ZERO DEFECTS IS DOABLE!” Phil Crosby proclaimed. “All over the world, people are doing it all the time.” This pronouncement, accompanied by the impish grin of a man who has made a career out of making radical statements, was made over a table cluttered with the remains of a finished lunch. The small, elegant restaurant, not far from Crosby's summer home in the mountains of North Carolina, provided a ready example of his point.
“Just look at this place,” he gestured around the room, “was there anything at all wrong with this meal? Food, service, presentation—all perfect. A little project brought in on time, on budget, and to the complete satisfaction of the customers. Anyone who says zero defects is a pipe dream hasn't eaten in any good restaurants lately.”
“Probably 90 percent of things that get done are done right,” he went on. “I walk up to the automatic teller machine and stick my card in and ask for $200 and they give me $200 and it shows up in my checking account. No problem.”
Yet, despite the influence of his ideas on quality (see sidebar), Crosby's name is not widely revered among the thinkers in the quality movement. Quality Digest magazine panned his 1996 reissue of his groundbreaking work Quality is Free (McGraw-Hill, 1975) and his name rarely shows up in textbooks on the subject. Why not? Well, Crosby has an opinion about that … in fact, this affable, plain-spoken quality revolutionary has an opinion about almost everything. Here is a sampling:
On the quality movement …
We hear a lot of talk about quality, yet every time you buy something or have a service performed, its disappointing. Are we getting better or worse?
It's better than it used to be because operating management is aware that we have to take quality into consideration. Particularly in the design of new products, we have gotten a lot better.
The main obstacle to quality is the quality professionals. They argue with each other about these little programs and they write books that repeat conventional wisdom and useless statistics. They don't ever bother to understand what I‘ve said in this book (Quality Is Still Free, McGraw-Hill, 1996), that business is transactions and relationships. All we have to figure out is what transaction we are supposed to do and then get it done right. And meantime, let's help our suppliers and employees and customers be successful. That's all you've got to do; that's the whole mission of quality. But they get wrapped up in these little things—like the stupid Baldrige Award. People are finally realizing that adhering to that stuff doesn't get you anywhere. You may win the award but it doesn't get you any respect because it's a self-nomination. That's why every year fewer people apply for the thing. Think about it: 50 applications, maybe, out of seven million companies in the country.
Forty years of butting heads with conventional ideas about quality and leadership hasn't dulled Philip Crosby's enthusiasm for the fight.
They took my nice little idea of quality management and turned it into a junkyard. Quality management is concepts, TQM is procedures. Everyone likes procedures because then you can go around and measure procedures; it doesn't make any difference whether you get any work done or not … but if you want to deal in concepts, then you have to go to the heart of the matter and ask the hard questions. Concepts are truths that apply to all situations. But we're procedure-oriented in a world of concepts.
In management textbooks, your name isn't usually included on the list of quality gurus. Why is that, do you think?
Actually, I am on the list, except I‘m the guru who was wrong!
No, academics don't like my books because they don't have any graphs in them. The people who follow my thoughts are managers, people who actually have to produce something. They need to know: What can I do so that everything that goes out the door, whether it's in an envelope or in a box or in the form of a human activity, is exactly what it was supposed to be—exactly.
Don't Believe in Zero Defects?
Crosby's quality standard of nothing less than perfection may receive a lot of negative press in the quality-theory world. But in the real world, it may be more prevalent than you think. Consider these facts, published in Industry Week (Feb. 3, 1997).
Even being 99.9 percent right leaves a huge margin for error. If 99.9 percent right were good enough:
Banks would deduct 22,000 checks from the wrong accounts each hour.
Pharmacists would process 20,000 incorrect prescriptions each year.
Phone companies would misplace 1,314 phone calls each minute.
Printers would produce 2,488,200 magazines with the wrong covers each year.
Airline pilots would make 730 unsafe landings at O‘Hare International Airport each year.
Hospitals would give 12 babies to the wrong parents every day.
Maybe because of your style of writing and speaking, you've been called the “salesman of quality.” What do you think of that title?
That's not a bad thing to be. The thing about me is that people can understand me. Unlike some of these folks, I talk about real things. My four absolutes of quality—conformance to requirements, prevention, a performance standard of zero defects, and measuring success by the price of nonconformance—any numbskull can understand them. The reason Quality is Free was such a big hit was that it took this subject of quality, which had been made into gibberish, and put it in English. See, I didn't understand it myself, I was in it for years and I never could figure out what the heck—finally I figured it out and then I just separated myself from all the quality stuff and ran ITT. I ran the quality system worldwide in ITT, and we did fine. All over the whole company, everything got better. More profitable. When I wrote the book, I just explained how to do that to executives.
