CHAPTER | SEVENTEEN
Quality Is Not What You May Think
Every organization says it has “quality,” but just saying you have it isn't enough. Quality is a necessary and important part of any product or service you offer, whether that product or service is an automobile or an airplane, a potential candidate for a job, or the due diligence conducted by a consultant, attorney, or accountant prior to an acquisition. The word also reflects what you mean by quality. But do you ever think about what quality means to your customer?
For instance, the speed at which you provide your service is likely part of quality, either as seen by you or your customer. However, is this speed fast or slow? In a fast-food restaurant, most customers want the pace of service to be fast. On the other hand, customers in a fancier restaurant will prefer a slower pace, especially if they are conducting a business meeting or the meal is part of a romantic evening.
Quality is indeed a relative matter. I was making a presentation to a potential corporate client a few months ago, proud that the program we had developed would aid students in completing a demanding MBA program in only eleven months, rather than the standard two years—what I viewed as a quality improvement. “You don't understand,” the vice president of human resources said. “We don't want our employees to complete their MBAs that quickly. They'll get their MBAs and then leave us. We want them to take at least two years.” So, there are many different ways of looking at quality, but you should always view it from the point of view of the customer.
You Think You Got Quality? It Ain't Necessarily So
According to Drucker, quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts into it. It is what the user gets out of it. It's what they pay for.1 Users want only what they can use and what gives the product or service value for them. I emphasize “for them.” Value is as they perceive it, and quality is part of that value. Therefore, it is foolish for a seller to spend money, time, and effort developing quality as he sees it, for the buyer may not see it that way at all. Further, it is equally foolish to promote durable products that will last forever, or products or services that are provided fast, or even products that are 100 percent reliable in manufacturing, if these features are not what is desired or appreciated as value by the user.
I once worked for a company that made oxygen breathing masks for military aviators. It supplied the masks to the government in quantities of upwards of 40,000 at a time. Many other companies had tried, but none had ever succeeded in getting into this market. That was because of a single valve that was used in the oxygen mask. No matter how much “quality” the other manufacturers built into the valve, a significant number of valves would fail to perform as specified during quality testing of production batches. In fact, the more bells and whistles that were added, the more difficulty the company had in meeting the specifications of the test. And those “high-quality” valves the competitors offered were made of expensive and exotic materials, frequently making those products far more expensive than those manufactured by my company. The government couldn't have cared less about added gimmicks; passing the test was absolutely critical, though.
Moreover, it turned out that testing a percentage of valves off the production line in any batch was meaningless. Unfortunately for the competitors, there were still always a significant number of valves that would fail their quality control test. Yet my company always had a 100 percent success rate on our valves. What was our secret?
Though well-guarded, the secret wasn't complicated at all and didn't require a “higher-quality” valve. Our success rate for production of the valves wasn't any better than the competitors’; in many cases, our success rate may actually have been worse. But my company realized that the government didn't care whether or not the valves were consistent in meeting production standards.
Quality for the government was whether the valves delivered met quality standards in the test, not whether the company could consistently produce a valve that met these standards. In fact, our production chief told me that he didn't think anyone could produce valves such that every single valve in a batch met the quality specs. Yet, except on very rare occasions, every single valve that my company turned over to the government easily passed the government specifications. How did we do it? The solution was simple, but unheard of. We didn't test a percentage of valves in a batch to ensure reliability; we tested every single one of the valves sent to the government, whether that involved 40 or 40,000 valves. Those that failed were simply tossed out. This was a much more expensive procedure than if production could develop a valve that could consistently pass the test after production, but it fulfilled the customer's definition of quality, and this was Drucker's point.
Another Kind of Quality
Drucker was not recommending that suppliers offload poor workmanship or performance because that's what the user supposedly wants. This is a defense one hears occasionally from some suppliers, such as publishers, television producers, newscasters, or those in other similar industries as to why “quality” products are no longer provided: “We're just giving people what they want.” No, that's an excuse for low quality. But how can quality be measured? And can it be quantified in order to be measured?
Sometimes, quantity may be a part of quality. For example, the quality of a surgeon's work can be quantified by the number of operations he performs annually. That may be important to a for-profit health-care provider paying a number of high-priced physicians. But except under emergency conditions, the quantity of operations a doctor performs is not important; rather, it's the number of operations performed successfully. This is a different kind of quality, the quality of performance or productivity, as opposed to a benefit, value, or feature.
