Quality Archives - Page 5 of 19 - understand-culture

The Grade from the Opening-Night Audience

On the Friday a film opens, CinemaScore staff in five randomly chosen cities hand moviegoers a small card. Each viewer gives the film a letter grade. The average, from A+ to F, goes to the studios that night. As of February 2026, 23 films had received an F.

Ed Mintz started the service after he saw The Cheap Detective in June 1978. He had read a positive review of the film. He disliked it. He then heard another moviegoer say he wanted “the opinions of ordinary people, not critics.” Polling began in 1979.

In 2013 the reviews for Man of Steel were “crummy, rating just 56 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes.” Its opening-night audiences gave it an A-.

Problems per 100 Vehicles

Since 1987, J.D. Power has asked people who bought or leased a new car what went wrong in the first 90 days. Its Initial Quality Study ranks brands and models by problems per 100 vehicles. The first study put the Toyota Cressida on top, with 69 problems per hundred cars. A company history says the surveys “defined quality in terms of how consumers judged it.”

In 2014 problems rose. A J.D. Power vice president explained that some owners said “the technology is hard to understand, difficult to use, or simply does not always work as designed.”

The plant awards are the exception. They are “based solely on defects and malfunctions and exclude design-related problems.”

Fitness for Use

Joseph M. Juran’s Quality Control Handbook first appeared in 1951. It has gone through many editions. The National Academy of Engineering says it “is still considered the definitive compilation on quality.” Juran’s short definition was: “Quality is fitness for use.”

A later edition, Juran’s Quality Handbook, gave a longer definition: “Quality means those features of products which meet customer needs and thereby provide customer satisfaction.” A second definition named “freedom from deficiencies.” These are errors that require rework or “that result in field failures, customer dissatisfaction, customer claims and so on.”

What the Customer Says

In Total Quality Control, Armand Feigenbaum defined quality as “a customer determination based on the customer’s experience with the product or service.” The customer’s requirements may be “stated or unstated, conscious or merely sensed, technically operational or entirely subjective.”

In 2005 IndustryWeek reported a shorter version, based on his presentation at its Best Plants Conference: “Quality is what the customer says is quality.”

The Portrait of a Daughter

A father ordered an enlarged portrait of his dead daughter, painted from a small picture. He testified that if the portrait “was not perfectly satisfactory to me in every particular, I need not take it or pay for it.” He refused the finished work and would not look at a revised version until the trial. The artist sued.

In 1878 the Michigan Supreme Court ruled for the father in Gibson v. Cranage. “It may be that the picture was an excellent one and that the defendant ought to have been satisfied with it …,” the court wrote. “Artists or third parties might consider a portrait an excellent one, and yet it prove very unsatisfactory …” Under the agreement the father “was the only person who had the right to decide this question.”

Courts keep this personal test for matters of taste, such as a portrait. Where a satisfaction clause concerns “commercial quality, operative fitness, or mechanical utility,” they generally presume that the parties meant what a reasonable person would accept.

The Great Communicator

In his farewell address on January 11, 1989, President Ronald Reagan spoke about his nickname. “And in all of that time I won a nickname, ‘The Great Communicator.’ But I never thought it was my style or the words I used that made a difference: It was the content. I wasn’t a great communicator, but I communicated great things.”

He said the ideas “came from the heart of a great nation.”

Slides Instead of Technical Papers

On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia broke apart, and all seven astronauts died. The technical cause was a piece of insulating foam, about 1.7 pounds, that broke off the external tank.

The investigation board released its report on August 26, 2003. It wrote that “the Board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports.” It called “the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers” an illustration of “the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”

The Photograph That Made Lincoln President

On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln spoke at Cooper Union in New York. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery says the speech “convinced his audience that he was not a country bumpkin but a serious constitutional thinker.” Before the speech, Lincoln sat for the photographer Mathew Brady. According to the Gallery, Brady remembered that he drew Lincoln’s collar up high to improve his appearance.

Harper’s Weekly turned the photograph into a full-page woodcut. Later artists smoothed Lincoln’s hair and refined his features. Lincoln is reported to have said: “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President.” The wording varies between sources, and one says only that he “reputedly” said it.

Typography in Briefs

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit gives lawyers a guide called “Requirements and Suggestions for Typography in Briefs and Other Papers.” Its judges hear six cases on most argument days and nine on others. The papers “add up to about 1,000 pages per argument session.”

The guide compares lawyers with other professionals. “A business consultant seeking to persuade a client prepares a detailed, full-color presentation using the best available tools.” It adds: “Law is no different.” Good typography “won’t make your arguments better, but it will ensure that judges grasp and retain your points with less struggle.”

Executive Presence

In 2014 Sylvia Ann Hewlett published a book called Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success. It describes executive presence as “a dynamic, cohesive mix of appearance, communication, and gravitas.” The book draws in part on a survey of 268 senior executives.

Of those executives, 67 percent named gravitas as the most important of the three. Communication came second with 28 percent. Appearance came last with 5 percent.