See, the secret to the whole thing is attitude. If you believe that there's no such thing as a blue car, and someone shows you a blue car, you have to assume that that's not a blue car, because you don't believe in it. Conventional wisdom says it doesn't exist.
Now, when you talk to statistical people, there's no zero in statistics, so they start off with the fundamental belief that a certain amount of products have to be bad, that you can never reach zero defects. That thinking sets the standard. Then management says, “Cars that have no defects would bankrupt us because we'd have so much inspection and rework and so on.” Well, I came along and said, “No, just learn how to make the damn things right.” That was such a culture shock, that it got people's attention. And the fact that I am an entertaining speaker is why people thought I was a salesman. But everybody is a salesman. If you don't sell your ideas, who is going to do it?
You have some strong opinions about relating quality to customer satisfaction.
The idea of having requirements be customer-defined is silly. Think about the reality of it. How do you get that out of the customer? You pass off your responsibility to some mysterious group of people called the customers, who don't always know what they want. One of the famous surveys done by electronics companies in the U.S. asked, “If we gave you a machine that you could put a piece of paper in and a copy of the document would appear at somebody's desk on the other end, would you use that?” The result was “No, who wants that?” The Japanese just went ahead and built faxes. Now everyone has a fax. Who could live without a fax? But there aren't many American-made ones. There's a case where they asked the customer what they wanted and the customer didn't understand the business. Also, customers change their minds; they aren't loyal. So when people say the customer sets the requirements, I want to see those requirements, see how they were derived.
And having customer satisfaction as the goal is self-defeating, because your most dissatisfied customers always vaporize. You're asking the choir how they like the church.
So you feel the quality movement has gotten sidetracked?
Well, yes. See, when I started Phil Crosby Associates in ’79, everyone was desperate. None of the quality stuff worked. Then companies like Milliken called their suppliers and said, “Go to [PCA's] Quality School, give us stuff we can work with.” When things started to get better, management stepped back and said, “OK, now we can turn this over to the quality professionals again, and they went back to acceptable quality levels and Six Sigma. As a result, now you get cars that are almost defect-free—but not really.
Now, I don't disagree with continuous improvement … I think that's a good lifetime goal. But that isn't what most people think CI means. They think it means that if we dropped eight babies this week, we'll only drop seven babies next week and six the week after that and then we'll apply for the Baldrige because our percentages will look good. It's a way of getting around zero defects.
On the myth of team synergy …
In your book you seem to be down on teams. Isn't that inconsistent with your emphasis on good relationships at work?
Have you ever been to a team meeting? How many people talk? I don't know of any team that ever solved a problem; usually the real problems are so political in nature that everybody's afraid to mention them during the meeting.
What's the answer to that?
You have to let people take action individually. The more organized you get, the more political you get, the less happens. Here's an example: When I first went to ITT they sent me down to Puerto Rico to look at a telephone manufacturing plant we had down there. I‘m not a telephone expert, but I could see that they were making something nobody wanted. There was no market for it. But there was an executive vice president up in New York that thought this was a great idea. So I went home and wrote a memo that said maybe we ought to forget about this thing and make something somebody is going to buy. The next thing I know, the VP storms into my office—I didn't know who the hell he was—and I said, “Well, I‘m sorry. I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, but the thing is useless, they [in Puerto Rico] all think it's useless.” But nobody down there would ever have spoken up against it.
You see, you need people who have no strings and who can tell it like it is. That's what the quality business really started out to be. The idea was, we would have these people over here who were knowledgeable and could measure stuff and they would tell you when the process was getting out of control, and people would listen to them.
Harold Geneen of ITT says synergy is bogus. I take it you don't believe in it either?
If you take a group and give it a project like “How could we improve the service in this restaurant?” they can do that. But if you talk about a totally new concept for a restaurant, no. Innovative ideas come from the individual. You don't get many innovative ideas out of a committee, unless you have an innovative individual on the team who's planting the ideas.
If you look at the team you'll find one or two people in there that are the thought leaders. Teams have their value but if you go back and look at all the great advances in history it's always an individual that has come up with that. There are a lot of signatures on it, but Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.
Now, there are a lot of great ideas that individual minds come up with but they may not be able to make anything of it. So you need somebody who is an innovator and an implementor. That's a pretty tough combination. Somebody who gets the ideas and then actually goes and does something about it.
When you talk about the people who get things done—who get the right things done— there's a very small percentage of them who actually do something. There are people that if they never came back to work it wouldn't make any difference. About half of them. That's not cynical, that's just right. You ask somebody to do something, and then you've got to remind them. People are preparing, they're getting ready to do things, they plan, it takes forever and ever and ever.
Years ago I was on a corrective action team and nothing ever got done, so after a couple of meetings, I started messing around and fixing things. I just found out who was responsible for it, found out what the problem was, asked them to do something, get it done; pretty soon all the problems were off the list. And I got hell from my boss. I “went around the system.” There are no systems! People write about systems, but in reality there are only individual people getting things done. You just have to find that person who will get things done and get out of the road.
