Quality is never an Accident

Looking at travel images my sister recently posted of thousand year old gardens, neon-lit shopping arcades, authentic tea houses, 200 mph bullet trains and centuries old Shinto shrines had me reflecting how the Japanese culture is an interesting combination of the ancient and new.

In a Time magazine essay, the author Pico Iyer described how his Japanese wife Hiroko gets out of bed every morning and boils hot water to make tea for her father. It doesn’t matter to Hiroku that her father has been dead for six years. She still places the tea on the household altar along with her father’s favorite snacks.

On her days off, Hiroku travels two hours by train to talk to her grandmother – who died in 1979. She still remembers the time when she was a little girl and kicked a chair in anger. Her father told her to apologize because the chair had a soul and a heart too – and had done nothing to harm her.

Iyer observes that despite this honoring of old traditions and memories, his wife Hiroku is a modern woman in every other way – listening to Green Day on her boom box, selling semi-punk English fashion, wearing trendy leather jackets and eating “moon-burgers” from McDonalds. Japan is constantly changing on the surface, writes Iyer, but deep down, not much really changes.

A study of countries by the University of Toronto found that modern-seeming Japan finished Number 1 in how closely they carried on their ancient traditions. This comes as no surprise when you consider that Japan was a hermit kingdom during the 17th and 18th centuries, willfully walling themselves off from the rest of the world and executing citizens caught trying to leave the islands.

My sister’s recent trip brought to mind a time in my early career when I got to witness up-close the qualities of Japanese culture and industry. The year was 1989 and I was managing a New Product Introduction team. The team’s job was to audit and verify the company’s new products, making sure they were working as designed prior to their official product release. This involved working with selected customer Beta sites and training our distributors from other countries.

Two month’s before the release of one particularly important new product feature, the company’s distributor in Japan decided to send four of their customer support experts to the United States. Their mission was to work directly with the NPI team so they were properly trained and prepared to support early Japanese adopters of the product.

I was filled with amazement at how thoroughly and diligently they worked at their task. They came prepared with specific customer hardware test cases and they painstakingly spent 14 hour days running the software in every conceivable mode while trying to simulate every potential fault condition (even the ones that could likely never occur).

These Japanese Support Technicians could speak very little English but they each carried detailed notebooks which they used to successfully communicate all the problems and issues they discovered during their testing.

When they did discover true defects in the product, they were very cautious not to assign blame to individuals or to make disparaging remarks about the product or the designers. They did not want to confront anyone in a way that made them “lose face” but instead pointed to the test conditions and results – stating facts and asking open-ended questions about the results to the designers.

Watching these Japanese colleagues in action was an eye-opening experience for me and it made me realize how much more effective our NPI team would be if we adopted many of their habits and processes.

The absolute focus on quality that I observed was made even more surprising by the fact that when I was growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, products that were labeled “Made in Japan” had a reputation for low quality and inferior performance.

I started researching to understand just how it was that Japan had managed to make the jump from a country thought to make cheap products, to a country that is now universally recognized for high quality manufacturing and customer satisfaction.

I learned, ironically, that the “patron saint” of Japanese quality control was an American named W. Edwards Deming. Deming was a statistician, educator, and consultant who was a virtual unknown in America before his advocacy of quality-control methods aided Japan’s economic recovery after World War II and spurred the global success of many Japanese firms in the late 20th century.

In 1950 Japanese business leaders invited Deming to Japan to teach their executives and engineers his pioneering “Total Quality Management” (TQM) and “Statistical Quality Control” (SQC) methodologies. Japanese companies quickly adopted his methods, making a commitment to quality control that helped Japanese firms dominate product markets and become the second largest economy in the world.

The Deming Prize, established in 1951, is named in Deming’s honor and it is awarded annually to a Japanese corporation that wins a rigorous quality-control competition. It wasn’t until the 1980s that Deming’s ideas finally began to be adopted by American corporations who were seeking to compete more effectively in the world market.

After our Japanese colleagues returned to Japan I made it a point to read Deming’s influential book “Out of the Crisis” and to put many of his ideas into action within the NPI team.

