Management by travel

Last week I wrote about Florida Power and Light learning Total Quality Control from Kansai Electric in Japan, and I mentioned that "FPL and Kansai set up an extensive program of travel and visitation, so that personnel from each company could build personal contacts with their counterparts." It was a single bullet-point in an article largely about other things, so many readers might have missed it. But the technique is a powerful one.

Years ago, I worked for a Bosch subsidiary called ETAS. ETAS had run as an ambitious startup for some years by then. They were beginning to expand, with sales and development offices outside of Germany. But they wanted to preserve the unique company culture that had brought them their early success. Now, culture requires communication, and the most effective communication is always in-person. Nothing else replaces being there. So the company made a strategic decision for several years to invest in business travel.

This meant that the office in California where I worked had regular visitors—from the other ETAS office in America, and from the home office in Germany. We had workshops to bring together our engineers with their counterparts from other product lines. Likewise for the sales force; likewise for the customer service team. The global Process Owners for each of the business processes in our Quality Management System visited regularly to check how the systems were working for us. Nor was the travel all in one direction: there were events held in Germany by this department or that one, and our people were regularly invited—expected—to attend.

The organizational structure was international, as well. For some years my immediate supervisor sat in Germany. (I was still in California, so we were separated by nine time zones.) Three key positions in our office's management structure were filled by ETAS personnel who relocated from Germany. On the other hand, ETAS's Global Director for Operations and Finance was an American. International conference calls were routine, and so was the travel.

Not my passport. I downloaded this
picture from Wikipedia.
But you get the idea.

One of my topics in the Quality department was internal audits. The ETAS program assumed that for each internal audit there should be at least one auditor from somewhere else, to avoid the risk that a local auditor might get jaded by familiarity and stop seeing nonconformities. So I routinely led audits in our other American office, and in Germany; and we routinely invited my German colleagues to come audit in California. I didn't realize quite how routine the travel had become until one day the Passport Control officer in the Stuttgart Airport had to search for a blank page to stamp and finally told me, "You come here a lot."     

So did it work? Yes! It worked very well.

The net result of all this travel is that we really were able to work with our colleagues from other offices and other countries as if they were just down the hall. It was not unusual for me to chat with one of our engineers and hear him casually reference recent conversations with our German top management—referring to them by first name. We discussed common concerns, asked and gave support on common projects, all as if we were working in the same building. Of course there were occasional misunderstandings arising from imperfect translation or differing legal backgrounds; but they were easily managed, because we had built up friendship and familiarity by working together.

Ultimately, as the company continued to mature, we got to the point where it was no longer as critical as it had once been to reinforce the cultural framework; and we no longer poured quite so much money into travel. The savings certainly made a difference: there is no question that our travel-based management strategy had been very expensive. At the same time, it is also unarguable that it helped tie together a collection of far-flung offices into a single operating unit. 

Do I recommend the same strategy for every company? Well of course it depends. Not every company has multiple offices in different countries; of the companies that do, not all of those need their offices to work together seamlessly. As a result, many companies don't need anything like this approach. And I'm sure that some companies which might otherwise benefit from it, can't afford it. If the margins in your industry are too narrow, that limits what options are available to you. 

But it is still true that the best communication takes place in-person. It is still true that no electronic tool ever quite takes the place of being there. That's what makes travel and visitation such powerful tools for building a culture and binding a company together. 

           

Normalization of deviance

A year and a half ago, I wrote about disasters—and about how hard it can be to see them coming. I made the point that when we analyze a disaster retrospectively, we are likely to be led astray because we know how it's all going to turn out. Because of Hindsight Bias, in particular, we think it should have been obvious to everyone that a disaster was imminent, when in reality it might not have been clear at all. It is important to remember this bias when we try to understand a disaster, so we can look at events with the eyes of those who participated in them, to derive working lessons for the future.

But not all disasters are like this. Sometimes the risk of a disaster really is obvious to the people involved at the time, according to data they already have—they see the data, they understand the risk, and then somebody decides just to go ahead and do it anyway.

The Challenger disaster

"On January 28, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven crew members aboard. The spacecraft disintegrated 46,000 feet (14 km) above the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 16:39:13 UTC (11:39:13 a.m. EST, local time at the launch site). It was the first fatal accident involving an American spacecraft while in flight."*

What happened? It was a cold day, and the rubber O-rings which sealed a joint in the right Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster were stiff. So they didn't seal the joint adequately. Shortly after liftoff, gases from within the rocket booster leaked out and started to burn through the larger structure. Now, the space shuttle and all its launch framework were made out of steel—of course. But the rocket boosters burned at 5600℉; and at that temperature, steel boils!** (Not melts—boils.) So naturally the whole assembly burst apart.

