It was 25 years ago that Philip Crosby’s watershed book, Quality is Free, was published—a landmark that Philip Crosby Associates will celebrate all year long. At a time when peers such as Deming, Ishikawa and Juran were focusing on the highly technical aspects of quality measurement and control, Crosby’s Quality is Freesent a far simpler message: Senior management must commit to quality for it to transform organizations, and doing things right the first time adds absolutely nothing to the cost of a product or service. In simple terms, Crosby showed managers all over the world that doing things wrong makes costs skyrocket. More important, he showed that management was the root cause of these problems.

The book set off a revolution in corporate thinking because it shifted the responsibility for the quality of goods and services from the quality control department to the corporate boardroom, attacked widely entrenched notions of ‘good enough’ and acceptable quality levels, and introduced zero defects as the only acceptable performance standard, setting the stage for the Six Sigma movement that followed. The book became a bestseller.

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