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Reflections on Job One
I
n the late 1980s, things looked dire. The U.S. was losing the productivity race to Japan and had a huge national debt. More people were buying Japanese automobiles than American, consumer electronics were all coming from Asia, and Japan was the first to develop high-definition television. Books such as
Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge
by Michael L. Dertouzos cited the problems we faced and described what
we had to do to turn things around.
At that time the common perception was that Japanese goods were of higher quality than American goods. In a way, this state of affairs was pretty ironic. After World War II, “made in Japan” was just about the worst thing you could say about a product. It meant “cheap, shoddy imitation.” How the Japanese turned that perception—and the quality of their products—around in just a few years was pretty amazing. A number of factors were involved,
and here’s just one example: many years ago, televisions were sold by brand dealers, much like automobiles. You had Magnavox dealers, RCA dealers, and Zenith dealers. When you bought a TV, the dealer would bring it to your home and set it up for you. To enter the American market, Japanese manufacturers needed to exploit distribution channels such as K-mart, and to make that strategy successful, they had to produce TVs that needed no setup and didn’t break. I remember someone describing in awed
tones how he brought a Japanese TV home from the store, took it out of the box, plugged it in, and it
worked perfectly
.
Japanese success at building quality products was due largely to the efforts of W. Edwards Deming (see
http:// caes.mit.edu/Deming/
). In the ’50s, when you couldn’t interest anyone in this country in the topic of quality management, Deming went to Japan, where corporate top management took his guidance to heart.
If you read “Dilbert,” you know that
quality can be perceived as a pejorative concept, used as a cudgel by management. A look at Deming’s 14 Points for Management, set forth in his book
Out of the Crisis
, will assure you that his approach far transcends lip service to quality. For example, he abjures slogans such as “zero defects,” which only serve to create adversarial relationships within companies, arguing that most quality and productivity problems are inherent in the system and not under the control of workers.
It used
to perplex me that Japanese manufacturers could produce such good electronic products without relying heavily on printed-circuit assembly test equipment. They were just following Deming’s advice to eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.
Today, those productivity problems of the ’80s are behind us—or are they? The American economy is thriving. HDTV has been reinvented, and we’re in the thick of it. The American
automobile industry, while not the juggernaut it was in years past, has regained respectability. However, there is no happily ever after; quality is evanescent. Jack Ganssle has pointed out that as projects get bigger, they become more unmanageable and organizations become less productive. Software project horror stories are too plentiful and well-known to cite here. To borrow from an old saying, the price of quality is eternal vigilance.
Lindsey Vereen
lvereen@cmp.com
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