Philip B. Crosby died on August 18, 2001. Crosby was a quality expert, but he was much more. This was the first business book that I ever read, and it is still my favorite. The following quote alone would be worth the price of the book:
"The successful situation manager is one who learns to establish the ground rules for success before launching himself into completing the job assigned to him. If nothing else, he must assure himself that he will know when he is finished. He must also decide what persons are involved in deciding he is finished, and supply them with the means to measure his progress."
"Much of the tragedy of modern life is wrapped up in the failure to accomplish those two basic steps . . ."
"You are going to be measured anyway by some means, fair or foul. Usually the one doing the measuring has nothing specific in mind; so he does it by the seat of his pants. Careers are destroyed in this manner. It is the situation equivalent to 'Let's have lunch sometime.' "
Rarely is career advice so well stated or so universally applicable.
In The Art of Getting Your Own Sweet Way (1972), Crosby writes:
"People are conditioned to believe that error is inevitable . . . However, we do not accept the same standard when it comes to our personal life. If we did, we would resign ourselves to being shortchanged now and then when we cash our paychecks. We would expect hospital nurses to drop a certain percentage of all newborn babies. We would expect to go home to the wrong house periodically. As individuals we do not tolerate these things. Thus we have a double standard, one for ourselves, one for the company."
The standard organizations needed was "Zero Defects":
In this book Crosby writes, "The Zero Defects concept is based on the fact that mistakes are caused by two things: lack of knowledge and lack of attention . . . Zero Defects is not a motivation method, it is a performance standard. And it is not just for production people; it is for everyone."
Though many wanted to join the quality bandwagon, Zero Defects was not always understood:
"I found people thinking that Zero Defects was a worker motivation program and blaming all the problems on the workers . . . Management is the bad guy . . . We are dealing with a new management philosophy, not a propaganda program."
However, the real focus of The Art of Getting Your Own Sweet Way is on situation management, not quality management. That makes the book useful to everyone since everyone has situations to manage.
The back of the book includes Crosby's trademark "Guidelines for Browsers." This feature is simply a list of loosely related sentences that reduce the key points of the book into slogans. Here are a few favorites:
"You have probably noticed that the world was not specifically designed for you."
"None of us is only one thing. We are a combination of many occupations, responsibilities and desires."
"Consistency wins, whether you want it to or not."
"Embarrassed kittens become tigers."
"Unless you get your kicks from an electric massage,, there is nothing things can do for you that people can't improve on."
"Dedication is wanting your thing to happen more than they don't want it to happen."
This book is now 30 years old and has been out of print for a long time. With Crosby gone, let us hope that the book will be re-issued at this point and not fade into oblivion. Maybe these few quotes will help generate some new interest in this work.
