Quality Archives - Page 7 of 19 - understand-culture

Omit Needless Words

William Strunk Jr. taught English at Cornell University from 1899 to 1937. In 1918 he wrote a 43-page book for his classes, The Elements of Style, and had it privately printed. It sets out eight “elementary rules of usage” and ten “elementary principles of composition.” Among its commands are “Omit needless words!” and “Use the active voice.”

In 1957 E. B. White praised the book in The New Yorker. The publisher Macmillan then asked him to revise it. The new edition came out on April 16, 1959. By 2009, total sales had passed 10 million copies.

The rules have critics. The linguist Geoffrey Pullum wrote: “Several generations of college students learned their grammar from the uninformed bossiness of Strunk and White.”

Known Standards

The U.S. Army defines evaluation as “the observation of performance against known standards.” For each collective task, a training and evaluation outline gives “the conditions under which the task should be accomplished” and “the standard to which the task must be accomplished.” Evaluators mark each step a GO if it was done correctly and a NO GO if it was not. Soldiers can read the outlines on the Army Training Network.

Some Army leaders tell soldiers who finish training early: “We train to standard, not time in this unit.” In a 2024 essay, the writer Sean Sweeney criticized leaders who say this and then keep soldiers at the training site after they have met the standard.

Amelia Bedelia

In Peggy Parish’s children’s book Amelia Bedelia, published by Harper and Row in 1963, a new maid gets a list of chores. She takes every instruction literally. Told to dust the furniture, she throws dusting powder on it. Told to put the lights out, she takes the bulbs out and hangs them on the clothesline. The list also says “Dress the chicken.”

Mrs. Rogers comes home angry and is “on the verge of firing Amelia Bedelia.” Then Mr. Rogers puts a bite of Amelia’s lemon meringue pie into his wife’s mouth. None of the seven chores on the list asked for a pie. Mrs. Rogers keeps her and “vows to write more explicit instructions in the future.”

The 4Cs of Diamonds

Diamonds are graded by four qualities known as the 4Cs: color, clarity, cut and carat weight. According to the Gemological Institute of America (GIA), “prior to 1940, however, there were no standard terms or factors that defined diamond quality.” Merchants “used many different and inconsistent terms.”

Robert M. Shipley, a former retail jeweler, founded GIA in 1931. He “standardized the diamond value terms to color, clarity, cut and carat weight and called them the 4Cs.” With GIA’s grading standards, the institute writes, diamond quality “can be communicated in a universal language so diamond purchasers know exactly what they are buying.”

USDA Prime

The words Prime, Choice and Select on American beef are grades from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its beef standards were “established in 1916 and fully adopted in 1926.” Graders from the department’s Agricultural Marketing Service judge each carcass submitted for grading. The quality grade rests on the animal’s maturity and on the degree of marbling.

The grader judges the marbling “in the ribeye after the separation between the 12th and 13th ribs.” A University of Nevada meat scientist explains that “higher marbling degrees indicate higher grades, which are usually associated to better eating experience.” Grading is “a voluntary service.” Processors and producers may request it, at an hourly rate.

The Task Idea

Frederick Winslow Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. “Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea,” he wrote. “The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance.” In most cases, each worker receives “complete written instructions, describing in detail the task which he is to accomplish.”

The task, Taylor explained, “specifies not only what is to be done but how it is to be done and the exact time allowed for doing it.”

Void for Vagueness

An Oklahoma law required contractors on state work to pay at least “the current rate of per diem wages in the locality where the work is performed.” The penalties were heavy and charged by the day. General Construction Company, which was building bridges for the state, went to court to stop the law from being enforced against it.

On January 4, 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. It ruled that “a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application violates the first essential of due process of law.”

The Court found “a double uncertainty.” A current wage rate is really a range of rates. Whether a place lay within the “locality” would also depend on “the probably varying impressions of juries.”

Clear Is Kind

“Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” The author Brené Brown uses this saying in her leadership book Dare to Lead. She writes that she “first heard this saying two decades ago in a 12-step meeting.” One of her examples of unkindness is “not getting clear with a colleague about your expectations because it feels too hard,” and then blaming that colleague for not delivering.

Her team turned the idea into a habit. They used to ask, “What does ‘done’ look like?” Now they simply say, “Paint done.” Brown says the request “unearths stealth expectations and unsaid intentions.”

Specific Goals and “Do Your Best”

In 2002 the psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham reviewed their research on goals in American Psychologist. The article was subtitled “A 35-Year Odyssey.” “We found that specific, difficult goals consistently led to higher performance than urging people to do their best,” they wrote. They added: “when people are asked to do their best, they do not do so.”

The reason, they explained, is that “do-your-best goals have no external referent and thus are defined idiosyncratically.” This “allows for a wide range of acceptable performance levels, which is not the case when a goal level is specified.” The findings covered “well over 100 different tasks involving more than 40,000 participants” in “at least eight countries.”

The Definition of Done

In Scrum, a method for running software teams, every team keeps a “Definition of Done.” The Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland calls it a “formal description of the state of the Increment when it meets the quality measures required for the product.” The rule is strict: “If a Product Backlog item does not meet the Definition of Done, it cannot be released or even presented at the Sprint Review.”

The agile coach Mike Cohn calls the Definition of Done “an agreed-upon set of things that must be true before any product backlog item is considered complete.” One of his examples is that “the code comes with automated tests at all appropriate levels.” Each item also has its own acceptance criteria, and “all of the acceptance criteria (conditions of satisfaction) must be fulfilled.”