After a busy day in meetings, I’m back in my home office, cozy in my sweat pants and reflecting on the day’s activities.  This morning my husband and I had coffee with an associate who is in the process of starting a consulting business.  I really enjoyed talking with him and trading information on resources.  The meeting was definitely value-added for us and I hope it was for him as well.  I always enjoy sharing ideas and information - it  really gets the mental wheels turning.

One surprising takeaway from our meeting stemmed from the image of an American flag on his business card.  His new company name:  Quality Leadership.  The image:  The stars and stripes.  Now the wheels are really turning.  One of the strongest ideas I associate with being American is that of freedom.  We enjoy freedoms envied by most of the world.  And is America a leader in quality?  Indeed, it is.  

But if you’ve been around for any length of time you know that not so long ago this was not the case.  If the title of this blog caught your eye, you’re probably familiar with Philip Crosby and his pivotal 1979 book Quality is Free.  Here’s a little background.  During the late 1970s and into the 1980s North American manufacturers were losing market share to Japanese products largely due to the superior quality of the Japanese products.  In fact, my entry into quality as a career is due, in large part, to the quality movement of the 1980’s.  Thanks to the work of Crosby and his counterparts W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran and the pop-culture management guru Tom Peters, America was waking up to the fact that Japan was beating us in quality, cost and increasingly, market share.  We went “in search of excellence” with Peters who found companies like Harley Davidson executing breathtaking turnarounds by focusing on improving the quality of their products and involving their employees.  (Think Quality Circles and SPC - two big ideas that gained widespread popularity during this time.)  Remember the Ford slogan “Quality is Job One”?

If you were an engineering student in the 1980’s and you thought statistics was cool, quality was definitely the place to be.  My first job was “SPC Coordinator” at a company that made refrigeration timers for the appliance industry.  (SPC by hand - spreadsheets and PC’s were relatively new at that time!)  After two years, and a stint as a Quality Circle facilitator my husband and I were recruited by GE to work at a newly acquired plant making ranges in Georgia.  He as a process improvement engineer and me as a purchased material quality engineer.  At the time the service call rate on some product lines was a staggering 30%!  We were part of a wave of new quality professionals that were hired to  help dig our companies out of the quality ”hole” that had developed over the previous two decades.

Just a side-note - today that GE range plant is an industry leader in employee involvement, quality and innovation and consistently leads the division in financial performance.  It was such a privilege to be part of the outstanding team that made that happen.

Back to Crosby.  The legacy of Crosby’s work is arguably the concept of Zero Defects.  The idea that products could be produced with zero defects followed the logic that if we can design processes to prevent problems then we don’t have to pay to detect or correct problems.  The cost of paying to detect and correct defects is known as the Cost of Poor Quality, another one of Crosby’s key ideas and contributions to what had become conventional wisdom.

Let’s bring this back to the title of the blog…Quality is Freedom.  I believe that quality is, indeed, a tremendous source of freedom.  When you’ve successfully built processes that consistently produce a high-quality product or service, you’ve gained a lot of freedom.  Freedom from what?  Firefighting.  Excess inventory.  Expediting.  Sorting.  Rework.  Schedule changes.  Overtime.  Customer complaints.  Did I mention firefighting?

You know, I don’t remember the last time I heard someone arguing that improving quality would cost too much money and wouldn’t pay back.  Philip Crosby would be proud that logically almost all of us prescribe to his thesis that quality is free.  But if the logical argument for quality doesn’t resonate with you, perhaps the emotional lure of freedom from all that pain will help you decide to make quality your “job one”.

  Top 10 signs that you might need Lean….10.  You can’t leave the building you work in without employees calling asking you what to do (including evenings, weekends and holidays).