David C. Crosby, quality guru, Zero Defect proponent, and Quality Digest Daily contributor, died this past Monday. He was 80 years old.

Born in Belair, Ohio, on November 9, 1930, Crosby was a U.S. Navy veteran who served during the Korean War. He began his career in Orlando, Florida, working for the Martin Company (now Lockheed Martin). It was there that, in conjunction with his brother Phil, he worked to develop and refine the key tenets of Zero Defects:

• Quality is conformance to requirements
• Prevention is the system of quality
• Zero defects is the standard of performance
• The cost of nonconformance is the measure of quality

"Doing it right the first time" was and continues to be the goal of Zero Defects, based on the understanding that it's much more expensive (and often impossible) to inspect quality into a process. The idea is to prevent defects as far upstream in the process as possible.

Crosby had a long and varied career, including stops at RCA, General Instruments, and Portec Inc. He founded The Crosby Company in 1980 to create software and training programs for quality control. Crosby developed the first statistical process control software program offered for the personal computer.

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