Gurus of Quality

Philip B. Crosby, a

exponent of TQM'

Assistant Professor, Goa h-.::

of quality"

- Time Magazine

Philip Crosby is charismatic populariser 0: To-= Quality Management (TQM) and knoV\n ~ :Uncle of Quality revolution.

Crosby's first book, Quality is Free, has "j22credited with playing a large part in beginnir'5 ::."= quality revolution in the United States ",- ~ Europe. He authored a total of 13 books, inc.:.~~~ The Absolutes of Leadership in 1996 and Qunl:;: -- ~ Me, an autobiography filled with lessons frou.~_ published in 1999.

His books, Quality without Tears and Quali~,-:: ~ are easy to read because he used a very Si::-L~~2 language. Philip Crosby's ideas came fro~. r-~ experience on an assembly line. It is known :.:'1 S·=world that Crosby had his own thoughts by' .~~_ he placed innovative ideas and theory on management.

"Most managers are so concerned with today, ar - --.
getting our own real and imagined problems s that we are incapable of planning corrective or actions more than a week or so ahead."

The above phrase is from Quality is free. '\:.a: ,.=, beautiful phrase it is. If we analyse this we co=:-.:=, to a conclusion that it is true in today's CO;'.:2- Not only Managers but in daily life as ,,individual also we sometimes just crea(e imaginary world of problems. We lack plarc.:=;:~ skills. I read somewhere that Planning is a look ahead, a broad look around and a searIT":=~ look within'. I think Philip Crosby also wan:e..:i :
tell the world that you have to plan wha: ~.~~ want to achieve, set your goals, how you \\'~.: 0achieve based on the capability you haw.

If we can't deal problems in positive manner --that too quickly (without loss of time) we \ .
the battle. World today is so competitiw.

-'~5'::':' argues that changing a culture is not a - =.::er of teaching people a bunch of new -=--~..2sues, or replacing their behaviour patterns ::. aew ones. It is a matter of exchanging values --.:: providing role models. This is done by --;::,-..ging attitudes. And for this Crosby also . ised that genuine interest in people and --~-'::s is very important.

-e :irst struggle, and it is never over, is to '~come the 'conventional wisdom' regarding -:':lality. In some mysterious way each new --:lager becomes imbued with the conventional ~dom. It says that quality means goodness; that : is unmeasurable; that error is inevitable; and 2-.a: people just don't give a damn about doing good work. No matter what company they work =-',7. or where they went to school, or where they -a-e raised - they all believe something erroneous _~ this. But in real life, quality is something quite ':::-=erent. Quality is conformance to requirements; :: lS precisely measurable: error is not required to ':"~~;=jll the laws of nature; and people work just as ,---,.; now as they ever did. . . . people perform -~e standards of their leaders. If management people don't care, then people won't care," osby 1979: 7-8).

rosby's name is perhaps best known in relation :c the concepts of Do It Right First Time and Zero Defects. He considers traditional quality -nntrol, acceptable quality limits and waivers of ~:..1b-standard products to represent failure rather :..:'an assuranc~ of success. Crosby therefore c.efines quality as conformance to the -equirements which the company itself has -tablished for its products based directly on its tomers' needs. He believes that since most ompanies have organisations and systems that a:.:ow (and even encourage) deviation from what ~ really required, manufacturing companies

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spend around 20% of revenues doing things wrong and doing them over again. According to Crosby this can be 35% of operating expenses for service companies. He does not believe that workers should take prime responsibility for poor quality; the reality, he says, is that you have to get management straight. In the Crosby scheme of things, management sets the tone on quality and workers follow their example; whilst employees are involved in operational difficulties and draw them to management's attention; the initiative comes from the top. What zero defect means is not that people never make mistakes, he says, but that the company does not start out expecting them to make mistakes.

In one of his books he defined five new characteristics essential to becoming an Eternally Successful Organisation:

Five characteristics of an 'Eternally Successful Organisation'

1. People routinely do things right first time

2. Change is anticipated and used to advantage

3. Growth is consistent and profitable

4. New products and services appear when needed

5. Everyone is happy to work there

Philip B. Crosby, leading exponent of TQM, is remembered for the substantial contributions toward the field of Quality. He highlighted 14 steps to quality improvements and he is famous for his 6 Cs. His 6 Cs. are as under:

1. Comprehensions or ability to understand and absorb quality related activities, its sustenance and improyements,

2. Commitment by all (top management, employees, suppliers and customers) to quality management system performance,

3. Competence for improyement and then sustaining improvement on a long term basis,

4. Corrections or fool-proofina quality management system of the oroanisation by rectifying mistakes and deyia tions and putting the quality management y tem back

on the track for world-class performance,

5. Communication in the organisation should be honest and clear without ambiguity,

6. Continuance of the organisation's good performance and its continuous improvement is the essence of a world-class organisation and its successful operation.