But how much of this could we have predicted ahead of time? It turns out the answer is, All of it. Recently I ran across a lecture on YouTube that breaks it down.*** (This lecture is saved in four parts, of which the first two discuss the Challenger disaster from a Quality perspective. The other two parts give valuable advice for managing your career and your life, but I won't focus on them here. You can scroll to the bottom of this post to find links to the lecture itself.)

In summary, the speaker (Mike Mullane) explains the sequence of events. 

• During the initial design reviews, the O-rings were designated at "Criticality 1," meaning that a failure could entail the destruction of the vehicle and the loss of life. "Criticality 1" also meant that any damage to the O-rings constituted adequate cause to abort the mission and redesign the shuttle. 
• Sure enough, after the shuttle's second flight (years before Challenger), the team recovered the parts and detected damage on the O-rings. 
• But for this and that reason the team decided to go ahead with a third launch, and the third flight was fine.
• In future flights, sometimes the O-rings were damaged and sometimes they weren't.
• After-action reports regularly called out the risk posed by damage to the O-rings. Multiple memos, over a period of two years or more, described the O-ring issue as "urgent." 
• But each flight was successful. So the project got the idea that the O-ring problem wasn't that big a deal. Every time the issue was raised, it was granted a standing waiver.
• Until, of course, one day it was a big deal after all ....  

What is the normalization of deviance?

Mullane explains that the "normalization of deviance" stems from nothing more than the natural human tendency to take shortcuts under pressure. We know what the "right" way to do a job is, and when we are relaxed we are happy to follow it. But then time runs short, or money runs short, or something else happens—it could be anything, really—and we get under pressure. So we take a shortcut, to make the job easier.

And most of the time, after we take that shortcut ... nothing happens! The job gets finished with no problem. So the next time we are under pressure, we remember that shortcut and do it again. And then again. Pretty soon, the "shortcut" has become the normal way of working. The "deviance" (a deviation from the defined and approved method) has become "normalized."

We've seen this before. Last year, when I was writing about Boeing, I explained how their cost-cutting drive led them to gut what used to be a robust safety management system. One of the factors at work was exactly this dynamic. I wrote:

They [Boeing management] found, empirically, that they could eliminate one Quality inspection, save a few dollars, and no planes fell out of the sky. OK, good. How about eliminating two inspections? Three? Four? Where do we stop? You can see how, in the absence of visible negative feedback (like an increased accident rate), this could get out of hand quickly.

That's what happened with Challenger. Word for word.

How do you protect against it?

Fine, how do we avoid this?

The short answer is almost too simple: Don't do that! But that sounds obvious, and yet this dynamic continues to afflict people every single day. So really, what do we do?

Mullane lists four points that he thinks are critical:

1. Recognize your vulnerability: Everybody thinks, It won't happen to me. I know all about this problem, so that makes me immune. I watched a video on YouTube. I read a blog post in Pragmatic Quality. I know better than to fall into this trap. Nice try. But the other people, those ones who did fall into this trap? They were plenty smart too. All of them "knew better." But when they felt pressured, their brains reacted automatically. It can happen to you too, exactly the same way. So watch for it.
2. Execute to meet standards: This is the core of it. Plan the work, and then work the plan. Mullane explains the Air Force has a saying, "The flight manual is written in blood." In other words, every instruction in the flight manual was put there because one day somebody did something different and it turned out badly. Don't let the next one be you. If the manual says, "Abort the mission when the red light flashes," and then the red light flashes, ... abort the mission. Simple as that. 
3. Trust your instincts: Mullane makes a big point of saying that we often know more than we understand consciously, and that our instincts are there to keep us alive. So if something just feels ... off, somehow ... wrong, but you can't put your finger on quite why ... trust that feeling. Probably the thing really is wrong, and at some level you even know why. It just hasn't percolated up into your consciousness yet, but it will.
4. Archive and review near-misses and disasters: Learn from other people's experience, so you don't have to go through the same thing. Look at the disasters—or the near-misses, where things came out fine but almost didn't—that your own team has experienced. But then try to find out about other teams as well. Look for the big disasters (or near-misses) in your industry, the ones that make the news. Read everything you can, and then flow down to your team what you have learned.

