qualitas1998.net Quality Report  Review of A Passion for Profit

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A Passion for Profit, yes

Summary:
Tony Wright has written “A Passion for Profit”. Entrepreneurs and managers should read the book to avoid wasting money, time and employees' trust on valueless certification practices and, once again, remember that quality is the top managerial issue measured with money.

Now, a few people apart from the engineers of the big multinationals would have ever known the words "ISO nine thousand" if it were not for the European Council -- i.e. the legislative organism of then European Community and today’s Union -- that on Christmas 1989 with the Resolution OJ90/C10/01 “Global Approach to testing and certification” called on companies for a general, “voluntary” adoption of the European standards of the family EN ISO 9000, and required analogous adoption of the standards of the EN 45000 series to certification and testing companies in order to become “accredited”.  

Now, Governments were and are the biggest customers everywhere in the world, including in Countries that celebrate the free market.

Do you therefore think that with the “Coordinator” of your biggest customers in Europe gently (it was a Resolution and not a Directive) requiring “certification” to ISO 9001, the big “suppliers” (i.e. companies, as they were called in the famous jargon of the standard) would have refused to get registered to it?

Of course, they all rapidly got certified, and today no serious companies doing business in Europe lacks registration to ISO 9001 or to its minor version ISO 9002 concerning companies that do not design their products or make R&D. And of course, then, all these bigger companies required to their suppliers to rapidly become certified if they wanted not to lose contracts. The latter suppliers, hence, in order to avoid any possible problems with their big customers requested certification to their smaller suppliers; and these then…

The astonishing result is that today more than 350,000 companies are registered to the standard (and many more are considering to do it); organizations, to quote from the ISO original Website, “of all shapes and sizes from around the world: from international giants like FedEx, to La Lorraine -- a senior citizens’ nursing home in Switzerland”.

But it that sort of talk that entrepreneurs and managers will like. Entrepreneurs and good managers, after all, have even too many things to care of to take seriously ISO 9001 because “managers -- to quote father of quality management Philip B. Crosby --  are interested only in what bears the sign of the dollar next to it.”

In a world pervaded by too much hypocrisy and conflicting interests like that of organisational improvement, Mr Wright has the honesty to remind all of us that “every QHSE initiative must have the generation of profit as its overall goal if it is to continue to enjoy the support of management. When the business is bankrupt, the employees out of work, the management frantically chasing down to job prospects; what the company can do to improve Quality, Health & Safety of its employees, or care of the Environment?” 

“Nothing at all” - rightly concludes Mr Wright. 

A system analyst, a professional trainer and computer programmer, Mr Wright has worked at real-life quality improvement programs (and with international systems standards) within multinational companies since the mid Seventies. Those were the times when the Japanese “total quality” (or TQM, total quality management) had still to become a trendy issue in western management circles (before to sadly fade) and when another quality guru, the American Dr W. Edwards Deming was starting to become famous in his own Country after he had been preaching quality to Japanese managers. 

And those were also the years when Phil Crosby was leaving ITT (1978) to publish the revolutionary “Quality is Free” (later sold in 1.7 million copies) and start his own educational company to teach American managers that management of quality was not a technical, worthless issue as those usually practiced by engineers and quality control czars.   

Now, Mr Wright’s “A Passion for Profit” adds to the fundamental Crosby’s “Quality is Free” in that it bridges ISO 9001 and related certification efforts with the simple idea that, at work, quality is defined and measures with money. That is, that every work is a process; and that work processes are there to generate profits and that we succeed when we are able to execute processes that conform to their requirements to do so.

So, think for instance of your company: is the work you are waiting to receive timely, correct and complete first time; or do you always have to wait, get incomplete and too often mistaken documents? Are your resources properly working? Or are you wondering why is that printer always out of work when you need it? Are your Colleauges capable to effectively work in team? Or are they working against each other?

So the question arises: who defines processes and takes care for resources are available? Who takes care for people's professional and emotional needs? Why so many people are not properly trained? And are employees involved in improving the processes they conduct? 

How then do you recognize their contributes? Giving them -- as this reviewer came to know by a proud quality manager of an international company -- bonds to by foodstuff at the local store?

Clearly, room exists for imroving first of all the process of managing quality. And we know today that only managers can care for it.

Managing quality managing processes

To manage quality simply means to cause, sustain and improve the requirements of the processes conducted by an organisation to generate profit (or to serve the community). Having this idea firmly established in the world management can really mean survival in a frantically developing world economy with competition coming from everywhere as the cost of capital and workforce lower with globalisation proceeding like a storm.  

Mr Wright plainly explains to us what a process is; how it is simply represented by procedures, and how to simply and effectively flowchart it. It is both fun and useful to read how he takes a 10 pages real-life procedure generated by a consultant and simplifies it to 1 page cutting “all the padding”. The procedure is the “Design Project Management” and for you who are reading now it might be helpful to remind you the recent case of defective tyres sold in the US that have caused hundreds of deaths and injuries and million dollars legal actions against car and tyres makers in that Country. 

Mr Wright reduces the procedure to a single page, bearing a simple flowchart and clear indications to whom the responsibilities are including compilation and approval of the procedure. “It is a mandatory condition of employment -- reads at the bottom -- that all Design Services staff comply with this procedure. Failure to do so will result in appropriate disciplinary action.”

Now, recalling the Primary Purpose, I ask you: How many times brilliant designers or scientists project things that are aimed to their self-gratification playing with technology? And how much money is this behaviour costing to a company?

You don't necessarily need to read Jakob Nielsen to understand that almost all of the companies’ websites, instead to serve their users and generate profits, were projected to satisfy the personal pleasures of their technical designers leaving frustrated users at home to wait?

Understand what ISO 9000 is and how to use it

Having made clear the overall picture explaining “The Motivation for Change”, Mr Wright’s book goes ahead with 3 more chapters (The Meaningful System, Simplifying and Improving Procedure, Flowcharting) that complete this medium-sized (124 pages) volume 1 of “Making it Work! QHSE - The whole thing made easy”, a series of volumes on quality, health&safety and environment management directly published by his company Integrated Systems Associates Ltd.

"Managers -- writes Wright -- don’t understand the role of the Third Part Assessor and think he is a policeman who is there to see that the rules are obeyed. I’d like to picture our new ISO 9001 system in a different way. Imagine you’re sitting down in front of a potential customer. You tell him that he should do business with our company because we are the best. And we can prove it. You open the Manual at the beginning. Order intake. ‘As a potential customer’, if you place an order with us this is how we will process it…If we need to design or modify a product for you this is how we will do it…If we need to purchase parts to go into your product this is the process we will use to make sure those parts are correct…This is how we will schedule the work to be done. And this is how we will actually do that work and inspect it.”