What happens when the Quality Police come to call?

 

Standing right behind the risk managers on the list of management specialties that would love to slap me upside the head with a two-by-four are the quality guys, and for similar reasons. I believe each discipline asserts the efficacy of their techniques well beyond their true effectiveness, often pushing all the way to irrelevancy. Whereas I’ve characterized what the risk analysts do as little more than institutional-wide worrying, I’m going to call what the quality experts do when they go too far as eat-your-peas-style hectoring.

Don’t get me wrong – when your organization has a genuine problem with the level of quality being put out in goods and services, management simply has to call in a quality specialist, even if their predilection for assigning rank among themselves is irksomely similar to the way martial artists do. They’ll create their process maps and fishbone diagrams, failure mode assessments and Total Quality Management award applications, and eventually come up with a usable answer to how to improve the companies’ goods and services. It’s what happens in the meantime, and afterwards, that has me irritated.

Consider the story of Christian Frederick Martin. Martin was a guitar maker in Germany in 1833, when the Defenders of Quality were the guilds. To advance in any industry dominated by these 19^th-century TQM enforcers, one had to serve time as an apprentice before even being considered a candidate to move up in the ranks, to an acknowledged craftsman, or master of the trade. Martin and his family belonged to the (gasp!) cabinet-makers guild, and were opposed in their guitar-making by the local violin-makers’ guild. Of course, freed from the fetters of the guilds, your nominal 19^th-century Elvis Presley would have had the consumer’s option of deciding if he wanted to gyrate around the stages of Europe with a guitar slung down low that had been manufactured by a cabinet-maker, or a violin-maker, and that would be that. But, nooooooo….

In 1833, the cabinet-makers issued a statement, which read, in part,

"The violin makers belong to a class of musical instrument makers and therefore to the class of artists whose work not only shows finish, but gives evidence of a certain understanding of cultured taste. The cabinet makers, by contrast, are nothing more than mechanics whose products consist of all kinds of articles known as furniture." Slandering the work of the cabinet makers, the Violin Guild added: "Who is so stupid that he cannot see at a glance that an armchair or a stool is no guitar and such an article appearing among our instruments must look like Saul among the prophets."[i]

Realizing that he would never be completely free to manufacture guitars the way he wanted, Martin left Germany and came to the United States, where he founded a guitar company whose name today is virtually synonymous with exceptional quality.  And, when the real Elvis Presley burst on to the scene in the 20^th century, he had one of Christian Frederick Martin’s company’s guitars slung low as he gyrated across the stages of the American Midwest.

But note how the guild went after the non-violin guild’s guitar-makers – it was purely on quality grounds. The violin guild had set themselves up as some sort of quality police force, bravely saving the people of Germany from having to endure bad guitar music (if only they could have been around for the onset of “grunge rock”). In the long run, it was the free market that drove the quality of the guitars upwards, not the harrumphing of the violin guild.

For those quality managers who are not impressed by this blog, and still wish to slap me upside the head with a two-by-four, I have this question: are you aware that two-by-fours are, in fact, one and one-half inches by three and one-half?