OUTLINE and SAMPLES from Quality I

Self-Development INTRODUCTION to........

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388 pages long, this extremely well-organized and conversationally-written text breaks down the Quality Management movement to ten central Principles and eighteen main Mechanisms.  

Both theory and practical application are extensively addressed and illustrated through many specific, real-life examples.  This book also benefits from many illustrations and figures where key concepts are extracted and crystallized.  

Quality Management is taken from the Senior Executive business level, and extended down to the individual "regular" person working at his/her desk, dealing with a family, working in a volunteer group such as a church congregation, in school situations, and in one's personal life.    

The AIM of this book is to describe how your personal understanding and implementing Quality Principles and Mechanisms can make your own life, family, church group, school-situation, volunteer organization, or job-situation easier, more productive, and more enjoyable.

See below for why search for Quality?

[and Quality Section for Outline and Samples.]

Why search for Quality?

There's but one outstanding, overwhelmingly-compelling answer: Personal Pride.

Yes, Quality can definitely help you to be more successful in business, have a happier family life, have more effective volunteer organizations, and generally make your life easier.

But the overwhelmingly-main reason to pursue Quality is to take the greatest pride in who you are and what you do.

After all, why strive to do your very best, say, at some crummy job where you don't get paid much and where no one appreciates you?

Personal Pride: i.e. you are not junk!  You don't do junk!  You're not associated with junk.  You are a Quality person and you do Quality work.  This is part of who and what you are.  This is a fundamental part of your struggle to achieve Personal SIGNIFICANCE.        

Although you can tolerate sloppiness, confusion, carelessness, neglect, and slipshod work if you have too (i.e. you're not a super-picky perfectionist)---you find such things personally offensive, especially when its your own work.  If you have charge of something you want it to be the best possible under the prevailing circumstances!  Not just good---but the very "goodest!"

The Quality of the job says something about you.  Even if no one ever even knows you were associated with making that shiny, slick new car that rolls off the assembly line, you know you had a hand in it!  When you see one of them zooming down the highway, purring along just fine, hardly ever in the repair shop, with an owner that loves it---you rightly feel that it is a tribute to you!  You are proud of that car and of the part you had in making it!

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Your wife/husband, mother/father, kids/relatives...how they view you and the things you do is important: it says something about you.  

Although you don't live your life just to please other people, you want others to like and respected you if that's at all possible.  You know that if you are strong enough, tough enough, and demanding enough--- you can beat other people into submission!  You know that you can make them obey you or put up with you out of fear.  But you also know that you can not command people's RESPECT and FRIENDSHIP.  

Respect and friendship have to be earned.  And the best way to earn friendship and respect from others is to be aware of their needs, put their needs on an equal plane with your own needs, and genuinely try your best to help other people as they would define help. Only then do you become a real friend, a person that deserves and gets back respect and friendship from others.  

The toughest place to do this is in a family, where you are squashed together with other people so closely that you have to put up with their faults and shortcomings as well as their good points.  The great temptation is to if not simply to break-up, but to perpetuate a chain of petty revenge that makes both you and your Family miserable!  Rather than a nurturing, supporting, protecting Haven...the Family can easily and quickly become a war zone.

If you can, instead, find and institute Quality in your home---then you've a great shot at finding and making Quality in your place of Worship, where you go to School, at your Job, and in the Organization you head up.  

Its easy enough to brush off your relatives, your brethren at Church, your fellow students and teachers, your co-workers, and your subordinates in your organization with: "To Hell with them!  I'll do my own thing!  If they don't like it, they can all just go to Hell!"  And sometimes they may be a roadblock to Quality, if indeed the others are truly standing in the way of overall Quality.  But more times than not, such a dismissal of the people around you will destroy Quality.   After all, the second big component to Self-Respect (after your own internal evaluation) is feedback from others!  If you cut-off positive feedback, or dismiss as trivial the valid needs of others (often perceived as negative criticisms), you lose a tremendous source of validation to who you are and what you do!    

If you think you're doing just great, but many of those you deal with think you're awful, something's wrong!  That's not Quality!  That's self-delusion!  Quality does not ignore people who interact with you.  Quality binds you up with other people into one big package.  You are not a person who lives in a room with other people who just happen to live in the same house.  You are part of a Family, and the Family is part of you!

You want to have Pride in your Family because it says a lot about you.  Having pride in your Family says that you're not junk, you don't do junk, and you don't come from junk!  Your Family is not junk!  Your Family is unique, has its own special mix of excellent talents and achievements, and is worth a lot!  The pursuit of personal Significance is especially expressed in how you deal with your Family and how they feel about you!  

