The deep source of Quality

Image by lovelyheewon from Pixabay

The other day I read the most encouraging article I have seen in a long time. Bookstores are coming back.

More precisely, Barnes & Noble is profitable and growing again.

Is this a Quality story? Yes it is. Remember that Quality means getting what you want. For a long time, Barnes & Noble failed to give customers what they wanted, and the company suffered as a result. The article describes a long string of bad decisions by Barnes & Noble management that made the stores "crucifyingly boring" and that made the company catastrophically unprofitable. In many ways it was just hanging on waiting for Amazon to kill it outright.

And then Barnes & Noble brought on a new CEO, named James Daunt. Daunt made changes to the Barnes & Noble stores that made customers want to go there ... and, once there, to buy books. He made the stores interesting, and he got them to sell interesting books. In other words, he improved the whole Quality experience for customers, and customers responded to the higher Quality with their wallets.

If you want to build a checklist of Quality tricks and tools from Daunt's success, you might find a few in the article. One important change was that he gave each store a lot of autonomy in deciding what to stock and sell. He trusted the local employees to know better than anyone else what would sell in that location. And he accepted the consequence that each store would look different—even unique. This by itself was huge. The article lists some other measures that he implemented. Doubtless a full study of his turnaround would uncover even more.

But the article also makes it very clear that the heart of Daunt's success doesn't lie in tricks and tools. The heart of his success isn't about methods. The author explains the point, rather, as follows:

"This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books."

It's as simple—and radical—as that. Because Daunt loves books, he knew immediately and intuitively what things matter to people who buy books. He knew which decisions would make book-buyers happier, and which decisions would make them miserable. And so he also knew—immediately and intuitively—what practices to abandon, regardless how strongly they were championed by management experts or executives. 

Some of these practices that he abandoned had formerly seemed fundamental to the bookselling industry; and when you describe them on a whiteboard or in a boardroom they sound like they make sense. But they alienate people who love books, and of course those people are the target market for a bookseller. Alienating them is by definition bad Quality! The problem that had trapped Barnes & Noble in the past was that these bad decisions were made because they sounded like they made sense. And since the people who made the decisions were not themselves booklovers, they couldn't see that the decisions were wrong.

In other words, the deepest source or spring of Quality is love: love for the work or love for the product. If you don't fundamentally care about what you are doing, no collection of tricks and tools will be enough to make the difference.* And when you do care, that caring prompts you to look ever more deeply ... and looking deeply helps you see what to do.

Of course the methods and techniques all help. But the love, the caring, the deep looking—all these come first. Only afterwards can the methods and techniques find their place.

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* Robert Pirsig makes the same point in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

"Maybe it's just the usual late afternoon letdown, but after all I've said about all these things today I just have a feeling that I've somehow talked around the point. Some could ask, 'Well, if I get around all those gumption traps, then will I have the thing licked?'

"The answer, of course, is no, you still haven't got anything licked. You've got to live right too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts." [p. 324]