Deming wrote that organizations adopting key principles of management can increase quality, improve customer loyalty and lower costs. The key to success was to practice continual improvement and to think of manufacturing as a connected system, not just as “bits and pieces.”

Deming listed 14 key points that Management must adopt to create a culture of quality in their work environment.

Deming’s 14 Points for Creating a Culture of Quality in the Workplace

1. Create constancy of purpose toward improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive, stay in business and provide jobs. Managers must cultivate innovation, fund research and education and improve the product design and service – keeping in mind the customer at all times.

2. Adopt the new philosophy at all levels. Management must awaken to the challenge, learn their responsibilities, and take on leadership for change.

3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place. You cannot inspect quality into a product. The quality is there or it isn’t by the time it’s inspected. Inspection is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improving the production process. Correcting defects after a product had been manufactured is like scraping burnt toast after it has been in the toaster too long.

4. End the practice of awarding business on the basis of price tag. Focus instead on minimizing total cost. Move toward a single supplier fostering a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust. Negotiating on price only without regard to quality and service can drive good suppliers and good services out of business. Single-source suppliers are desirable because they can become innovative and develop an economy of scale in the production process that can only result from a long-term relationship with the purchaser. Undesirable lot-to-lot variation, which decreases quality, increases as the number of suppliers increases.

5. Improve constantly and forever the system of production. Measure key parameters and reduce variation that can lead to defects.

6. Institute training on the job. Management must understand the problems the worker has in performing his or her tasks satisfactorily. Money and time spent on this activity are ineffective unless the inhibitors to good work are removed.

7. Institute leadership. The aim of supervision should be to help people, machines and gadgets do a better job. Management should lead, not supervise. Leaders must know the work that they supervise. They must be empowered and directed to communicate and to act on conditions that need correction. They must learn to fix defective processes that produce faulty parts.

8. Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company. No one can give their best performance unless they feel secure. Employees should not be afraid to express their ideas or ask questions. Industries should embrace new knowledge that yields better job performance and employees should not be fearful that new knowledge could disclose some of their failings.

9. Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team to foresee problems of production and use that may be encountered by the end user. Many types of problems occur when communication is poor between departments.

10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force that ask for zero defects and new levels of productivity. The bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and lay beyond the power of the work force. Exhortations, posters, targets, and slogans are directed at the wrong people, causing general frustration and resentment. Management main focus instead is to improve the process by employing statistical methods to identify and eliminate the root causes of defects.

11. Eliminate work standards (quotas, numerical goals) on the factory floor. Substitute leadership. Never-ending improvement is incompatible with quotas. Work standards, incentive pay, rates, and piecework are manifestations of management’s lack of understanding. Pride of workmanship needs to be encouraged, while the quota system needs to be eliminated. Whenever work standards are replaced with leadership people are happier and quality and productivity increase substantially.

12. Remove barriers that rob worker(s) of their right to pride of workmanship. The responsibility of supervisors must be changed from sheer numbers to quality. This includes abolishing annual merit ratings and management by objective programs. A leader needs to be not a judge but a colleague and counselor who leads and learns with his or her people on a day-to-day basis.

13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement. An organization needs good people who are improving with education. Management should be encouraging everyone to get additional education and to engage in self-improvement.

14. Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transfor­mation. Every job and activity is part of a process. Questions need to be asked about what changes could be made at each process stage to improve the effectiveness of other upstream or downstream stages. Everyone on a team should have a chance to contribute ideas and plans that contribute toward meeting the needs of the customer.

Becoming grounded in these 14 principles while I was still young served me well throughout my career on numerous company projects and teams. I learned that quality doesn’t happen by accident and “There is no Instant Pudding” as Deming once replied to a manager who asked him for the “secret” to producing quality products. Total Quality Management requires focused commitment, constant measurement and the drive to improve continuously.

But the most important lesson I learned from Dr. Deming and my Japanese friends is that the biggest waste is a failure to make full use of the abilities of people, to fail to take the time to learn about their job frustrations or the contributions that they are eager to make.

So the next time you are delighted with the quality of a product or service you can thank W. Edward Deming and the constancy of spirit of the Japanese people – both ancient and new.