Quality out in the open

Over the last couple of weeks I've written about a recent disagreement between me and the organizational hierarchy of ASQ (American Society for Quality), and about what that disagreement can tell us about organizational behavior generally. (See specifically this post and then this one.) The situation has not really improved—not yet, at any rate—and I'll get to that in a minute. But I want to stop first to talk about an important principle that this whole discussion has brought to light.

The principle is transparency. As much as possible, manage your business out in the open. When it comes to Quality in your products or services, manage that out in the open too. (Incidentally, I make this very point with respect to process management in an article I posted just five years ago.)

Obviously this doesn't mean telling your competitors all your trade secrets. It doesn't mean exposing any information that you are legally required to keep confidential. 

But transparency generates trust. If you are open and honest with your employees, or your customers, or the public, then they will be inclined to trust you because they can see that you aren't double-dealing.

By the same token, if you are sly or silent or secretive—if you hide things—you encourage people to distrust you. They will all think, What are you doing that is so bad that you have to hide it from me? And their imaginations will conjure up pictures far worse than anything you are really doing! So you'll do better to own up to whatever it is, rather than let them imagine something horrible.

Transparency and justice

I spent my high school years at the Webb School of California. Like all private schools, it had rules. The students were teenagers, so perhaps it is not surprising that some of them challenged those rules. Once in a while, a student was expelled. 

Stephen and Ann Longley
in the 1970s.

Ongoing disciplinary actions were always kept confidential, of course. But as soon as the boy had left campus, the Headmaster (Stephen Longley, back in those days) addressed the school. Keeping the story simple and trans­parent, he told us what the student had done, and that he had been asked to leave. He was clear and to the point, with no needless detail to muddy the picture.

The impact of this honesty and clarity was enormous. In the first place we all knew that we wouldn't be seeing Fred or Herman around campus any more, and we all knew why. But there was more than that. We knew that Fred or Herman had been removed for violating an objective rule, not because someone took a subjective dislike to him. We understood that if we did the same thing he had done, we would be expelled the same way he was. But we also understood that if we didn't break the rules, we were safe. The objectivity of the rules secured us. And the relentless clarity of the communication promised justice.   

Failure to communicate

Does that mean we should just let it all hang out? Not really, because that is rarely an effective way to communicate. (Note that Stephen Longley's announcements were very focused.)

This is the mistake I made in my most recent exchange with ASQ. In last week's article, I told you that some administrator deleted one of my posts from the myASQ discussion forum on August 6, and then it took them another six days to send me an email explaining why. By the time I got that email (August 12), I was so full-to-bursting with things I wanted to say that I dumped all of it into my reply the same day. But that just meant that my email back to the administrators was full of sound and fury. Perhaps it is not surprising that they set my account to a status where everything I post is automatically queued for moderation. (Most people can post directly with no delay.) I don't know if this status will expire one day, but it was still in place yesterday (August 19). 

What I meant to say ....

Naturally I don't like being on permanent-moderation status, but I recognize that it's partly my own fault for not communicating with ASQ more clearly. But what I meant to tell them was what I am saying here and now, about the virtue of transparency.

The whole disagreement started back when I wrote about some minor mistakes in the roll-out of an updated election procedure. Very bland stuff. Someone in the administration might have felt attacked by the criticism, and in any event asked that it be deleted. The person who wrote me suggested that I take up the issue privately inside the administration.

What I wanted to explain is this:

• If my login doesn't work, that's a personal problem.
• But if a general procedure doesn't work, it already affects everybody.
• That means that people are already talking about it.
• Once people are already talking about it—and they are, today—the only way to silence them is to make the whole thing very public. If you try to suppress the discussion, people will imagine horrible things, far worse than reality.

I failed to make these points because I buried them under a lot of useless bombastic noise. But I am convinced that they are true.

Robert Townsend on secrecy

One of the best management books I have ever read is Robert Townsend's Up the Organization. Find a copy and read it. Here's what he says about secrecy.

Secrecy is totally bad. It defeats the crusade for justice, which doesn't flourish in the dark.