And then, if we do those four things, are we home free?

I'm pretty sure nobody can promise that. But if you do these things you'll be miles ahead. And you will have reduced the odds of normalizing deviance as far as you can.

If you want more details, Mullane's lecture is a good one.

Mike Mullane's lecture, part 1/4: What is normalization of deviance?

Mike Mullane's lecture, part 2/4: How do you protect against normalization of deviance?

Mike Mullane's lecture, part 3/4: Responsibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wuk_DoX-rz8

Mike Mullane's lecture, part 4/4: Courageous self-leadership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DABsxJtNcYg

__________

* Quoted from Wikipedia, "Space Shuttle Challenger disaster." I have used this article for basic information about the disaster.  

** For specifics see this flyer from Northrop-Grumman on the Five-Segment Booster, especially the "Booster facts" on page 1. 

*** The lecture was posted to YouTube about ten years ago, but I don't know when it was given. The speaker is Mike Mullane (website, Wikipedia), an engineer, weapon systems officer, retired USAF officer, and former astronaut. He was talking to the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF) about the "Normalization of deviance."      

        

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.   

      

On sabotage

It's been a while since I posted anything funny here. Let me know if this counts as funny.

Some years ago, the CIA declassified a document published by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) back during World War Two. The document was called Simple Sabotage Field Manual (Strategic Services Field Manual No.3), and it was written to support our allies trapped behind enemy lines as they tried to disrupt Axis war-fighting capability and Axis society generally. It discusses motivation, timing, and tools, and then gives a lot of specific recommendations. You can download a copy of the document from here (or here).

What could be funny about this, you ask? Well, the book got the attention of management consultants and other business excellence experts, because there is a section on how to sabotage "organizations and production." And the advice in that section just sounds so ... normal! 

Here are just a few highlights:

• Organizations and Conferences
• Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
• When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible- never less than five.
• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
• Managers and Supervisors
• Don't order new working materials until your current stocks have been virtually exhausted, so that .the slightest delay in filling your order will mean a shutdown.
• Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.  
• Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.
• Apply all regulations to the last letter.
• Office Workers
• Misfile essential documents.
• Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone.
• Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.
• Never pass on your skill and experience to a new or less skillful worker.

The list goes on and on. And, as I say, the actions mostly sound like normal human clumsiness, short-sightedness, officiousness, and inefficiency. I've seen some of these measures with my own eyes, and I bet everyone I know can say the same thing—not always and not everywhere, but at some jobs, from some people, at some times.

The thing to remember is that while you or I might call this inefficiency, the OSS called it sabotage! When our organizations stumble through the day allowing these things to go on, we are in fact sabotaging ourselves. Now, in spite of all that, most of us get through the day intact anyway. Most of our organizations live to do business again tomorrow. We don't shut ourselves down. 

But think how amazing our performance would look if we didn't sabotage ourselves!  

If you have time for a longer-form discussion, Kyle Chambers and Caleb Adcock from Texas Quality Assurance chatted about this very topic in two back-to-back podcasts back in early March. The first is half an hour, and the second is just about 45 minutes. As always, they discuss the issues with their trademark humor and pragmatism. 

  
      

Boeing again, and the power of systems thinking

It seems like Boeing just can’t stay out of the news these days. 

• 
  On Saturday, June 22, Korean Air 189—a Boeing plane—developed a leak half an hour after takeoff. Within ten minutes the cabin depressurized, triggering the emergency oxygen masks. The flight was bound from Incheon Airport in Seoul, South Korea, for Taichung International Airport in Taiwan. But when the cabin lost pressure the pilots started an emergency descent to bring the plane down to a safe altitude, dropping nearly 26,900 feet in fifteen minutes. While nobody was seriously injured, nineteen passengers were hospitalized for ear pain and nosebleeds.
• 
  A couple weeks before that, on June 5, two NASA test pilots blasted off for the International Space Station aboard Boeing’s Starliner capsule. They were supposed to spend a week. But the capsule had last-minute thruster trouble after it was already launched, which almost prevented it from docking with the ISS. (It also developed several small, unrelated helium leaks.) At this writing, the two pilots have been at the ISS for three weeks (not one) … and counting. Their return has been scheduled for three different dates—and canceled each time, as NASA and Boeing continue to trouble-shoot the equipment. But a Boeing spokesman offered reassurance that that “the astronauts are not stranded.”
• Last month, Justice Department prosecutors recommended that Boeing face criminal charges for violating a 2021 settlement related to crashes of the 737 MAX in 2018 and 2019. 
• And just last week, the National Transportation Safety Board sanctioned Boeing for making inappropriate comments to the media regarding the ongoing investigation of Alaska Airlines 1282. 

