What do you buy, when you buy a Tesla?

I thought I was all done writing about the place of customer requirements in Quality, but last week I saw an article that put an interesting spin on the subject. Publishing in Fast Company, Anne Marie Squeo wrote, "Tesla owners didn’t buy a car: We bought a set of beliefs Elon is trashing." Of course my first thought was, Wait, I thought Teslas were cars. But then I read her article and began to see her point.

Fundamentally, Squeo is writing about branding; and she makes the point that a brand can have a value or weight of its own, independent of this or that product carrying the brand. And of course this is true. Brands can imply a lot, and those implications can often stretch far beyond the domain where the brand nominally lives. Squeo identifies a number of attitudes and beliefs that she finds common among Tesla-owners—attitudes and beliefs that have nothing to do with cars or even transportation per se, but which are so common that she sees them as clear elements of the Tesla brand. People who disagree strongly with these attitudes and beliefs, she adds, are really not likely ever to buy a Tesla. 

By the same token, for example, when I was a kid Cadillac was a brand that implied the very best of everything, not just cars. If you were part of a group trying to fix a problem and someone said, "We don't need a Cadillac solution," he meant that the solution didn't have to be perfect so long as it was good enough. The implication was always that the "Cadillac solution" would indeed have everything you could ask for, but it would also be very expensive. And of course GM worked to reinforce that association in the mind of the public.

Critically, a brand can become a good in its own right, something that customers will pay for. Customers who bought a Cadillac expected it to be expensive, and would have scorned it if it weren't; because in fact the very expense—and the social cachet they hoped to acquire by being able to afford it—was part of what they wanted out of the car.

One consequence, though, is that if the brand has a value all its own then you have to take care of it. Recognize that the integrity of your brand is part of the value proposition that you offer your customers*, and build guardrails in your Quality Management System to keep it intact. In an earlier post, I described how the Bosch corporation responds with swift and visible action to violations of the Bosch Code of Business Conduct or the principle of legality; and Bosch responds this way in part because a reputation for ethical and legal business behavior is a fundamental component of the Bosch brand. The company literally cannot afford to let violations slide if there is any risk that the brand might be sullied.

The alternative is that you can make a conscious decision not to bother. This is the situation that I discussed four weeks ago with respect to Boeing. Boeing has chosen to use a certain amount of its institutional weight to push the spread of the AS9100 aerospace quality management system standard, but has not chosen to get a third-party certification of their own. In the abstract, this decision might be construed as a risk to the brand, because it generates confusion: Which is it? Do you support AS9100, or don't you? That precise point is the subject of Chris Paris's criticisms of Boeing, as I described in the earlier post. What allows Boeing to make the decision they have made is a calculation that the risk to their brand doesn't mean much risk to their business, since there is only one other company on the planet (Airbus) which constitutes any kind of credible competition.

In short: once your brand acquires a value in its own right, you have to take account of it. Either put measures in place to protect your brand, or make a conscious decision not to bother. What you cannot afford to do is to ignore the question, and to treat your brand inconsistently by accident.

It is interesting that, in the rest of Squeo's article, this is exactly what she accuses Elon Musk of doing. She argues, that is, that Musk's actions since buying Twitter harm the brand identity she had earlier described for Tesla, and that he seems to be causing this damage negligently, as if unaware that there is any issue. I have no idea what's going on in the mind of Elon Musk, so I have to recuse myself from that part of the discussion. I always think it is worthwhile to check out alternative hypotheses—maybe Musk is pivoting on purpose from one brand identity to another, rather than doing anything by accident—but it is always possible that Squeo has it exactly right. Perhaps Musk is genuinely unaware that the Tesla brand has (or had) a value independent of the specific cars sold with that logo, so that he failed to implement any safeguards (including restrictions on himself) to protect that value.

But if that's what is happening, don't try this at home. If your brand has an independent value, take care of it. 

__________

* For example, during your Context of the Organization (COTO) analysis. You can consider it along with other non-product requirements, as discussed here.

     

Rest and refresh

I thought of publishing something useful this week, but I'm also in the middle of last-minute shopping, baking, ... all that stuff. Likely enough, many of you are too. So let's take a break to rest and refresh.

Also, keep an eye on the weather and stay safe! I've seen no end of severe weather warnings for many places across the country. Winter weather can be dangerous and scary. 

Image by David Mark from Pixabay

(Strictly speaking we've recently had our own "severe weather warning" here in Santa Barbara, in the form of a surf report warning us of rip tides. But it's not the same thing.) 

Be well, and we'll pick this up again next week. And if you are fortunate enough to have some time off at the end of the year, please enjoy it!

     

Quality Auditors: "What my friends think I do"

It has been more than two months since I posted anything light-hearted here. Time for something funny.

Here is a meme that I created many years ago, back when "What my friends think I do" was actually current across the Internet. I hope you like it.

      

Should you MEET or EXCEED your customer requirements?

It's not uncommon to see a Quality Policy that boasts, "We will always exceed our customers' expectations!" And that's great. It sounds enthusiastic, ambitious, and challenging. Surely if Quality involves (at least in part) meeting customer expectations, then exceeding them must be even better than that. Maybe it counts as Super-Quality, or something equally special! And the idea takes many forms. Here's a post from LinkedIn which argues that the very definition of Quality in the present day requires exceeding (not merely meeting) customer expectations. 

But is it a good idea?

