Last month, the American Society for Quality held their annual World Conference on Quality and Improvement; and by a couple of twists of good fortune I was able to attend. The conference had a lot of speakers with a lot of good information, and I hope that my notes are thorough enough to let me write a few posts drawn from it.
But this first one will be easy. One of the speakers remarked, as almost a sidebar to his main topic, "There's an interview out on YouTube that you have to see. It's a 20-minute video from 1990, where Steve Jobs talks about Joseph Juran. If you've never seen it before—and I bet you haven't—go watch it. Jobs makes it clear that even back then he clearly got what Juran was saying; and of course we all know how it went after that."
I'd never even heard of this interview before, which I guess made the speaker right about his first point. And when I looked it up, I found he was also right that it is a really good interview. Steve Jobs is still a very young man in this piece, and he introduces himself as the CEO of NeXT. He keeps the focus strictly on Juran. And while he pauses for a moment to collect his ideas after each question is asked, his answers are always clear, fluid, unbroken, and deeply thoughtful. He explains the new idea (new then, of course, not now) of breaking down your work into discrete processes so you can measure them, analyze them, and make them better. And at one point he rejects the whole premise behind the interviewer's question—kindly, but very pointedly—because he says that the Quality approach that NeXT was learning from Juran had them working in such a way that the question made no sense.
I won't try to summarize the talk. Far better to let Jobs speak for himself. Here is the interview:
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