🌱 Dr. Armand Feigenbaum on Managing for Quality

Because in too many cases we’ve simply automated waste

The corresponding point is, therefore, if you want to find out about quality you better not merely stay in your office and go through analyses and mental gyrations. You better go through the difficult, agonizing work of talking to the user. The American automobile industry, in its sincerity, believed that the automobile engineer knew more about what you or I ought to be driving than we did. And technically that might be true. But fundamentally, in terms of buyer preference, it’s absolutely untrue.

The conventional intelligence when I was starting to work, the management doctrine — and it’s still alive and well in some companies, still taught in graduate business schools — was that the way you succeed is to make products and services quicker and cheaper. Sell them hard, finance them cleverly, and provide some kind of service safety net for your customers if the product doesn’t work. That is wrong. That is the road to competitive destruction. In fact, the way to make products quicker and cheaper is to make them better.

To have a measurement without an implementation in the improvement process is useless.