"Quality has to be caused, not controlled"
About this Quote
Quality, Crosby insists, is not a thermostat you fiddle with after the fact; its a chain reaction you set in motion upstream. The phrasing matters: “caused” is active, engineered, almost forensic. “Controlled” is reactive, managerial, and vaguely coercive - the fantasy that you can inspect, police, and KPI your way into excellence. Crosby, the guru behind “zero defects,” is attacking the most common corporate superstition: that quality is a department, a checklist, or a last-mile gate at the end of production.
The intent is practical and ideological at once. Practically, he’s telling organizations to stop relying on inspection to catch errors and start designing processes that prevent errors. Ideologically, he’s stripping “quality” of its halo and treating it as an outcome of choices: training, clear requirements, incentives that reward doing it right the first time, and systems that make the wrong thing hard to do.
The subtext is a rebuke to the whole culture of performative oversight. Control feels satisfying because it creates the appearance of command - reports, audits, “accountability.” Causing quality is less theatrical and more uncomfortable: it forces leadership to own the boring, structural work, and it denies the convenient scapegoat of “human error” when the system was rigged for mistakes.
In Crosby’s late-20th-century context - U.S. manufacturing losing ground to Japanese process discipline - the line reads like a strategic pivot. Compete by building quality into the process, not by catching defects with bigger nets.
The intent is practical and ideological at once. Practically, he’s telling organizations to stop relying on inspection to catch errors and start designing processes that prevent errors. Ideologically, he’s stripping “quality” of its halo and treating it as an outcome of choices: training, clear requirements, incentives that reward doing it right the first time, and systems that make the wrong thing hard to do.
The subtext is a rebuke to the whole culture of performative oversight. Control feels satisfying because it creates the appearance of command - reports, audits, “accountability.” Causing quality is less theatrical and more uncomfortable: it forces leadership to own the boring, structural work, and it denies the convenient scapegoat of “human error” when the system was rigged for mistakes.
In Crosby’s late-20th-century context - U.S. manufacturing losing ground to Japanese process discipline - the line reads like a strategic pivot. Compete by building quality into the process, not by catching defects with bigger nets.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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