Did you ever ask yourself why there's a private payroll? Or why all wages and salaries aren't posted on the bulletin board? According to the lore of the free-enterprise system money is really a scorecard. So why aren't the scores posted?*

Of course the company would have a revulsion (or a revolution) if everybody had to look squarely at a list showing the salaries of the president and his nephew, who are paid four times what they're worth, and the salaries of Izzy, Derek, and Susie, who are making a third of what they're worth.

In the case of most marketing or new product planning, secrecy is sinister. It defeats your loyal opposition and protects you from your best friends when you need them most. Secrecy implies either:

1. What I'm doing is so horrible I don't dare tell you.
   or
2. I don't trust you (any more).

__________

* I'm not suggesting that you should post salaries. For one thing, it would over-emphasize the importance of money. But you shouldn't tolerate a situation in which you're ashamed to post them. Like you are. 

           

Can you report bad news?

Quality professionals have to report bad news. It's part of the job.

That's why many organizations make Quality report directly to the CEO or General Manager, instead of tucking the department under Operations or Engineering. It's not that Quality's headcount or budget are so large that they have to be managed at that level. The idea is that Quality has to report the true state of things, without the risk that someone will hide the news.

"The widgets coming off Line 2 are defective, and if we ship them we risk a $2-million recall in the next six months."

"The prototype Mark IV Fantabulator still fails five of its fouteen critical tests and leaks radiation all over the user."

"The packaging machine in Logistics is out of alignment again, even though they just fixed it last week."

These are things the organization needs to know, even though they might embarrass someone. And it is Quality's job to speak up.

Or is it?

Last week I wrote about some hiccups recently as ASQ rolled out an updated procedure for electing officers in the geographical Sections. On the whole it wasn't a dramatic topic. Then after I posted the article here, I wrote a notification to post in myASQ, which is ASQ's in-house social media platform. I started with a brief and—I hoped—non-threatening introduction:

Was anybody else as confused as I was by the roll-out of the new procedure for electing Section officers? We heard that there were changes coming, but my Section (at least) didn't get specific information until we had already missed some deadlines. I don't know if anyone else had the same experience. But is there a chance that the organization could do a Lessons Learned analysis on this roll-out, in order to make future ones go better?

I talk about it in a little more detail here:....

Then I gave a link to last week's article. In other words, I tried to keep it as bland and professional as I could, in the hopes of starting some kind of discussion about what went on.

Within fifteen minutes, an administrator deleted my post.

I post a lot on myASQ, and this is the second time I've had a post deleted. The first time was just about a year ago, when I posted an article critical of the Board of Directors. That time, the removed post was a link to this article here; and I discussed its removal very briefly in this one here. In a nutshell, last year's post was taken down ostensibly for violating the myASQ Terms of Service; but in fact it didn't violate the Terms of Service that were current when I posted it. Those Terms were updated 24 hours later, specifically to forbid any discussion of the things I was talking about.*

This time around? I got an email yesterday from ASQ HQ, six days after the post went down, with a partial explanation. The heart of it is a reminder that myASQ is the wrong forum for complaints about procedures that aren't working. The email suggested that I contact this office or that officer instead.

Public or private?

In principle it makes sense to specify that this channel is only for this kind of communication, but in this case I wonder. If I contact an office or an officer, the ensuing discussion will be private. But when the topic is a failed procedure—and a procedure that affects many people—I think the communication really has to be public.

The point is that people are already discussing the issue. When I asked, "Was anybody else as confused as I was?" it was a rhetorical question. I'd already talked to people in other Sections who had the exact same experiences and the exact same questions. So in a sense I was asking my questions on their behalf as well. In my reply to the email from HQ, I tried to make the point that a lot of people in the Society are already whispering in the corners about this very topic. If ASQ came out and addressed it publicly, they would silence a lot of whispering. And they would give members a renewed confidence in ASQ as an organization. It would be a win all the way around.