Crosby recognised that zero defects must be the goal of all activities and his 14 steps to quality improvements can be summarised as under:

1. Management commitment

2. Develop a quality management team

3. Quality measurement

4. Cost of quality evaluation

5. Quality awareness

6. Corrective action

7. Zero defects planning 8. Employee education 9. Zero defects day 10. Goal setting 11. Error-cause removal 12. Recognition 13. Quality councils 14. Do it over again

Philip B. Crosby was one of the first to recognise that quality is e,-eryone's responsibility and must be led by the top management. Before publishing of his book 'Quality is Free', the industrial world believed that if an organisation wanted to improve the quality of it roduct , the organisation needed !!Teater in,- tment and more inspections. Cro by reyer- this belief. His book 'Quality is Free' pu eiore us the secret behind Japan's manufacturina uccess that gave the message - "The !!Teater the quality, the lower the cost to produce products and services."

References :

t Crosby, P. 1979 Quality is free: the art of making quality certain. New York: McGraw-Hill.

t http://www.mftrou.com/philip-crosby.html

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t http://www.iso-9000.ro/eng/9001/gurus.htm t http://www.4rcs.com/crosby.html t www.asq.org t From the Gallery of Quality Geniuses - Rem'

Philip Crosby: The Fun

_ Crosby - Norman Bodek (Quality Digest, June

"'~" Management, P. N. Mukherjee, Prentice-Hall - - Pri\'ate Ltd.

- the Quality Revolution

"Do It Right the First Time"

Dr. Deming and Dr. Juran were the grea- - - of the quality revolution. Where Phil r"'.

excelled was in finding a terminology fo~ that mere mortals could understand. His :: "Quality Without Tears" and "Quality ~ ~were easy to read, so people read H:e::"' popularised the idea of the "cost of poor -:. that is, figuring out how much it reall:' do things badly.

Like Frederick Taylor, Philip Crosby's ide-, from his experience on an assembly ,-focussed on zero defects, not unlike the: _ the modern Six Sigma Quality moveme~Crosby was quick to point out, however, 2- _. _ defects is not something that originates assembly line. To create a manufacturin :. that has zero defects, management mus: __ tone and atmosphere for employees to .

management does not create a system b. zero defects are clearly the objecti\'e employees are not to blame when things and defects occur. The benefit for comp such a system is a dramatic decrease in resources and time spent producing g consumers do not want.

Mr. Crosby defined quality as a confoe:

certain specifications set forth by manag_and not some vague concept of 'goodness specifications are not arbitrary either; be set according to customer needs an .

Quality is Free

Philip Crosby wrote 'Quality Is Free' r quality to management in terms the:- _ understand. The book addre_s:

of Quality

~ality is defined as ormance to require-ents, not as 'goodness' or eaance'.

. e system for causing Philip Crosby ality is prevention, not appraisal.

- _ e performance standard must be Zero Jefects, not "that's close enough".

-:he measurement of quality is the Price of _ 'onconformance, not indices.

_ phy

? Crosby was born in West Virginia in 1926.

erving in WW - II and the Korean war he _ ed for Crosley, Martin-Marietta and ITT .e he was corporate vice-president for 14 =. Philip Crosby Associates Inc., founded in was his management consulting firm that -~ hundreds of companies. After retiring in _ he founded Career IV Inc., Philip Crosby -= 'ates II Inc. and the Quality College. Crosby - - in August 2001, but his legacy will live on _ l er quality in thousands of organisations.

- ~:-e' an encomium from W. Noel Haskins- -:er, a teacher of quality improvement: 'He was of the warmest and most focussed people I . had the pleasure to meet and his common· . .se approach will be missed by many'.

'conceptions of quality management, and _ -es the story of how a worldwide quality ::-- -ess was installed into the ITT Corporation.

-, book contains many case histories to explain ': 'what quality is and how it can be improved

Jan-April 2009

Quality -~4 t""" ~



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on purpose.

