Well written! We have six "normal" children, albeit one with Down Syndrome, and one reason we homeschool is because they are all so different! Your argument might be bolstered by a review of Plato's philosphy of education: the root meaning of 'education' is "to draw out".

God bless!
Brian Lane

and shuold be branded as nonconforming and locked away without access to publish anything else ever again. Or then again, maybe we radicals can get together and make the world a better place.

Oh Mike Oh Mike what a dream it must have been? Reading this this morning brought tears to my eyes as you have related Quality to the human being. Your writing has touched my heart for within you describe the very essence of failure in the understanding of what constitues QUALITY.
I have been in the management game all my life, i'm 66, and have found that the secret of success as a manager is having the capability to bring out the best in people. To embrace failure and as my dear mother once said, happy are they that embrace change.
It seems in this current world of ours we are always seeking to apportion blame when things go wrong. Instead we should be asking what can we learn from this that will make us better people.
Some time past I worked in a printery with a machine that was worth close to $2,000,000. A huge 6 colour machine that makes the most exquisit prints. One night on the night shift the press operator was printing a very large poster. The job was worth $60,000US. As is normal with the computer controlled machinery of today the machine was self correcting. However the standard operating procedure was an instruction to the pressman to pull every 10,000th poster and check it for correctness. The pressman that night fell in love with the computer control and thought that as the machine was self correcting that he would let the machine run until the job was complete.
And so the machine ran on into wee small hours before signalling that it had finsihed the print run. The pressman went to the delivery stack and pulled the top copy. On placing this on the examination table he noted a big yellow splat right in the midle of the poster. He turned to the rest of the stack and low and behold the whole print run was infected by this large yellow blot..
The whole printery was alive with the failure. In the mens room it was the only topic of converstation. Then the CEO arrived and was duly informed of the failure. He sent for me. I was the maintenance manager, can you explain this he requested? Yes I said the yellow ink duct had somehow come loose and with the machine vibration the duct was slightly cocked allowing the yellow ink to overflow and drip onto the finished poster each time it made a pass.
What to do he asked? Nothing, I answered. He looked strangely at me and then asked me to explain my thinking. In truth the pressman was the best operator they had. This was why he was given the new printing machine to operate. If you sack him you will loose this man of great experience. He will have learnt a lesson here yes a $60,000 lesson but a lesson never the less. Your suggested course of action then, he requested. I advised him to have his secretary put on a morning coffee in his suite and to invite the pressman to explain what went wrong. Then after receiving his explanation he would invite him to have a coffee and biscuit and then seek a solution in preventing this happening ever again.
He did exactly as I had advised. The printery was alive with expectation that the pressman would get the sack and eagerly awaited the outcome.
The pressman finally came out of the CEO's office and headed straight for mine. He stood there in front of me shaking but smiling. He could only utter the words thank you and extended his hand. I shook it warmly and enquired as to what his proposed solution was. But that's another story. This was some 15 years ago and he is still working there to this day. I'm told the quality of his work cannot be bettered.
I now make it my mission to seek out those in the organisation that the company would want to get rid of. The so called no-hopers. I then set about turning these people on. Let me tell you once you flip the switch there's no turning back. Nonconformances become things of the past. Innovation becomes the norm and the rest is runaway success.
Thanks Mike for stirring the emptions this morning I shall have a beautiful day.
God Bless

Rob Langdon
Quality Manager
Biomedical Technology Services
Brisbane
Queensland
Australia

This is an excellent article that captures some of the best, and worst aspects of Quality. As a professional in the quality improvement and business management areas I constantly try to challenge people to think about the philosophy of quality improvement and then think about tools to accomplish the goal. I continue to do some guest teaching at the college level so my experience is a bit different then the authors but the conclusions are the same. The variation in people, and the ability to leverage that 'mistake' to craft highly successful teams is critical to our future success. This article is unique and eloquent and a must read!

Hi Mike,

I've become a huge fan of your columns here in Quality Digest. I love your perspectives on things that matter to me. This latest article is right in there with the best of the things I've seen you do, so far.

I thought this might be a good time to mention a conversation I had with another man I admire, H. Thomas Johnson (http://www.pdx.edu/sba/fp-h-thomas-johnson ), some years ago. Dr. Johnson is active (as I am) with the In2:InThinking Forum, a group of people, often focused upon improving quality, who think a lot about, well... thinking (http://www.in2in.org/ ).