Of course—I tried to reassure the officer who wrote to me—discussing the issue publicly never means naming names! No one expects the Society to say "It's all the fault of John Jones and Fred Smith." But it is always possible to say "A Member misunderstood the procedure and therefore did X; then an Administrator followed up using the wrong template and did Y. We are currently investigating how to error-proof the process so that it is impossible to make those mistakes again." And, as I say, it would boost confidence to do so.

I don't know if I was persuasive or not. I guess we'll see.

Where do we report bad news?

Ultimately that's the important question: Where do we report bad news?

• We have to report it somewhere, because that's what we Quality professionals do.
• ASQ has urged us for years to channel all our communications into myASQ, so my first guess is that that's where we should report administrative failures like this one. 
• On the other hand, if myASQ is the wrong place to report bad news, then that's fine too—so long as we know what channel to use instead. And for practical reasons, it should be a more-or-less public channel, one that other people can consult. Is there another channel inside ASQ with these features? Or how about LinkedIn? Facebook? The New York Times? 

I'm ready to use any of them, so just let me know. 

__________

* Yes, I downloaded copies of the Terms of Service document—with date stamps—before and after, just to be sure.

           

Doesn't anybody know how to play this game?

Quality professionals have to know at least something about a lot of different fields. 

• We don't have to be logicians, but we have to know enough logic to work through a 5-Why analysis or to build a cause-and-effect diagram. 
• We don't have to be statisticians, but we have to know enough statistics to manage processes with a control sheet, or to sort failures with a Pareto chart. 
• We don't have to be experimental scientists, but it helps if we know something about the design of experiments.

We also have to understand organizational behavior and management. Most of the improvements we identify can't be implemented without the help of other people, generally people who don't report to us. So we have to know when and how to introduce changes so they can slide into place with the least disruption. It helps to develop a feel for the organization we work in, so that our colleagues in other departments are disposed to support us rather than to block us. 

That's why I was so startled at the very casual way I learned that ASQ had recently updated the procedure to elect leadership committees (or "Boards") for local geographical sections.

• I first heard an announcement (with no special urgency) that there would be a training class on the updated procedures on July 15. I was going to be out of town that day, so I made a point to listen to the recording as soon as I got back.
• Sure enough, I listened to the recording on July 23. It outlined a complex new procedure but specified no deadlines.
• That evening there was a general leadership meeting, and someone asked what the deadlines were for the new procedure. No one in the meeting knew, so the organizer took an action to find out and let us know.
• Only the next day, on July 24, did the meeting organizer send us a screenshot that the first deadline for the new procedure had been on July 8—more than two weeks earlier!

The discovery that we were already late caused a little consternation among our regional leadership. Our contact in leadership found and supplied two documents to clear up the confusion. Unfortunately they disagreed. One said to hold elections for two weeks, starting in October, with a slate of candidates compiled in August. The other said to hold elections for four weeks, starting in September, with a slate of candidates compiled in July.

Some time later I tracked down a copy of the procedure document itself. Turns out the new version had been released back in February, and the first deadline for the election process is actually July 1. But the first time anybody was told about it was in a training class two weeks later that didn't specify deadlines. As I say, the notification was very ... relaxed.

OK, you might say, so it was a simple bureaucratic mix-up. No big surprise. These things happen all the time. Why should it matter to you so much?

And my real answer is an emotional one, not a reasoned one. But we're ASQ! We're supposed to know better than that. We're supposed to be better than that!

But are we? On reflection it's not so obvious, for at least two reasons.

First, ASQ is an organization like any other. It has to hire staff, like any other. ASQ's members are Quality profes­sionals, but there is probably no require­ment that the Society's profes­sional staff all spend a certain number of years in the Quality trenches before coming onboard. Such a require­ment would be, at the very least, highly unusual; it would also force ASQ to pay well above market rates for office staff. 

Second, even seasoned Quality professionals sometimes make bone-headed mistakes. I know I have.* What we hope for, when working with Quality professionals, is not that they be perfect, but that they be ready to examine their own mistakes openly and dispas­sionately in order to learn from them. And naturally we hope also that they bring with them the memory of past lessons learned, perhaps in the form of a checklist or procedure, so that they don't have to learn from any particular failure more than once. But to ask that they never fail is simply to ask too much.