A focus on Quality in the Family can greatly enhance your own self-respect and Personal Pride, make your life a lot easier and more pleasant, and prove (in this the most difficult and meaningful forum) that you are capable of doing whatever it takes (that's legal and moral) to achieve success!

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Another huge challenge---in a very difficult forum---is School.  I myself put in twelve years of my life to end up graduating from High School.  Then I put in a sum total of twelve more years of my life ending up successfully finishing Graduate School with a Ph.D. in Biology.  And for the vast majority of those total twenty-four years I hated every minute of school!

I really didn't know exactly why I hated school so much, just that I did.  It's only some years further down the line that I've come to understand my hatred.  My past (and continuing) hatred is mainly based on the sad situation that most schools, education programs, and classes lack Quality.

Ok.  I know that's a pretty harsh indictment.  Let me qualify that statement by saying the following: 1) yes, I know it's a really complex, difficult, challenging situation for the teachers and administrators---most of whom are doing the best they can under the prevailing circumstances; 2) there are definitely pockets of excellence and individual teachers who achieve Quality; and 3) this is just the opinion of little-old-me, based on my own personal extensive experience.  So don't get too excited if you don't share my hatred.

But not only did I suffer as a student for many years, I also taught both informally and formally at the grade school level, the high school level, the undergraduate level, the graduate school level, and at the medical school level.  So I'm fairly well experienced with school from both sides, as both the student and the instructor.

It's my opinion that schools in general simply don't achieve what they claim to be doing. 

What do they claim to do?  Supposedly, they are there to teach us things.  Whether or not the things they try to teach us are worth the effort or not is a completely different subject.  Let's just assume that the material being taught is important and worth the effort.  So as a little kid I was raised up believing that schools were there to teach me things.

However, I was perpetually frustrated.  My experience was that in order to get A's I had to fight and struggle heroically, most of the time in a subject I cared little for, to out-compete the other kids in the class to get the top grade.  The top grade was important because without it I could not go on to the next higher level.  I knew early-on that Id like to try for a Ph.D. in Biology, my main academic interest.  In order to get accepted into a Ph.D. program I'd have to have near-straight- A's, which meant getting top grades in many classes and subjects that I not only didn't love, but might actually hate!

Ok.  So here I was motivated to put in a maximal effort in all my classes.  I wasn't a person who just slid through, or did the minimal to get by, or who was satisfied with a half-hearted effort.  I was the kid who really worked hard on each assignment, did the required reading and home-type work, and got up at 2:00 in the morning many times dead tired to do that final cram for the next days test.  And what was the result of this huge effort on my part in each of my classes?

Frustration!  Here I'd put out this huge effort at learning the subject---and within a couple days after taking the final test (and getting an A in the course), I could not recall 90% of the material I'd struggled so hard to "learn!!!"  And within at most a few months, I'd have trouble even telling you the take-home-messages from the course!!!  How could I claim I'd learned anything!???  All that huge suffering, that mammoth effort to cram all those many facts into my brain---and that information was lost!!!

And even worse than the involuntary loss of all that knowledge, was the required brain-dump needed to do to succeed in the next subject!!!  Yes, you read that correctly.  I was required by the school system to rid my brain of the past class' extensive, voluminous information because after surviving that course I'd be immediately thrown into a totally different subject that I'd have to concentrate on completely, thus pushing out the prior subject to make room for the new one!

What a perversion!  Instead of the courses all building on each other and supporting/enhancing/enriching/supplementing/complementing each other, the reality was that they were excluding each other!!!  Horrors!!  The School System itself was working against my learning the subjects!

I came to the very sad conclusion that---at least from my perspective---our school system is based on false premises.  What are these false premises?  Basically that learning means to memorize a huge pile of facts, get high scores on fact-based tests (both for the individual class and for national standard tests), and out-compete the other people for top grades.

That's not learning!  That's just tremendous suffering with only an alphabetical letter next to the course name---on some piece of paper---to show for it!

Its is a prescription for disaster!  Where true learning of just about any subject should be a fascinating, incredibly-exciting, uplifting experience---school most often for most students is a huge PAIN!!!  You doubt this to be true?  Well, then, do two things: 1) think back to when you were in school; and 2) ask any student.

Unless you are one of the very few human beings blessed with total recall (which I certainly am not, and no one I've ever met has been), then as far as learning goes, in most of our schools YOU ARE SCREWED!!!  Your fate is to cram your head with zillions of facts so that you can run to school and vomit it out onto a piece of paper before it all quickly drains away out of your head.  As an exercise in futility, in suffering, and in largely wasting your time---the prevailing education system is superb!  As a means of learning it is largely fatally flawed.

Assuming all I've said is true, what can be done to correct the situation???

