Quality is Free by Philip B. Crosby: How to do it First Time Right
A book on Quality Management that guides a business to a zero defect one.
Quality is free. It’s not a gift, but it is free. What costs money are the unquality things—all the actions that involve not doing jobs right the first time.
In any business, you convert raw materials using resources into a final product and sell it. Your profit is the difference between your selling price and the manufacturing cost. If you want more profit, you sell more. If you want still more profit, you reduce your manufacturing cost. If you have ever worked in a manufacturing plant, you know that the biggest choke point is the product quality. If your final product is rejected, you still have spent as much cost on it as your good product while you can't sell it. So the best way to reduce manufacturing costs without compromising on raw materials or resources is to do it right the first time. If things are as easy as they sound...!
"Quality is Free" is a book by Philip B. Crosby, a prominent figure in the quality management field. In this book, he charts a road map towards 'zero defects.' As per Crosby, quality is totally free and can even give the business an increase in profits if properly managed. His philosophy is about instilling a habit of doing things right across a business, not only in the production units, which usually bear the brunt of quality issues. He specifically adds that management should not simply support these efforts but be committed to them and take an active part in implementation.
The first part of the book explains his approach towards quality management. Compared to Deming, another quality management expert who used statistical methods, Crosby used practical and non-technical ways to make quality a certainty. His definition of making quality certain is "getting people to do better all the worthwhile things they ought to be doing anyway." With humor and intellectual flair, he destroys many preconceived notions the general public has about quality like it means goodness or luxury, but it is in fact "conformance to requirements”.
Crosby explains concepts like the Quality Management Maturity Grid, the importance of higher management fully committing to the concept of zero defect, and the cost of quality using an ample number of case studies. He derives fourteen steps of quality management, which, when followed diligently, could push one organization towards zero defects. He clearly specifies that a quality management program should never be used as just a motivational tool, which will dilute its effect, making it ineffective. The book also contains a chapter on the different management styles that exist and an evaluation of them. The second and third parts of the book contain a detailed case study of a fictional quality improvement program that reads like a story.
The best thing about the book is the clarity of thought that Crosby brings to the table. Every concept is explained using apt examples that someone with even no technical knowledge can easily follow. He liberally uses doses of humor that help a lot to grasp the basic concepts. The entire book is structured as a step-by-step guide that could be followed by any business organization. The anecdotes help the reader to adapt his ideas to a real-world landscape. One could feel like he tends to oversimplify the concepts and reduce everything to the scope of personnel management.
Crosby wrote this book in 1979. The industrial structure has immensely developed since then with global spreading and improved technologies. The field of quality management has also evolved into a more holistic and standardized setup with total quality management and statistical quality control. One crucial difference that the book has with the present techniques is in the matter of customer focus, which is of paramount importance today. So to apply many of his approaches today, one has to do a lot of adaptation in techniques and methodology.
However, his focus on continuous improvement, stress on the prevention of defects, and the use of the cost of quality to arrive at the efficiency of quality management is still being used in the industries. His urge to involve everyone across the business, including the top management, in quality programs is also an applicable method. "Quality is Free" provides many basic pieces of information about quality management, and the core of it still stands relevant. Many of its concepts, like the zero defect attitude, continuous improvement, and focus on prevention, can be used as tools of personal improvement too.