There's a sense in which it is hard to promise something like this, because you have no control over what your customer actually expects. You may know what requirements he has communicated to you in writing. But his real expectations might go well beyond those. In fact, if you have done business with him before, he may have gotten so accustomed to you over-delivering that now he expects you to over-deliver! If you ever simply meet his stated requirements, he might be secretly disappointed. But of course I'm playing games when I say this. There are other factors to consider.

Most critically, nothing is free. It might be nice to exceed expectations, but make sure you can afford it.

I once worked on a project that suffered seriously from overperformance. The development was late and badly over budget, and all the while the engineers continued to design the product to be better than the customer had asked for. Finally, in a desperate attempt to stop the bleeding, the Project Office instituted a formal policy of Designing to the Requirements. Stated like that it doesn't sound controversial, but right away the engineers dubbed it the "Just Good Enough" Initiative. One of them complained to me, "My boss just bawled me out for doing too good a job." It was almost as if they had forgotten that all their time and effort cost money, and that at the end of the day the company had books to balance. 

In the end, the final product was magnificent. But it was really tough to get there.

The same discussion comes up in very different contexts. Recently I have seen a spate of articles on the subject of "quiet quitting." Different authors use different definitions, but several have argued that "quiet quitting" is no more than "meeting the expectations" of the job: giving an honest eight hours of work for eight hours of pay, but then going home. Not looking for ways to go above and beyond. Not offering that little bit of extra, unpaid effort that pushes a job over the edge from adequate to superior. Not exceeding expectations. And whether this kind of "quiet quitting" is a good thing depends powerfully on the context and on myriad details: the company, the job, the employee, the home situation, the prospects for the future, and on and on. No one size fits all.

I think that has to be the general answer to the challenge of consistently exceeding customer expectations. It sounds great. It is surely impressive. But no one size fits all.    

      

Wait ... did Boeing just take my advice?

Forgive me for interrupting myself. I was going to follow up my last post about customer requirements with one about meeting or exceeding expectations, but that has to wait. Right now there is a contretemps in the ISO 9001 community on LinkedIn, and it relates directly to a point I made in this very blog a few months ago. How can I resist such an opportunity?

It all started when Alan Daniels of Boeing gave an interview in a podcast where he discussed (among other topics) the importance of AS9100. You wouldn't expect this to be controversial. But when the podcast was advertised through a post in LinkedIn, a vigorous discussion broke out in the comments of that post between Christopher Paris, of Oxebridge International, and Doug French, retired from Boeing.

Paris asked, If Boeing thinks AS9100 is so important, why don't they hold an AS9100 certification, validated by external auditors?

French replied, We do think the standard is important, and we follow it carefully; but we've made an internal business decision not to spend the money for the certificate at this time.

Paris: Why should I believe you, if you don't back up your words with an objective certificate?

French: What part of the words "internal business decision" do you not understand?

And it kind of went downhill from there. 

What delights and fascinates me about this discussion is how exactly it echoes points that I've discussed in this blog. For example, Paris's objection that there is no reason to believe Boeing follows the rules of AS9100 without a certificate could have been copied verbatim from the last paragraph of my post two weeks ago about why we have standards in the first place. [Note: because Boeing is in aerospace, the discussion between Paris and French revolves around AS9100. My post is about ISO 9001. But the issues involved are identical.]

But what really caught my attention is that Boeing seems to be following the very advice I posted last March, in this post here, about whether or when to seek certification. If you remember, what I said was this:

"[W]hile every company benefits from doing things well, not every company benefits from having a certificate to hang on the wall attesting that they do things well. If having this certificate will bring you more new business than it costs you to get it ... then it is worth the money to get the certificate. If not, not."

That's exactly what Doug French said. 

How does this advice apply to Boeing? Companies often seek certification for a couple of reasons. One is that a customer demands it; another is that it sets them apart from the competition. But who exactly is Boeing's competition? There are only two major airplane manufacturing companies in the world that sell commercial jetliners: Boeing and Airbus. [Reference.] Yes, of course there are smaller manufacturers as well, but for all practical purposes no other company can compete with these two. So Boeing has no need to set themselves apart from competitors by seeking certification. And there are no customers demanding to see a certificate, because the relevant customers know that they don't have a wide choice of vendors. There is simply no compelling economic reason for Boeing to seek certification.

To be fair, Paris recognizes this. While he chastises Boeing for not seeking certification, the reason he offers is not economic. His reason is moral: noblesse oblige. While recognizing that of course Boeing can get along just fine economically without certification—business has gone swimmingly up till now, after all—he argues that if Boeing is going to champion the AS9100 standard (which they do), and if Boeing is going to require all their suppliers to be certified to AS9100 (which they do), then they should feel morally obligated to lead by example. So long as they don't, Paris argues, their protestations about the importance of standards and certification sound hollow.

Is he right? I guess it's a matter of opinion. But the way the airplane manufacturing business looks today, Boeing is probably safe in doing what they do. Even if a lot of people end up agreeing with Paris, how far will that cut into their sales? I predict that the effect will be negligible compared to the ups and downs of the worldwide demand for aircraft—and I'm certain Boeing is paying a lot of attention to that.

And if things change one day? If suddenly there is a material risk that Boeing will be penalized in the marketplace for not holding a third-party certificate of compliance to AS9100? The day that happens, Boeing will contract with a Certification Body and get their certification. That's what any company would do. If having this certificate will bring you more new business than it costs you to get it ... then it is worth the money to get the certificate.

I'm still tickled to think that Boeing is following my advice on this point.