On project management …
Project management is like quality management, it's both more and less than it's cracked up to be … Doing it by the project management method, this thing came in on time, under budget and it worked. That's the whole idea. But then you start to get complicated and professional and, really, you don't have to be a professional to do it. The professionals in almost every profession screw the thing up.
For example, at Martin Marietta we had a whole room devoted to PERT charts that were supposed to tell us what to do, how to make decisions, etc. Problem was, the room was always locked. We had a problem one day and went down there to look at the charts and couldn't get in, couldn't find the guy who had clearance to get in. So there we were, the planning guy and the manufacturing guy and the engineering guy were all standing there in the hall and we all talked about this big problem. So I said, “OK, you can do this and I‘ll do that,” and we chatted for a minute and we went off and solved the problem. Later I walked past the PERT room and it was still all locked up! What good does that thing do? I asked myself. None of these managers would ever think of going to that system for help. See, it's like I said: The real work happens outside the system—the system is just entertainment.
On leadership …
Tell us about your new book (The Absolutes of Leadership, Pfeiffer, 1996).
I was giving a talk to a group of senior managers and someone asked me, “What does an executive or manager need to have to be ready for the 21st century?” And, on the spot, it came to me that they needed four things:
An agenda (organizational and personal).
A personal philosophy of management. Not the latest book or fad (what Dilbert calls “the dead woodchuck under the porch”), but something you've thought about. It should include a philosophy of finance. Mine is that finance is nourishment, not a control mechanism, it's what you feed the company with. And a personal philosophy of quality; mine is based on prevention. You don't just believe whatever the quality people tell you, like “Here's the quality thing of the year, ISO 9000. Boy, we'll get signed up with this and we'll be set!” Anybody who believes that deserves whatever happens to them. Then you have to have a personal philosophy on relationships. Mine is to help employees, suppliers and customers be successful.
Then you have to build enduring relationships. Let me give you an example: I treat everybody the same. That's just how I am. I talk to the doorman like I talk to the chairman like I talk to anybody. They had this surprise party for my 70th birthday and 300 people showed up, most of them ex-employees whom I can do nothing for, but we have enduring relationships.
Finally, you have to be worldly. Be comfortable dealing with any kind of people in any situation. It's a true world economy, but most people still don't think in those terms. I talked to a bunch of college presidents in Orlando a few weeks ago, and I thought, well, I might as well give them their money's worth, so I told them that the education industry in 1996 reminds me of the auto industry of 1966. They are convinced that they know all the answers, they know how to do it, that this is the only place that you can come get an education …
But if you think about what you can do electronically, there's no reason people have to come sit in a classroom to get an education. If you look at Asia, there are 3 billion people, half of them under 25 years old. What a market!
Being worldly means you expose yourself to different people, different cultures. I have gone out to talk to many companies where there would be 40 fat, white, gray-haired men in the audience. Those guys are going out of business, because when you all look the same way, all think the same way, you all get the same golf handicaps and went to the same schools, you don't know what's going on in the world.
Those four items I call the absolutes of leadership. For the rest, they have to buy the book.
On projectizing the world …
The thing that big companies have a hard time doing is recognizing talent. I think that maybe you just can't have big companies anymore.
What will replace them?
Little companies. When you get over 200 people, you can't really manage anymore. When I left PCA, it was 320 people all over the world. I stopped knowing everybody after 200. It got too big.
I think the idea is good of setting up business unit organizations, which are basically projects. If you carve out business units, you could run each one like a project, recognizing that it's never going to go away, but that you have to have a continual influx of new ideas and products, and you can't ever get yourself locked into a mode of operation.
On the dumb things companies do …
IBM, Xerox, GM: they all got into trouble in the ‘70s because they thought they were the market. That was a tough lesson. The funny part of it is, it was very apparent. Back in 1968 I talked to the automotive people and predicted the future for them—you know, that they were going to lose market share to the foreigners, that customers were going to revolt because they made crappy cars, that they treated their dealers bad—and they didn't boo and hiss, but they were very glad to get rid of me. But all those things happened!
How do you explain this resistance to simple truths that seems to keep tripping us up?
Barbara Tuchman wrote a book, The March of Folly, about this very thing. Her definition of folly was that it had to be obvious that this was the wrong way of doing it, that there had to be many other ways of doing it, and that the solutions were not that hard, but they deliberately chose a tack that was contrary.
I suppose it's human nature: People believe a lot of things that are based on totally erroneous ideas. Like, there's no such thing as a blue car.
All I can say is, the Quality Management Foundation in India is putting all my ideas on CD-ROM … maybe someday, after I‘m dead, somebody will look it up and decide that I was right, after all! ■