Craftsmanship Archives - Page 2 of 2

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

In 1974 William Morrow published Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. According to Pirsig, 121 publishers had rejected it. His editor wrote that the book was not “a marketing man’s dream.” It sold about 50,000 copies in three months and more than 5 million in the decades since.

The book asks what Quality is: “Quality . . . you know what it is, yet you don’t know what it is.” Early on, the narrator describes repair shop mechanics who worked with the radio playing. “They were like spectators,” he writes. They were “involved in it but not in such a way as to care.”

Pride of Workmanship

The first part of point 12 of W. Edwards Deming’s 14 Points for Management reads: “Remove barriers that rob the hourly worker of his right to pride of workmanship.” The responsibility of supervisors “must be changed from sheer numbers to quality.” The points appear in his book Out of the Crisis. They became popular with American business leaders in the 1980s.

Deming named the barriers. The second part of point 12 covers managers and engineers. For them it means “abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objective.” Point 11 says: “Eliminate work standards (quotas) on the factory floor.” It also says: “Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals.”

Quality Is Job 1

On August 14, 1981, Ford Motor Company launched an advertising campaign with the slogan “Quality is Job 1.” The New York agency Wells, Rich, Greene produced it. More than 250 Ford employees appeared in the television commercials. The campaign ran for nearly 17 years. In 1998 Ford replaced it with “Better ideas. Driven by you.”

Ford reported a 25 percent improvement in quality between the 1980 and 1981 model years. Market research named the real employees as “the biggest reason for the campaign’s success.”

In 2025 Ford issued more than 150 recalls. The previous record for one year was 77, set by General Motors in 2014. Ford said the number of vehicles recalled “reflects our intensive strategy to quickly find and fix hardware and software issues.”

The Back of the Fence

On NPR in 2011, the biographer Walter Isaacson said that Steve Jobs’s father, Paul Jobs, taught his son “it’s important to be a great craftsman even for the parts unseen.” When they built a fence, the father said the back that people would not see should “look just as beautiful as the front.”

Jobs told Isaacson: “He loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldn’t see.” Jobs carried the rule into his own work: “For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

Sweep Streets Like Michelangelo

On October 26, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia. His talk was called “What Is Your Life’s Blueprint?” He told them: “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures.” He hoped people would one day say: “Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”

King had used the image since at least 1957. In an Atlanta speech that year he credited the idea to Benjamin Mays: “Do your job so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn could do it no better.”