Defects

I love this article! I've been speaking of Zero Defects for the past couple of years since the company started to embrace "Lean" and the manufacturing managers felt that the defect targets should change from zero to be between zero and maximum. You don't TARGET the center of the allowed specification for defects, you TARGET "ZERO", I've told them. I was over-ruled. I likened it to telling a child that 5 lies in one week would result in punishment so 'let's try to target only 3'. How absurd. You should target 'none'. The come back was that we couldn't afford to run to zero defects and it would cost too much money. I explained that "Lean" is a "Journey" that you try to improve both throughputs and quality and as you ratchet both to be better, it may take some time but it is do-able, the point though is to keep the mindset that we do not want/need/target to put defects into the product. Zero Defects is a mindset that keeps the employees striving to do better. Targeting middle-of-the-road defects gives the mindset that mediocre is good. Mediocre is not good. Mediocre generally puts you out of business. Look at the long-range ramifications. Don't be short sighted.
Thank you for a terrific article Mr. Crosby!