Question:What do you call it when a quality manager is caught cheating on a quality exam?

Answer:Benchmarking

Several months ago, I taught a three-day internal-audit class to about 15 people. On the morning of the first day, Joe, the quality manager, gave me an Excel spreadsheet of the lunch orders of every participant for each day of class, including special orders. Joe had previously e-mailed menus to each participant, and they had e-mailed their orders back. He had taken the time to input every order and detail (e.g., extra mayo, no ice, etc.) and had color-coded the lines for ease of reading.

I looked at it, looked at him, looked at it again, and then looked at him to see if he was serious. He was. He was proud of his work, and he thought that I would be impressed. I couldn’t help laughing, even as I tried not to.

You see, Joe doesn’t excel when it comes to Excel, and he’s a very slow typist. He types with one index finger at a time. (Even I’ve even mastered three fingers at a time—middle left, index right, and middle right.) My guess is that it took him two to four hours to organize the lunch, send and review e-mails, and develop the spreadsheet. Meanwhile, several corrective actions assigned to him were late.

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