Some of the most powerful and practical phrases from 'Quality Is Free' are listed below.

Why spend all this time finding and fixing and fighting when you could prevent the incident in the first place?

Management has to get right in there and be active when it comes to quality.

The first struggle, and it is never over, is to overcome the "conventional wisdom"regarding quality.

What should be obvious from the outset is that people perform to the standards of their leaders. If management thinks people don't care, then people won't care.

The problem of quality management is not what people don't know about it. The problem is what they think they do know.

The first erroneous assumption is that quality means goodness, or luxury, or shininess, or weight.

We must define quality as 'conformance to requirements' if we are to manage it.

Quality management is a systematic way of guaranteeing that organised activities happen the way they are planned.

Prevention is not hard to do - it is just hard to sell.

What Awakening is really afraid of is commitment to the future. Uncertainty doesn't know about the future and so can't be bothered by it. Awakening knows about it, and is bothered. Both do nothing, but for different reasons. The result is the same.

Attitudes are really what it is all about.

Just because the general manager and the department heads have gotten religion doesn't mean that anyone else has.

The most effective way to bring operating and other management people to their senses is to put them in contact with someone they will believe.

People really like to be measured when the measurement is fair and open.

People will only tell you the troubles that others cause for them. They will not reveal what they make happen themselves.

Good things only happen when planned; bad things happen on their own.

There is a theory of human behavior that says people subconsciously retard their own intellectual growth.

The bigoted, the narrow-minded, the stubborn, and the perpetually optimistic have all stopped learning.

The customer deserves to receive exactly what we have promised to produce.

I do not know of a single product safety problem where the basic cause was something other than a lack of integrity judgment on the part of some management individual.

Once in a 'while you come up with something for which there is no solution. Then you make a judgment and accept the situation, and life goes on. Count on one or two per career.

Quality imprm'ement has no chance unless the individual are ready to recognise that Improvemen neces ary.

Quality is free, u- 0 one i e"er going to know it if there '-n't orne ort of agreed-on system of me urement.

Helping manaoement to recognise that they must be per onally committed to participating in the program r . es the lenl of visibility for quality and ensures e\'eryone's cooperation so long as there is some progress.

The executiye's problem in understanding and utili sing the labor force is compounded by the fact that people are not interested in doing something just because they have been told to do it.

To help in a positive manner, you must be genuinely interested in people and results.

Your efforts to help are based on a genuine concern for the individual, and are not to further your own ends. Then the help will be accepted.

(continued on page 30)

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28



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Re-purpose Befo

One of my favourite questions when meetina \ '.senior leaders of enterprises is, "What i yo'organisation's purpose?" The typical .:

immediate response is, "To make money ar";

grow." "But," I respond, "this answer has no .~,~ to do with your customers, who provide ......

money your organisation needs to profit ar-";

grow." I then repeat my question, but elabora-e 'What does your organisation do to 01customer problems better than competitors so' -:

customers old and new will pay good money; your services and goods and buy more 0 'e:

time? '

In recent years a fashionable alternative to " '" money and grow sales" was that organisa '0-purpose was to steadily grow shareholder \'G...' e.

But now the king of shareholder value, Gene!''' Electric's retired chairman J ack Welch, : - ~ acknowledged - thank goodness - that this ~ " result, not a strategy for achieving this res Now that investors as well as customers ar strike during the great financial crisis, the \ -:

management world is being forced to re ......purpose from the standpoint of the custo e-.

(

Confusion about purpose is particularly pair ~ to watch in the collapse of General 10:-~ because this organisation was so brilliant io:- :.

long in dearly defining its purpose. On June 1921, GM's great leader Alfred Sloan produc - ::

simple memorandum on the topic of "Pr .: _--:

Policy" that defined General Motors' purpo:: .

generations to come.