Maybe ASQ can carry out a root-cause analysis on the mistakes in this roll-out, and then assign long-term corrective and preventive actions. In other words, maybe ASQ can use the current muddle to improve the process for handling updated procedures. That kind of outcome could turn today's jumble and disorder to advantage. Let us hope.

__________

* Tip of the hat to the memory of the great Graham Chapman, in "The Mouse Problem."     

           

Quality when you have no choices

Last week I argued that Quality has a role in determining the attitude management should take towards workers in the organization; because if management doesn't offer the rank-and-file such simple considerations as respect, truth, transparency, and justice, the organizational machinery is going to break down. In that sense, I said that showing your people respect and justice are just a form of preventive maintenance.

Was I wrong?

I got a reply telling me I was wrong. Specifically, this reader argued that sometimes people are trapped and can't walk away. She reminded me that I have written before about monopoly situations (like public utilities) where competition is absent, and that in such cases customer care often takes a back seat. 

As an aside, it is clear to everyone how these two cases are the same?

Under a monopoly, one party (the seller) provides a good, often a necessity (like gas, electricity, or water). So long as he continues to provide it, he can charge more or less whatever price he wants and can offer more or less whatever level of service he chooses. People who need the good in question will continue to buy from him because there are no alternatives.

By the same token, if membership in some organization offers benefits that some people can't do without—or if an employer hires people who can't afford to quit—those people will stick with the organization on (more or less) whatever terms the organization chooses to offer, because there are no alternatives.

The full comment introduces other examples as well, ranging from slaveholding to contracts with teaser rates. But in all cases the topology of the power relations is the same, even if the magnitudes are very different. 

Anyway my critic concluded—with respect to the discussion of ASQ's current controversies that started this whole thread—that "if there is a benefit to membership that’s (a) independent of the local programs, and (b) unavailable elsewhere, it seems to me that ASQ leadership can do whatever they darn like with your dues, and you members just have to lump it."

"We don't care. We don't have to."

It's a logical argument. We've already discussed that if the lines are too long when you go to renew your driver's license, you can't just patronize a competitor instead; so, perhaps unsurprisingly, there is usually a line. If a public utility messes up your service order, you may not have a lot of recourse short of contacting the regulatory entity that oversees them. And everyone remembers Lily Tomlin's famous line as Ernestine the telephone operator—even people who aren't old enough to remember Ernestine herself: "We don't care. We don't have to." (Ironically, she was spoofing the phone company, which is no longer a monopoly.)*

As for ASQ, whose management controversies, as I say, started this whole thread, there does seem to be a sense in some quarters that the membership are responsible to the management and not vice versa.

• On the one hand, there are regular exhortations from ASQ management encouraging the local sections to find new ways to attract and retain members.
• On the other hand, as noted in an earlier post, headquarters has cut off all the regular remittances of member dues to the local sections (notwithstanding that people are sensitive to loss).
• Nor was there discussion or consultation with the section leadership in advance of this decision (notwithstanding that people are sensitive to slights).
• Nor has there been any public discussion of these controversies inside ASQ. In fact, just last week there was an update to the Community Guidelines for the myASQ discussion forums, forbidding discussion of ASQ's Board of Directors or their decisions.** Nominally the update was to "ensure myASQ remains a welcoming, helpful space focused on our shared professional interests." But concretely that means, among other new provisions, that "Community members shall refrain from using myASQ for activities related to the ASQ Board of Directors or other Society elections, including posting discussions, blogs, and direct messages, unless explicitly authorized in writing." It is not clear to me whether ASQ hopes to keep members from finding out about the controversies, or just wants to push discussion to other locations. (There is extensive discussion on LinkedIn, for instance.) Either way, these developments have all taken place notwithstanding that people can judge independently of how you want them to.

So on the face of it, it does look like there is some point to my critic's argument.

Yes, but no

But I think "on the face of it" is the key qualifier. In general, exploitative monopolies can succeed in the short run, but they fail in the long run. Unless they offer benefits that are worth the cost, in the long run people figure out how to make other arrangements.

