Life & Wisdom Quote by Phil Crosby

Crosby’s line sounds like a bromide until you notice the quiet demotion it gives to “coaching” itself. In the popular imagination, coaching is charisma plus technique: the rousing speech, the clever drill, the transformation montage. Crosby, the quality-management evangelist behind “Zero Defects,” is arguing something colder and more structural: the biggest lever isn’t motivation or micromanagement, it’s selection. Get the match between person and role wrong and you’ll spend your days “coaching” around friction you created; get it right and the system almost coaches itself.

The intent is managerial triage. Crosby wrote in an era when American companies were waking up to the cost of variability - in products, yes, but also in people. His subtext: performance problems are often hiring and placement problems disguised as training problems. That’s a provocative shift because it relocates responsibility from the individual (“try harder”) to leadership (“design better teams”). It also flatters the discipline of management: judgment, not inspiration, is the core skill.

There’s a sharper edge, too. By calling selection “the largest part,” Crosby implies that coaching is frequently performative - a way to compensate for poor upstream decisions. It’s a warning against the comforting myth that a great coach can fix anyone. In Crosby’s quality-minded worldview, prevention beats correction. Don’t wait to inspect defects out of a process; don’t wait to coach misfits into place. Build the conditions where competence is the default.