What’s an airline to do?

Asking the wrong question

I wrote, “What’s an airline to do?” but it’s not clear if that’s even the right question. Let’s think about it for a minute.

Of course, it’s difficult to turn around a whole organization, especially one as large as Boeing. Growing or healing a Quality culture is a big task, and it requires coordinating a lot of elements—even something as trivial as a box of doughnuts can help make a difference. If this were the first time that Boeing had had problems, we might expect the turnaround to take a while.

But it’s not the first time. Boeing’s Quality and safety cultures have gotten worldwide attention at any rate since the crashes of Lion Air 610 in October, 2018, and of Ethiopian Airlines 302 in March, 2019. And internal discussions had already begun years before those crashes. Boeing whistleblower John Barnett testified that he began raising Quality complaints internally back in 2011.

So if the deficiencies in Boeing’s Quality and safety cultures have been well-known for over a decade, why has the company seemingly made so little progress?

A couple of months ago in this blog, we looked at how the Mayo Clinic built their Quality culture, one that continues to be healthy and effective. One of the critical elements that made the Quality initiative succeed was solid, long-term management support. Barnett and others (including other whistleblowers) have said—to put it gently—that Boeing’s management did not offer the same kind of support when Quality concerns were raised. Their focus was profitability, pure and simple.  

The funny part is, you would think that a focus on profitability ought to be enough, if only the management took a wider perspective. When customers suffer from a bad product, they sue; their damages come out of the company’s profits. When courts convict companies of criminal activities, they assess fines; those fines are paid out of the company’s profits. Besides, as we discussed with respect to the Mayo Clinic, a reputation for high Quality can itself be a key to increased profitability. Surely if only Boeing’s management were sufficiently enlightened, they would do the right things out of self-interest. Wouldn’t they? Isn’t that how this is supposed to work?

Empirically, it doesn’t seem to.     

So maybe the real question is, What’s a judge to do? Boeing has already been assessed $2.5 billion in criminal penalties; they have been subject to litigation more or less continually since the Lion Air crash; and there is no clear evidence that anything meaningful has changed. If the DOJ prosecutors have their way and Boeing is assessed another $24 billion, do we really think that will finally make the difference, when other fines and damages have failed? Or will Boeing just write it off as a cost of doing business? 

One of the recurring lessons in the Quality profession is the need to study the objective consequences of the measures we take—in other words, to assess the effectiveness of our corrective actions. If we keep doing the same thing to fix a problem and it keeps not working, the odds are pretty good that doubling down one more time isn’t going to help. Assessing fines on corporate malefactors—not just Boeing, but others as well—doesn’t seem to make much difference. Maybe it’s time to try something else.

The systems perspective

We’re often encouraged to take a “systems perspective” to solve Quality problems, though it’s not always obvious what that means in practice. But I recently ran across an example in an unexpected place. In my spare time, I’ve been reading The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics, by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith.* One topic they discuss is government corruption (e.g., bribes); and they point out that enacting strict laws against corruption is, by itself, not nearly enough to curtail it.** (To be very clear, I am NOT accusing Boeing executives or the FAA of corruption! But this example is meant to show how a systems perspective can illuminate questions about enforcement in general.)

Why are those laws not enough? Well, they have to be enforced by someone in the government administration. So in case the administration is also corrupt (and in some countries it is), they will not enforce laws against their friends or allies. In such countries, strict anti-corruption laws are no more than a tool that the administration can use to weed out the disloyal by engaging in very selective prosecution for something that in reality everyone does.

What Bueno de Mesquita and Smith explain is that the best way to root out corruption is to increase the number of voters that the government depends on to keep power. In an autocracy or an oligarchy, where the administration depends on a tiny number of backers, they can afford to reward those people through corruption in exchange for support. But if more people are allowed to vote, then the number of supporters needed to keep a government in power grows much larger. It then becomes pragmatically impossible to pay so many for their votes. And at that point, the anti-corruption laws can finally do their job and the prevalence of corruption starts to recede because the system no longer supports it.