Sloan stated that General Motors would pr a carefully configured range of produc:: "every purse and purpose", from used Chen at the lower end of the market (with e- "':

financing on these traded·in vehicles) to a":" _ loaded" Cadillac at the top end. This . ::-::' memo rationalised GM's chaotic product lir.

so its vehicles would not overlap in the IItaO· Instead, they would each have a clearly de -- place in a status hierarchy and would alwa:'5 ::--.:

more refined, a bit" classier" with a higher:!"'" than competitor products in each market se

Re-structure

emo about market policy was much more ::--- :he now familiar market segmentation and '-;: ~e proposition for each segment. Sloan did 5 ::-eiliing much more important by defining , ~ central purpose as creating an aspirational :. - - ' a 'or for every customer through the life , :e, from the used Chevrolet as their fi!""t e to the fancy Cadillac as their last (often : -;:: ding with a Cadillac hearse on the way to -- _ -emetery !) And it worked brilliantly. General 'ms was probably never as efficient in 'uction as Ford and it was rarely a technology "'- 'er. But it provided a clear product pathway - :he customer's life journey. Customers raced this purpose and opened their wallets . .ay higher prices for more refined products ." each market segment. Within a few years ;::: oan's memo GM had became the largest and ::- - successful corporation in the world and in .' c history of the world.

, O\'ing forward to the present moment, it is :: ' dening to read the viability plan GM recently ::- oposed to the US Automotive Task Force. With - e exception of the plug hybrid Volt (an ....:-proven technology for an unproven market to _ produced at tiny volume in the early years), the ?'an is entirely about "restructuring" and ~_lrinking, about what General Motors isn't. It ~ 't Saab or Hummer or Saturn. It won't have :-early as large a dealer network. It isn't a :::lanufacturer with a significant North American :ootprint outside of Michigan and Ohio, etc.

The natural instinct of senior managers in any ~. is is to restructure and downsize. But the estion is always, "Restructure and downsize :oward what?" No customer cares about a -ompany's structure. No customer cares about ownsizing. Customers only care about a 'ompany solving their problems along life's path.

-0 here's my advice to new GM CEO Fritz Henderson or whoever may follow after him.

3efore you restructure, restate GM's purpose.

~oday no one knows. Do it in a simple memo.

deed, do it in a single-page A3 format. Sloan eeded three pages in 1921, so practise continuous

Jan-April 2009

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and compelling purpose will save this stricken giant (or any other failing enterprise.)

. Best regards,

Jim

Toyota has gotten off lighter than GM in the current crisis, but it faces the same confusion about purpose.

Until the mid-1990s the clear purpose of Toyota was to be the best organisation in the world at providing refined, durable "value" products in all market segments with few delivered defects to customers. The assumption was that growth would naturally follow, and it did. But then the purpose seems to have shifted to becoming the biggest auto company as rapidly as possible by adding capacity everywhere, a purpose that no customer cares about. At the same time competitors, led by Hyundai, have closed the gap on Toyota's original purpose and everyone is doing hybrids where Toyota initially took the lead. An A3 on re-purposing Toyota is surely what new president Akio Toyoda needs as well. My fear is that he will only focus on cost reduction and restructuring.

improvement to get down to one! And remember that no amount of restructuring without a clear

P.S.

Source: James P. Womack Founder and Chairman Lean Enterprise Institute, Inc.

--(to~.--

Quality is Free (continued from page 28)

You can create solutions to complicated problems by being the only one to break that complicated problem down to its basic causes.

The most valuable manager is one who can first create, and then implement.

If the leader is the only one who knows what game is being played, then the leader is obviously the only one who can win.

The art of following should not be looked on as something to be learned just to fulfill a temporary obligation on the way to becoming supreme exalted rooster.

Pretending all the time is a terrifying management style to adopt.

Listening. You can convey no greater honor than to actually hear what someone has to say.

Implementing. There comes a time when someone has to actually get the job done.

Leading. Leaders start to fail when they begin to believe their own material.

Pretending. If you're going to be an actor, be a good one, but stay out of management.

Quality is free. But it is not a gift.

The biggest problem manager's face comes when they are actually expected to accomplish all the things they have been saying could be

accomplished if only everybody would listen to them.

ZD is the attitude of defect prevention. It means, 'do the job right the first time'.

Make a commitment to a standard, communicate it, recognise performance, and then recycle.

It is much less expensive to prevent errors than to rework, scrap, or service them.

Most managers are so concerned with today, and with getting our own real and imagined problems settled, that we are incapable of planning correcti\'e or positive actions more than a week or so ahead.

Corrective action is just a matter of getting all the rocks rolled over and seeing what is under them.

But there is no substitute for the words 'Zero Defects'. Thev are absolutely clear.

It is always cheaper to do the job right the first time.

Workers perform like the attitude of management.

Many of the most frustrating and expensive problems we see today come from paperwork and similar communication devices.

The way to get started on making certain is to recognise that we cause problems for ourselves, and we must find ways to prevent them.

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