My critic talked about slavery. I am no expert in the economics of slaveholding, and I will leave any discussion to those who are. But if we look at a situation that was similar in some respects—I'm thinking of mandatory collective labor in the old Soviet Union—everyone knows that the private or black market economy was far more productive than the official, collective economy.*** It's true that most people couldn't run away. But they were often unmotivated. We've discussed before that the deepest source of Quality is love. For that very reason, though, if you don't care about what you are doing then your work will be no good. It will be at best transactional: Do this to get that. Pretty soon that becomes Do as little of this as you can get away with to get that. If everyone else is doing the same thing, the whole enterprise becomes a house of cards. The joke in the Soviet Union ran, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."

Think about it for a couple of minutes and you can come up with any number of other examples. It is true that sometimes the obstacle posed by this or that monopoly is very large. It may seem insuperable. But sooner or later, someone will find a way around it, if the monopoly doesn't fall apart first (like the Soviet Union) from its own internal inefficiencies. The only reason Christopher Columbus tried to reach Asia by sailing west was that the people who controlled the overland route were charging too much for spices.

What about ASQ? The society sells educational materials related to Quality, and it offers certification in the various Quality disciplines. These goods are professionally valuable to anyone in the field. In the terms posed by my critic above, they are "(a) independent of the local programs, and (b) unavailable elsewhere"—at least today. But strictly speaking you don't have to be a member to buy them. Members get a discount on classes and certifications, but non-members can buy them too. So is membership worth it? That's a personal decision, but it does give you the chance to make personal and professional connections with other members. And for some forty thousand people worldwide the answer is plainly Yes.

On the other hand, membership has been dropping. ASQ does not formally advertise membership totals, but Google estimates the following numbers overall:

• In the 1990’s: 136,000 members
• In the early 2000s: 100,000 members
• In 2010: 80,000 members
• In 2020: 52,456 members
• In 2024: 40,000+ members

Was this decline caused by the controversies over ASQ management? There is no way to know. All we can say is that it is consistent with what we might expect if members were unhappy with the direction the society's management had taken, but did not think they had the means to change it. But there could be any number of other causes as well. And, as Quality professionals, we know better than to jump to conclusions.

In the end, I stand by my argument that Quality matters in management. Yes, it is always possible for someone to mistreat his employees in the short run and still get some kind of results. But in the long run, such a system will get brittle and sluggish and fall apart. It's the same thing in the market: in the short term, a fast-talking shyster might fleece a few people out of their cash by selling them the Brooklyn Bridge, or gold-painted rocks. But it never lasts. 

__________

* Yes, this counts as "foreshadowing."

** By a remarkable coincidence, the update came shortly after I published this blog post here.

*** "Collective farmers were allowed to cultivate small plots of land and sell surplus produce in private markets. These private plots, though only about 3% of all farmland, produced a quarter of the country's agricultural output." See this article, "How Did the Soviet Economic System Affect Consumer Goods?" by Andrew Ancheta, Investopedia, September 09, 2023.     

      

Quality in management

Last week, I raised the question whether Quality has anything to say about how an organization manages its people and resources internally. To ground the discussion in a concrete example, I referenced a dispute that is currently under way inside the American Society for Quality (ASQ) about funding and budgetary priorities; but honestly I could have picked any number of other companies instead. There's nothing special about the ASQ controversy. From my point of view, really, there were only two benefits to writing about this example: first, I'm a member of ASQ so I happen to know about it (because the topic is unfolding around me in real time); and second, the critical details are already available in public so I could discuss them without violating anyone's confidentiality. (If you check last week's article, you will find footnotes with URL links for all of the substantive data.)

Remember the real question

On the other hand, it's never very useful just to write that "XYZ Corp. did a bad thing." What are the rest of us supposed to do with that? The useful thing is to write information that we can take back to improve our own work. And that brings us back to the original question: Does Quality have anything to say about how an organization manages its people and resources internally?