This is a systems argument! And while (once again) I’m certainly not accusing anyone at Boeing of corruption, I think the example highlights how we need to approach the problem of bringing our largest and most powerful corporations to heel. Working inside the existing system by assessing fines doesn’t appear to offer much traction. The alternative is to apply some other kind of pressure to any of the very few points where there is a chance for some leverage.  

An alternative to fines

The proposal that follows is only an example, but it relies on the same kinds of systems thinking that Bueno de Mesquita and Smith use. I owe this example to the blogger and public intellectual John Michael Greer, and I will quote his description extensively in what follows.***

Greer starts by pointing out that in certain parts of Europe during the early Middle Ages, most legal punishments took the form of fines (weregild)—the same way that our courts assess fines on corporations today. Someone who injured or murdered someone else could make restitution to the victim’s family by paying the appropriate amount of money, with no additional penalty. Unsurprisingly, this arrangement meant that the very rich could commit murder uninhibited, as long as they could afford the fine. Over time, the laws changed and weregild was replaced by imprisonment or execution. Greer’s proposal is that—since a corporation is presumed to be a “legal person”—we could make similar changes in corporate law today. He describes it like this:

Imagine that a corporation—we’ll call it the Shyster Company—has just been caught deliberately selling worthless securities to widows and orphans. The district attorney files charges of felony fraud and theft in state court. The trial date arrives, the lawyers bicker, the jury finds the defendant guilty as charged, and the judge sentences the corporation to ten years in the slammer. In practice, what happens is that the judge appoints a trustee, who takes control of Shyster and all its assets. For the next ten years, Shyster is a wholly owned subsidiary of the state government. Its stock pays no dividends and has no voting rights, its directors have to find something else to do with their time, and if the trustee decides that the CEO and other overpaid office fauna get to find new jobs, they get to find new jobs—assuming that they’re not doing time themselves, as they very well could be. All profits earned by Shyster during its period of imprisonment go to the state government, subject to set-asides that pay restitution to the victims of the crime.

Meanwhile another conglomerate—we’ll call this one Dirty Rotten Scoundrel Inc.—has been caught knowingly selling food products tainted with deadly bacteria, and a dozen people have died. This time the district attorney files charges of aggravated first degree murder. The trial date arrives, the media has a field day, the lawyers bicker, the jury returns a verdict of guilty as charged, the judge sentences DRSI to death and the appeals court upholds the sentence. In practice, what happens is that on the scheduled date of execution, DRSI ceases to exist. Its stock becomes worthless, its assets are sold off in an auction in which no former shareholder is allowed to bid, its name and trademarks can never again be used by anybody under penalty of law, and its creditors get whatever scraps are left once the victims’ families receive their settlements.

OK, I guess it’s an entertaining story, but where is the systems thinking?

Fair question: Greer explains that next. 

It’s crucial that the stockholders in both cases, and the creditors in the latter case, suffer for the behavior of the corporation…. Thus under this system, if word gets out that a corporation is pushing the limits of legality, the stockholders have a very strong incentive to sell, driving down the value of the stock. Equally, if lenders become aware that a corporation is engaging in really egregious behavior, they have a very strong incentive to charge higher interest rates or even to stop loaning money to the corporation. Neither has any such incentive under the current system, which is one reason why corporations act as though their quarterly profit statements are the only things that matter. To their stockholders and creditors, this is essentially the case; this proposal would change that.

In other words, this proposal changes the incentives that a corporation faces by applying leverage to the corporation’s stock price and its access to liquidity. This kind of leverage might make a difference.****

Would this help?

Of course I can’t know for sure whether laws like this would encourage Boeing to handle its Quality culture more conscientiously. In the short run, the chain of causality is probably too long to have an immediate effect. 

On the other hand, if one of these penalties ever were to be invoked, it would likely mean a wholesale change of the company’s top management. And if the management understood that risk today, they might be more willing to take the Quality culture seriously. As Samuel Johnson once remarked, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

Meanwhile if you have other proposals that take adequate account of the systems incentives which drive Boeing’s management, I’d love to hear them. Please leave a comment.        

_____

* (New York: PublicAffairs, Hachette Book Group, 2011, 2022). 

** See especially Chapter 6.

*** Quotations are all from John Michael Greer, The Wealth of Nature: Economics as if Survival Mattered, 2nd ed. (Founders House Publishing LLC, 2021), pp. 213-215. An earlier draft of the same proposal can be found in an archived blogpost here, dating from January, 2010.

**** Greer says more about the legal and political aspects of his proposal in the sources cited above.