ANSWER: put Quality into schools.  

Its not just a matter of being a little bit better.  Putting Quality into schools is critical to making schools what we already think they are: institutions of real learning.

Let me repeat.  As you'll see further in the book when we start getting into the details of Quality---some schools, some programs, some teachers are indeed doing great things in regards to real learning.  But even there they themselves are caught up in the System, and are severely limited as to just how good they can actually get!  

Changing the System to focus on Quality would liberate not only students, but the Instructors and Administrators as well.

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Why search for Quality at your job???

Ok, the answer here is just too easy.  So let's draw it out a bit.  Allow me pose a few personal Quiz-type questions:

1)  Do you feel fully appreciated, supported, and fulfilled at your job?  

2)  Are you allowed to contribute 100% to your organizations success?  

3) Are your talents fully utilized at your job?  

4) Are you allowed to serve your customers the very best you're capable of doing? and  

5)  Do you enjoy going to and being at work?

If you answered yes to all the above, then you're very lucky, indeed!

For many people---if not most people---work is a dreary, tough place where you do assigned tasks, put in your time, get your paycheck, and then go elsewhere to feel appreciated, supported, and fulfilled.  Your job is generally not a place you go to feel appreciated, respected, fulfilled, proud, and happy.  To get feel those things, people generally go to a Church, their family, hobbies, volunteer groups, or other personal activities.  Work is a place to...well...work and earn money that you then use to go do things that you enjoy!

Just imagine having a job where for eight-hours-plus per day---you were learning exciting, interesting things, having great fun doing it, feeling great pride at the service/product you were putting out, your bosses really appreciated and valued you, and all your talents were solicited and given opportunity to be used for the good of the organization!

Oh, sure.  "Some fantasy!" you laugh.  "That'll never happen..."

But it could...if the organization where you work would fully embrace and implement Quality!

And even if your organization never recognizes what Quality really is, your own personal application of Quality Principles can make your life on the job a lot easier.  Quality at your desk can be a great help in having bosses who are much nicer to you, customers who are much happier with you, co-workers who are much more cooperative with you, and subordinates who are much less trouble to you!

Everybody wins when true Quality is put at the center of the job!

Your customers are happier.  Your bosses are more satisfied.  Your stakeholders (such as stockholders) are less of a pain.  

Bottom line:  your time at work is easier.

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Quality is not antagonistic to Tradition.  Core-values are not destroyed by Quality.  True Quality will enhance and invigorate your place of worship!

Religion can be a rigid, cold, oppressive, even (at times) cruel endeavor.  But that's most often a perversion of what the founders of the particular religious movement were aiming at.  To use the example of Jesus Christ, He said (in many different ways) that He came to help people to fully realize their spiritual potential: to be the sons and daughters of God!  

Although organized, formal meetings of Believers was (and still is) a very important, even critical part of early Christianity, the focus in being a disciple of Jesus Christ was as on lifting people up, allowing their positive, good talents to bloom, fostering edifying-Creativity by allowing space for people to make mistakes!  Versus the huge web of restrictive rules that Jesus said the Old Testament religion had mutated into, Jesus offered exhilarating FREEDOM!!!

In like manner to the early Christian church, many of today's Christian groups began with the notion of throwing off past, artificial constraints.  Unfortunately, they often then proceeded almost immediately to gel-into their own webs of rigid restraint!  Some groups wanting to return to that simple, exhilarating, exciting, creative New Testament Christianity---throwing off denominationalism or illogical tradition---quickly settled-into becoming yet another denomination complete with their own set of rigid doctrines and traditions.

Recall that I said true Quality does not imperil Tradition, nor destroy core values.  But just imagine your place of Worship as the following: a house of believers who respect each other, value each others experience and knowledge, easily work together in teams on important tasks, express your core principles in leadership-supported action, and who use your time most effectively to best achieve your top priorities!

Is your place of Worship like that?  Hopefully, it is.  Many congregations of believers do have such an enlightened support System for their members: in which each member is learning exciting, interesting things, having great fun doing it, feeling great pride at the service/products you are together putting out, feels really appreciated and valued by the leadership, and knows that all his/her talents are solicited and given opportunity to be used for the good of the Church!

Unfortunately, though, many congregations either do not provide such opportunities, or do so only poorly.  

A focus on Quality could greatly enhance and help many religious groups (Christian or otherwise) to far better achieve their top priorities!  This is not to say they are doing badly!  In fact, they may be doing ok---or even good!  But are they doing their best?  Are they being as good as they could be?  Could what they are already doing good---be done even better?

Quality is not an indictment of "failure."  Quality is not saying you're doing anything wrong, or badly.  Quality is not an insult to how you're doing your job, how you're being a Godly person, or how you're running your particular religious congregation.

