Resources: Articles

QUALITY. WHEN DID IT EXPIRE?
By W. Roderic Covey, Founder

In the second half of the 1900s, quality was anointed king by business and industry, proclaiming quality product and service as their highest priority. Quality circles, employee suggestion plans, quality-assurance titles and entire departments became stars in the smallest and largest of companies in the U.S.—a trend that exploded to every corner of the earth.

Quality morphed into a single letter, Q, which peaked in the ‘90s when companies spent billions while falling over themselves to gain the coveted ISO certification. The Q-word was king of the hill, dominating the themes of corporate ads, PR and every element of marketing-communications.

Then came a decade of Quality’s precipitous decline: car-industry recalls became weekly media events, heretofore trusted medicines declared dangerous or deadly, and toys, infant cribs, vegetables, ground beef, pet food and wallboard all became “Recall of the Week.”

Meanwhile, services joined products in the quality decline. The Q-word disappeared (or should have) from lofty corporate mission statements. Manufacturers, banks, brokerages, insurers, government at all levels, and others ditched Quality as a corporate goal.

Quality’s epitaph will require a gargantuan gravestone to display myriad paragraphs of blame—greed, politics, war, government legislatures and agencies at all levels, corporate boards, the recession/depression, the exploding global expansion, a throw-away society, etc.

What to do? Forget a simple solution and a pat answer. Somehow, some way (and soon), the world must portray and live up to a new image of trust, honesty, faith and confidence.

Somewhere out there is a statesperson-in-waiting—a Ghandi, Churchill, Lincoln, Queen Victoria or Rosa Parks—who can help us polish the Q-word and return to a climate of excellence.