Last week I took the wrong approach, by checking what ISO 9000:2015 says in the Quality Management Principles. Oh, the information in there is sound enough! But it's all just recommendations, and it's mostly stuff we've heard before. So it's easy to imagine someone in an organization's management saying: 

Look, I believe in providing Quality to our customers. But when it comes to all that talk about "internal transparency" and "treating your employees with respect," I just don't have the time. I want to Ship Product and Make Money; and all that touchy-feely stuff about employee relations and being a Nice Guy—that's all a luxury. Get to work and get your job done. End of story!

Is he wrong?

Getting to work is fine, but he's wrong to call human relations a luxury. But ISO 9000 isn't the best place to see it. Let's back up and remember what Quality is about.

The Quality perspective

Quality means getting what you want, but there are a lot of ways to do that. Critically, Quality is not built in the abstract from a set of axioms or natural laws: there's no set of rules that unfailingly give you Quality. If anything, Quality is more like a giant Lessons Learned exercise, where we cobble together useful techniques by analyzing one failure after another and figuring out what it takes to make sure those failures never happen again. But since there are many different kinds of failures, there are many different Quality techniques—so many that it can be hard to summarize them all.

Still, there are general points that they all have in common. One of them is that if you want some assembly (like a tractor or a stamping machine) to continue to work well, you have to understand the components that go into it and how they are assembled. What kinds of failures are normal for these components? Does this material rust or corrode? Does that material bend or warp? Do these gears need regular cleaning and oiling, or is it better to leave them alone? All of these are normal questions that any Quality Technician responsible for a large machine would consider on a daily basis.

And here is the critical point. The organization itself is a kind of large machine, and its components are human beings! Quality requires that we understand the failure modes of our machines, to prevent breakdowns. Therefore Quality also requires that we understand the failure modes of our fellow human beings, to prevent organizational dysfunction. 

Failure modes

What do we know about human beings, that relates to their possible failure modes in organizations? We know a lot, and there's no way I can summarize it all in a single blog post. But let me list a few facts that I hope we can agree on.

• People are capable of free will.
• People are capable of independent judgement.
• People are capable of rational thought.
• People work together naturally in groups.
• People want to feel respected, and are sensitive to slights. (See research on disrespect, e.g. here.)
• People are, on the whole, more fearful of loss than covetous of gain. (See, e.g., the research on Loss aversion.)

Already, even these six points entail consequences for the management of any organization.

• Because people have free will, they must (at some level) want to be part of an organization, or they will simply walk away. (I discuss this point in more detail in this post back in the spring.)
• Because people have independent judgement, they choose whether to stay with your organization based on their own criteria, and not yours. In fact, different members of the organization might have different criteria from each other.
• Because people are capable of rational thought, you can give them reasons to stay with your organization and expect them to listen. But the reasons you give them should make sense. Also, because people can see with their own eyes, the reasons you give them should match what they can see for themselves—i.e., the reasons should be true. If you give your people reasons that are visibly false, the risk is that they will stop believing you even if you later tell the truth. Also, as I have discussed before, the easiest way to make people think that something is the case is to make sure it really is the case.
• 
  Because people work together naturally in groups—Aristotle called us "πολιτικὰ ζῷα" or "political animals" [Politics 1.1253a]—your people probably want to work for you, by default. And people regularly accept some kind of authority over their work, without chafing at it. But they will not accept just whatever authority you feel like exercising. While a willingness to work together is natural, so is the deep-seated expectation of justice. It is true that people sometimes disagree around the edges about what constitutes justice. But nobody who has a choice will remain part of a community without it.
• Because people are sensitive to loss, be careful before you take things away from them. Of course sometimes you have no choice. Sometimes there are good reasons. But in that case, it is important to counter-balance the loss by giving them something else in exchange. At the very least, you have to explain what you are doing and why. This shows them respect (and people want respect); it also offers them the truth (and people want the truth).

Notice what this means. I have not said one word about Being a Nice Guy. But a small collection of known facts about human behavior (and human failure modes) has already shown us that—if we want to prevent the organizational machine from breaking down—management has got to offer the rank and file respect, truth, transparency, and justice.

This isn't soft-heartedness or soft-headedness. This is just preventive maintenance. And preventive maintenance is one of the fundamental Quality disciplines.

