Every manufacturing manager and executive needs to read up on quality in order to perform for the company both long and short term. There are few books on quality that I would recommend although there is one that comes to mind:
“Quality is Free – The Art of Making Quality Certain” by Philip B. Crosby – 1979 “How to manage quality – so that it becomes a source of profit for your business. The premise of the book is simple, if you do it right the first time you only have to do it once and you gain a good reputation which equals positive word of mouth rather than leading to putting out fires and negative consumer sentiment.
The book has advice for large manufacturing companies to small businesses the size of a lemonade stand. So how do your transform your entire business into a quality enterprise? Philip suggests that many people do not fully understand what quality really is. It is more of an attitude than anything else and your business must make quality both a tangible quantitative thing. Quality must also become a non-tangible tradition that is adopted by all employees, staff, vendors and is so obvious that your brand and product become one with quality in your customer’s minds.
Are you ready to change your management style to become one with quality? Well the author also goes into the HPA Corporation Quality Improvement Program so you have a step-by-step plan of action that you can implement.
Philip Crosby states: “I wrote this book for the purpose of explaining quality to management in terms they could understand. It talks about the misconceptions of quality management, and relates the story of how a worldwide quality process was installed into the ITT corporation. The book contains many case histories to explain just what quality is and how it can be improved on purpose. The HPA case is a blow by blow story of one executive trying to turn an organization around. This lengthy story was used as a day long event acted out by the students.”
This case study at the end of the book after reading the philosophy at the start of the book, rounds out all you need to know to transform any company into a “Quality Company” and you will not only do it at no cost, you will save money and increase profits. Go for it, what are you waiting for it’s free, well expect for the minor cost to by the book, which I highly recommend.