While one might quantify, and thus measure, performance or productivity even with knowledge workers, this is not the major problem. The major problem is the difficulty in deciding which task of the job should be measured. Look at the wrong task in the product or service, and you get the wrong answer. Drucker demonstrated this with a prime example: public schools in the inner city.
Measuring Quality of Performance and Productivity
By most measures, inner-city school systems cannot be considered a success story. Yet right next to them, in the same geographical areas and in the shadow of the same conditions of crime and poverty, there often are successful private schools. These are not private schools in the sense of boarding schools or schools catering to the wealthy or the elite. Most of these are religious schools, and even though the parents of the attendees are not wealthy, they scrape together enough money to send their children to these schools or they earn scholarship admissions.
The students come from similar backgrounds as the students going to the inner-city schools, yet the contrast in school results is noteworthy. Yet while the public schools next door complain of indifferent students, crime, and lack of discipline, the atmosphere in these other schools is the opposite. I saw this myself when, as an Air Force general, I was asked to attend the ceremony at which several high schools in inner-city areas received their official acceptance as junior Air Force ROTC units. I found high standards and the kind of discipline any West Pointer would be proud of, right in the midst of some of the most dangerous neighborhoods.
According to Drucker, while there were many reasons for the differences between these two classes of schools in the same areas, the primary one is how each defines its mission. Most inner-city schools see their mission as helping the underprivileged. The private schools define their task as “enabling those who want to learn, to learn.”2 Does how a school defines its mission influence the quality of its product? You bet it does!
A professor I knew who was teaching at a state university once contrasted output as he saw it at his school with that of a more prestigious school in the same geographical area. Both schools offered similar degrees and both were accredited by the same accrediting bodies using the same standards. Both required their professors to do research and to publish, although the more prestigious school encouraged its professors to publish more and in journals of higher quality. However, the state school's tuition was about a third of that of the more prestigious school. Moreover, the state school defined its primary mission as teaching the first generation of a family to attend college.
This professor made an observation that I found fascinating. “They [the prestigious school] teach success,” he said. “At my school, we teach survival.” Accurate definitions of one's tasks are essential in the production of any product or service, and these definitions affect the resulting observed quality output.
Is Quality a Condition or a Restraint?
Work performance translates to quality for many jobs, and therefore performance also describes the output produced. Moreover, quantity produced may be secondary to quality.3 Yet, a simple comparison of quality versus quantity is not reasonable. There are jobs for which both quality and quantity define performance, and thus task definition. Sales jobs may be one example. An unfortunately large number of organizations define a salesperson's performance in terms merely of quantity—so many units sold, or such and such number of dollars brought in. This rather limited definition of performance needs careful analysis.
Years ago, there were two tired salesmen seated next to each other on a train, riding home after a hard day's work. After identifying to one another that both were in sales, one asked the other, “How did it go today?”
“Not so bad,” responded the other. “I took wholesale orders for over twelve dozen men's shirts. How about you?”
“I sold two,” answered the first salesperson.
“Oh, too bad,” his new friend commiserated. “I'm sure you'll have a better day tomorrow.”
“It wasn't a bad day, it was one of my best,” replied the salesman whose sales were so few. “I sell airplanes.”
However, even this simple example doesn't begin to explain the complexity of defining quality, especially for sales performance. Some very adept salespeople, whose dollar and quantity figures may be quite satisfactory, fail in the long run by not properly servicing the accounts to whom those sales were made. They then hurt the company or the brand's good name and ultimately lose future sales to the competitors. They, or their managers and higher-ups, have overlooked the fact that it is far easier and less expensive to obtain sales from established customers than to find and convert prospects into new customers.
Quality Requires a Different Way of Looking at Things
Drucker knew to look at quality in a product or service in a different way. We have to see it not as what we think is right and good, but as the customer views it. Only the customer can truly define what quality is, what the customer considers of value and can use, and therefore what is important to consider in a purchase. Once we get that right, we can measure performance and productivity in that area. We can then factor in features that the customer may not be aware of. Only in this way can we get the definition of quality right. And only then can we claim that we provide quality.