If you are interested, I can use next week's post to review how ASQ has handled its current controversy, in light of these points. Let me know what you think.       

       

Does Quality require shared sacrifice?

We usually think about Quality as one aspect of an organization's interactions with its customers. To the extent that we discuss internal behavior, we usually talk about behavior that has an effect on the customer experience: error-proofing, for example; or calibration; or lessons learned.

But does Quality have anything to say about budget management? What would that mean? Let me start with an example.

Once upon a time, I worked for a company that had several offices across the United States. And we hit hard times. (Since most of my career was in tech, I got pretty familiar over the years with the alternation of boom and bust.) To help us weather those hard times, an announcement came out one day that all of us in the rank-and-file were going to be put on 80% salary. We were told explicitly, "Just work four days a week, because that's all we can pay you for."

But that was only half the message. In the same announcement, we learned that:

• the Regional President had cut his own compensation to ZERO for the duration of the emergency. No salary, no bonus. Nothing.
• the rest of Senior Management got to keep their salaries, but their bonuses had been cut for the year. (And for people at that level, the bonuses represented a large fraction of their total compensation.)

In other words: however hard the austerity measures were going to pinch us, they were going to pinch Senior Management too. The message was clear that we were all in this together. So everybody pitched in, nobody grumbled, and after a while things turned around so we could go back to normal.

It's a great story, and the best part is that it really happened. But of course stories like this aren't exactly common. And I found myself reflecting on it as I considered some recent news from the Board of Directors of ASQ (American Society for Quality).

ASQ and hard times

In principle, ASQ is a volunteer organization. That is, there are a number of administrative roles at Headquarters (and perhaps other places) but the bulk of the work is carried out by unpaid volunteers. 

The Society is divided into geographically-based Sections, so that people who live in a common area can get together, get to know each other, and do things in common. The idea is that social interaction can be useful professionally, but also it's just a nice thing to do.

There are also annual membership dues. These dues cover the overall Society activities, and a fraction of each member's dues goes to that member's Section to help pay for local Section activities.

The fraction of annual dues allocated to a member's local Section is sometimes adjusted, but lately has been hovering right around 6.5%. (That's six-and-a-half percent, not sixty-five.) The remaining 94+% goes to the central organization.

But not this year. The money is normally disbursed quarterly. According to the "Member Unit Financial Management and Reporting" policy approved 2021-11-12, clause 5.1(g), "Dues allocations will be paid quarterly during the year and as soon as practical after the start of each quarter but not later than 30 days after the start of the quarter." In fact, though, Q1 2025 came and went with no sign of the quarterly disbursements. Finally on April 16, we received a communication from the Board of Directors that the Q1 dues allocations would not be distributed.* The explanation was that all our dues allocations had been invested in the stock market; and with the start of a new Administration in Washington DC, the stock market was behaving erratically.

Then on August 4, the Board of Directors announced that they won't distribute any dues to the local Sections for Q2 or Q3 either.** This time the explanation was that they simply couldn't afford to make the payments. ASQ's deficits are too high, and the budget is stretched too thin.

Where's the money going instead? 

The Board announcement explained that ASQ is now rolling out a members-only AI tool called Quincy, "offering members 24/7 access to expert insights, tailored recommendations, and ASQ’s extensive content library at your fingertips." (I guess the Board hasn't been following the recent news about how likely AI is to hallucinate answers to technical questions.) 

Also they've been putting a lot more money into the members' website, "which recently received the Community of the Year award from Higher Logic." [I had to look up who Higher Logic is, but I guess this is a big deal for people who know.]

And of course there are the administrative salaries. The Board announcement told us in tones of alarm that over the last three years distributions to the local Sections worldwide had totalled some $850,000 per year. That sounds like a lot of money. 

• But in 2022, Catherine Jordan (ASQ's outgoing CEO) took home $539,594 in total compensation; while Siddhartha Bhatnagar (the incoming CEO) took home $306,784.*** (Overall total for 2022: $846,378.) 
• In 2023, the numbers were a little more modest: Bhatnagar's total compensation had risen to $415,573, while Jordan's had dropped to only $325,110.**** (Overall total for 2023: $740,683.)