During this particular luncheon conversation, which included Dr. Bill Bellows, founder of In2:InThinking (http://www.csupomona.edu/~rosenkrantz/ime499/coll3w99.htm ), we were discussing diversity as it relates to processes or systems. We all agreed that W. Edwards Deming clearly taught that reducing process variation was a 'good' thing. Taguchi described variation from a targeted outcome as "loss to society", too.

But then, we got to talking about what it takes to improve a process and, you know? In order to improve a process... yes, yes.... it must first be stabilized ('controlled', with variation minimized, made predictable) BUT... and here's the important part.... THEN... you need to DRIVE THE PROCESS OUT OF CONTROL... in a desired direction, in order to improve (or optimize) it.

Left alone, a process may be perfectly in control, with negible variation, but completely incapable of producing desired results. Adjusted without first being in control, a process's variation increases in undesirable ways (deemed 'tampering' by Deming, who used to lament: "... and OFF to the Milky Way we go!"). But, when a controlled process is carefully driven out of control, such as through a Designed Experiment, process optimization has a chance of happening.

I enjoy natural system analogies, so I likened the increased variation required for process improvement to divine intervention, manifest as genetic diversity among plants and animals, including human beings. Tom seemed to liken it more to evolution, and considered evolution to be independent of anything God might have to do with anything. I gathered this might have been because Tom thought divinity shouldn't have anything to do with science. We disagreed on that point, because I believe that divine inspiration is the source of every great scientific breakthrough.

So, whenever I hear about the extent to which we human types embrace and appreciate our unique weirdness, I smile. In my opinion, Human diversity is just an indication that God is continually driving the process of Human variation OUT of control.... to optimize it.

Diane Kulisek
Quality Professional
www.capatrak.com

This was always the problem when I taught school; there was no incoming raw material inspection or quality control. Every item was different and I was supposed to teach all 120 of them to the same standard. The vendors (parents) were often of no help and management was nonsupportive. If I could have set the incoming material standards, I would have taught for nothing for the sheer pleasure of it.

Thank you for publishing this article. It is nice to see someone write about God in the business world, and to see someone willing to publish such an article.

Jack Dearing

Mike, as a person who always struggles to be within the "six sigma" limits of "normal," your article points out a very real issue with today's educational system / process. Like your daughter, school for me was boring which left me to my own devices to make school more interesting (some may say into trouble). Notes were always being sent home to my parents and when no notes were given to take home my parents wondered if I had been to school that day!

Children (and adults) are not widgets. There is no mold or tool that can make us all the same -- no matter how hard we try to "reprogram" someone. We, as parents, should be shouting at the tops of our lungs at educators and governmental agencies who insist on turning our children into mindless beings and diminish their self-worth because they are "different." Of course they are different! Each child (and adult) learns independently. The pathways in our brains form by the experiences we encounter. Each one of us processes information dependent on those experiences. Imagine how truly boring this world would really be if we were all the same.

It's time we embrace our uniqueness, call our uniqueness "common cause" variation and stick to driving out variation on non-living objects.

Mike, this was a great column. Thought provoking as usual. Thanks.

As a former middle school teacher, I have often felt the Baldrige process is being mis-applied in schools. To use our QC lingo, we're trying to test quality into the product (the students) but are not qcing the raw material. Students after all come from a variety of suppliers each of whom will "certify" their product is acceptable. (Don't believe me? sit in on a parent-teacher conference when there is "bad" news)

QC is great when you're trying to ensure safety or uniformity--such as making hamburgers. But you wouldn't use the McDonald's qc chart to define what a 5-star restaurant's food should be surely. (No offense to McDonald's, they're just not the same thing) There would be similarities such as degrees of cleanliness and portion control but again, the raw product may be vastly different. And our expectations would be, too.

But this same effort to QC our kids into very similar positions leads us to train everyone to the same degree: and I don't believe the educational customers (society/future employers/other tax payers) want everyone to be exactly the same. We don't all work in factory jobs any more after all.

We, as Quality professionals need to help define how our tools are used, then help define what the requirements are so we can have Quality students and later, quality citizens.

Although your article was interesting and hit on some key issues facing society today, in my opinion to post something in the public or private eye for that matter which says or even implies ( even if you're trying to be sarcastic as you stated) that GOD makes mistakes....is inexcusable! GOD doesn't make mistakes.

Found this quote I thought was interesting:

"It is nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeking and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."

It was written/stated by Albert Einstein in 1949