Quality Archives - Page 2 of 19 - understand-culture

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.”

No Penalty for Late Work

Some American schools no longer take points off for late work. In 2022 the Associated Press reported on a teacher at Wilcox High School in Santa Clara, California, who “stopped giving zeros and deducting points for late work.” Schools from California to Virginia were trying such changes, often called equitable grading.

Some teachers pushed back and said the changes lowered expectations. In San Diego the teachers union filed a grievance. Julia Knoff, a government and economics teacher there, said: “I have a job and I have a boss and requirements.”

In a fall 2024 survey of 967 teachers for the Fordham Institute, about half said their school or district had adopted at least one of five such policies. No penalty for late work was one of them.

The Joke of the Summer

In May 1997 the release of James Cameron’s Titanic was moved from July 2 to December 19. A Fox executive said “there’s not enough time for him to finish the movie the way he wants to see the movie on the screen.”

When the film opened, Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote: “Delayed release and outrageous costs made ‘Titanic’ the joke of the summer. Now it’s the movie of the year.”

Five Days Behind After Six Days

United Artists gave the director Michael Cimino $12.5 million to have his western Heaven’s Gate ready for release by Christmas 1979. According to Steven Bach, the studio executive who oversaw the film, Cimino was five days behind schedule after six days of shooting. After two weeks he was ten days behind, with three minutes of usable film.

The film came out in 1980, nearly a year behind schedule. It cost United Artists $44 million. After its wide release it earned $3.5 million. The studio was then sold to MGM. Bach told the story in his book Final Cut.

Dewey Defeats Truman

On election night in 1948, the first edition of the Chicago Tribune went to press with the headline “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.” Harry Truman won. On November 4 he held up a copy at St. Louis Union Station. The photograph became famous.

The printers who ran the Tribune’s typesetting machines had been on strike. The paper’s substitute method forced it “to go to press several hours earlier than had been usual,” before most states had reported results. About 150,000 copies were printed before the headline was corrected.

Because It’s 11:30

In her 2011 book Bossypants, Tina Fey lists the things she learned from Lorne Michaels, the creator of Saturday Night Live. One is that the show does not go on because it is ready. It goes on because it is 11:30.

In 2026, discussing a documentary about Michaels, the NPR host A Martínez repeated the rule: “He says the show doesn’t go on because it’s ready. It goes on because it’s 11:30.”