I have no more recent information. But if someone asked me where ASQ could find an extra seven- or eight-hundred thousand dollars a year to keep supporting the local Sections, ... gosh, I think about my experience with that earlier employer (where the CEO cut his own compensation to zero) and the arithmetic looks simple and compelling.

Of course, maybe the Board already had the same idea. Maybe our CEO is currently serving for a dollar a year, or less. I don't remember seeing an announcement, but I might have missed it.

So I asked. I emailed ASQ Component Relations a week ago, asking about any announcement on the subject. Just this morning I finally got a reply that said "ASQ does not share information regarding staffing and/or staff compensation." I wish I were surprised.  

In their defense

I had better clarify a couple of points that make this situation different from the one I started with.

Because ASQ is (largely) a volunteer organization, the dues allocations which have been stopped did not constitute anyone's personal salary. Nobody was relying on this money to pay groceries or rent. 

Many Sections had built up savings over the years. Those with no savings who needed money for an event were encouraged to ask their Regional Director for a special emergency allocation.

And Sections are allowed to raise money on their own (within certain limits). There's nothing to stop a Section from offering a dinner event and then selling tickets to cover it. 

What about Quality?    

With all that said, what does this have to do with Quality? Even if we assume the worst about the current state of ASQ executive pay, does the Quality discipline have anything to say about it?

Yes, but it's indirect. In ISO 9001:2015, pretty much the only clause with any relevance at all is 5.1.1(e) which requires: "Top management shall demonstrate leadership ... by ensuring that the resources needed for the quality management system are available." (ASQ management can probably argue they have done that, by telling us to use our savings and offering special allocations where needed.)

ISO 9000:2015 has a little more to say. I'm thinking of the seven Quality Management Principles that we discussed last spring, particularly the principles of Leadership and Engagement of people.

Recommended actions under the heading of Leadership include (clause 2.3.2.4):

• create and sustain shared values, fairness and ethical models for behaviour at all levels of the organization;
• establish a culture of trust and integrity; ...
• ensure that leaders at all levels are positive examples to people in the organization. [All emphasis is mine.]

Recommended actions under the heading of Engagement of people include (clause 2.3.3.4):

• communicate with people to promote understanding of the importance of their individual contribution; 
• promote collaboration throughout the organization; ...
• conduct surveys to assess people’s satisfaction, communicate the results and take appropriate actions.

These are suggestions, not requirements. And for the most part they are written so generally that it is hard to tell what actions satisfy them. (The very last point about surveys can be objectively assessed, but the others are a lot less solid.) Nonetheless, I think they all point to establishing a kind of common interest between leaders and led, a sense that we are all in the same boat. It may in fact not be possible to describe this kind of common interest strictly in terms that can be supported by objective evidence, but I want to say that most of us know it when we see it—and that most of the time we probably agree with each other's assessments (positive or negative).*****  

Using that kind of criterion, the company that I described at the beginning of this post had clearly implemented the Quality principles of Leadership and Engagement of people. For ASQ, perhaps the best we can say is that an affirmative answer to the same question is not obvious without more data.  

What do you think?

Since the formal standards are so vague, what do you think? 

• Does a commitment to Quality require shared sacrifice? 
• When hard times pinch, should top management make it a point to be visibly squeezed as hard as the rank and file? 
• Why does it matter, or why does it not? 
• Finally, what do you wish I had said in this essay, that I failed to say?

Leave me your remarks in the comments.

__________

* See, e.g., this LinkedIn post.  

** See, e.g., this LinkedIn post.

*** Source: ASQ's 2022 IRS form 990, publicized by Dan Burrows in this LinkedIn post. Of course these numbers don't count salaries for other positions, or any other administrative expenses.  

**** Source: ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer website. Again, these numbers don't count salaries for other positions, or any other administrative expenses.    

***** Even back in the Middle Ages, the justification for compensating kings and nobles and knights so much better than peasants was always that when danger threatened, the kings and nobles and knights put themselves at risk to protect their people.