Home
August 25, 1998
|
Link du jour: |
x |
x |
x |
What is quality? Quality is a thing with feathers... no wait... that's hope that has feathers. Hope is our anchor. But what is quality? Believe it or not, I've thought about that quite a bit, and while I have not yet been driven mad, I still don't know the answer. Why take on the question that drove Robert Pirsig mad? Well, it's sort of the question that drove me out of the quality biz. If I were to believe Philp Crosby, I'd define quality as conformance to requirements. Whose requirements? One time in my old job, the Bellcore quality auditor dinged us because I referred to a company from whom we were buying some software as "the vendor" instead of "the supplier". "Vendor? You mean a hot dog vendor?" Vendors sell hot dogs. Suppliers sell software. True story. If Bellcore says I have to call my vendors suppliers, then I must conform to the requirement in order to produce a quality product. Conformance to a bogus requirement is still quality in Crosby's definition. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was published in 1974 and Crosby's Quality is Free was published in 1978. Does this mean if Phaedrus had only hung on a few more years until Crosby defined quality for him, he could've stayed sane? Anybody out there think Crosby read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ? How odd that two of the definitive books of the 1970's dealt with quality. Crosby's customer-supplier requirements conformance model might work for literary quality if what we wanted was consistent identical literary products. The academic world could document the requirements for a novel, a short story, a personal essay, a poem... and authors would strive to conform to the requirements. Then either we would all write Ulysses or no one would write Ulysses. Book reviews would be reduced to quality audits. Where is the evidence that the writer followed this step in the flawless novel-generation process? How many defects have we uncovered? How shall we analyze the process so that we can prevent future defects? Of course the above argument presupposes that the "customer" for the novel is the academic community. What if the "customer" is thousands of readers? Does each one define the requirements? How can James Joyce know in advance what future generations are going to require from Ulysses? I pick on Ulysses because it made number one on the Modern Library top 100 English language novels of the 20th century, which means a small group of oldish white men liked it enough to vote for it. I never made it past 3 pages in 3 attempts but that says more about me than about it. Having pulled not one but two decaying copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance off my bookshelves and reduced myself to helpless sneezing fits flipping through the crumbling pages, I am no closer to understanding how to approach quality. My copy of Quality is Free is hardcover and on better paper so it's not decaying yet. See, what I mean by "better" here is paper designed not to decay rapidly. My paperback Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is printed on paper that was designed to decay. Acidic paper is cheaper. It met the requirements to make the book cheap. There was no requirement to make the book last 24 years. Using a subjective quality type word like better conveys the difference in the paper but doesn't say anything about quality (if you subscribe to the Crosby paradigm). As an interesting aside, I noticed that the copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance purchased in 1974 and so crumbly I start sneezing before I open the cover cost $2.25. The copy I purchased in 1984 (because the 1974 copy was already making me sneeze by then) cost $5.95. I wonder how much it costs today? So Phaedrus/Pirsig asks "But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know it even exists?" Crosby answers with "conformance to requirements" and "zero defects". So why for example is a Mercedes better than a Chevy Suburban? Why is a Mont Blanc pen better than a cheap Bic I picked up at the drugstore? Why are the online journals in desert island journals better than some other arbitrary list of journals? Why is The Great Gatsby a better novel than Peyton Place? Or is it? I have no clue. |
|
|
x |
x |
|
|
|