Quality is a way to be even better than you already are!

But just as in the work place, the school, the family---it takes a real understanding and serious application of Quality Principles and Quality Mechanisms to succeed!  It's not a superficial fad.  It's not a temporary program to slap onto the side of your congregation or organization.  It's not a quick-fix.  

It's a different way of looking at things.  A different way of looking at your core principles, your traditions, your institutions, the very methods that you use to achieve your goals.  It's a different way of looking at yourself, and looking at others.  It's a different way of thinking.

And---it is totally consistent with the teachings of Christ (and most other religious founders.)  Indeed, it's really putting into practice, inside our religious groups, the things we already say we believe!

Yes, I know.  There I go seeming to insult you again.  My apologies.  Its easy to get overly enthusiastic on the subject of Quality.  

Surely most---if not all---sincere, dedicated religious groups are already putting into practice the things they believe.  But is your local congregation of your particular religious group absolutely perfect?  Is there no room for doing even better?

I think most of us would agree there's always room for improvement---not necessarily in our core beliefs, but in the way we apply those beliefs!  

My suggestion here is this: you as a Church leader can make your local congregation run smoother, more effectively, and be even stronger than it already is---by having an eye to Quality:  understanding just who your customers are, what their valid needs are, and how can you better meet those needs!

After all, who did Jesus say was the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven?

A servant.

Quality is all about serving other people---meeting and exceeding their valid needs.  As such, it fits perfectly with the best aspects of Religious congregations and other volunteer groups!  

Quality is not just a way to help manufacturing plants make more standardized widgets,or help you provide more standardized services.  That sort of approach is called "Quality Assurance" and focuses on products.  It's a valid, but limited offshoot of the Quality movement.

Real Quality is a People Program: affecting, mobilizing, and freeing the talents of your people to better-accomplish your worthwhile, mutually-held AIM.  A Quality-outlook and approach is totally consistent with the unselfish, edifying, uplifting core values of Religion.

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It's true that Family, School, Work, and Religion occupy a big part of most of our lives.  But those things are not the sum total of our lives.

How do you interact with other people?  Is it destructive competition (to you or them) or constructive cooperation?  Do other people like to have you around them?  Are you one of those people that bosses love to have work for them, and hate to have leave?  Are your kids proud of you?  Are your parents proud of you?  Does your spouse still respect you?

When you think back on your life---all the years that have gone by so-far---do you feel a sense of accomplishment, of valid pride?  Do you feel that people would cry if you unexpectedly died?  Would other people feel a hole in their life, a void in the world, that your passing had left behind?  Or would they shrug, feel a pang at being reminded at their own mortality, and move on as if nothing much had happened?

Do you feel Significant?  Do you feel that your life matters?   When you get up in the morning do you see before you exciting possibilities, important vistas to aggressively trod-out upon, interesting challenges to exercise your talents?  Or is it just another miserable struggle to get out of bed---another tough, hard row to hoe...another gloomy day to slog through, get along the best you can?

Where do you find enjoyment?  Is your pleasure drug-based?  Are you only excited by alcohol, caffeine, chocolate, nicotine, or illegal chemicals?  Is your pleasure game-based?   Are you only excited by violent competition?  Is your favorite TV show Big Time Wrestling or All-Pro Football?

Now, I'm not trying to say that eating chocolate or watching wrestling on TV means you have an empty, unfulfilled life.  Yes, I myself admit that I enjoy eating good food, and even get a kick out of seeing those huge, muscle-bound wrestlers doing spectacular feats of strength and daringly-acrobatic moves.  I admit also to my share of frustrations and unhappiness.  I don't go around bouncing up-and-down with perpetual excitement and joy.  Getting up and going to work isn't usually a thrill.

But Quality does provide me a personal framework which helps me decide what's really important, figure out how I'm doing in trying to achieve those worthy goals, and in carefully/continually improving myself in all ways.  

Is having as my major goal in life going home with a bottle of cheap wine and getting smashed what I really want to be remembered for?   Or are there better and more personally-meaningful ways to use my time?  And just what are those ways?  What do I want to use my short time on this earth for?  How do I want my Family to relate to me?  What's really most important?  And how do I go about making that sort of evaluation?

Quality in my personal life can radically change how I deal with other people.  A focus on Quality upgrades the importance of other people in my life.  They become much more necessary and critical to my existence!  

Family is enhanced, work is improved, church is invigorated, and my outlook and output is greatly sharpened!

Why search for Quality in my personal life?  Because it will make my life easier, more productive, and more fun!---because it will help me be what I most want to be: someone of whom I can be proud!

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