In Search of Quality:

Introduction                                         

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

I am not implying that you as a father, mother, kid, church-member, religious-leader, student, teacher, administrator, volunteer, organizer, employee, supervisor, manager, or top-executive are doing a bad job.

Quite the contrary, I suspect that you indeed are doing a very good job---under the circumstances.

But you are limited and constrained in what you can do because of the system you are within.

So please don't read any of the sections of this book on Quality Principles or Quality Mechanisms as trying to beat you up!  Instead, read them as they are intended: aggressively beating up (and making better) the System.

The Message of this book is very simple: CHANGE THE SYSTEM to have a focus on real Quality, and everybody will win.  

Your Core Values and Objectives will be better met!  The talents of your employees will be better used!   Your Customers will be better served!  Your organization will enjoy greater success!

Over and over again, throughout this book, I will beat up the System.  

I will beat up all of the following:

• self-destructive behaviors,

• dysfunctional families,

• schools that claim to help kids learn but mainly cause them trauma and torture,

• religious congregations where tradition is put above core principles,

• volunteer groups where generous donations of time/talent are spurned, and

• product/service-producing organizations where "command and control" kills the innovation and enthusiasm of the employees.  

I will beat-up those types of Systems thoroughly, specifically, and repeatedly!

At the same time as I beat-upthe System, however, I will have particular praise and sympathy for those ordinary people struggling to do their best under difficult situations, caught-up in the prevailing System, who richly deserve great AWARDS for doing as well as they are under sometimes intolerable conditions.  

Yes, you deserve great credit for your heroic struggle.  You are a hero or heroine!  

This book is AIMed at giving you more knowledge and better tools with which to fight your good fight!  

Also, you don't have to be the Top Executive of some multi-national corporation to understand and benefit from Quality Principles and Mechanisms (though they are certainly applicable even at such pinnacles of success).  

You the "ordinary," regular person struggling to do your best for your own health, your family, your religious congregation, your volunteer group, your own learning/teaching, and your job can greatly benefit from a focus on Quality!

I have great sympathy and praise---and this book is focused on----all of the following brave people struggling against hard Systems:

• individuals fighting terrible personal problems,

• kids with abusive/absent parents,

• parents with rebellious unappreciative kids,

• spouses with self-centered mates,

• kids being taught that learning is rote-memorization for standardized tests,

• teachers forced to shovel in mountains of facts into their students---teaching a mile wide and an inch deep---with no time allowed to stimulate true learning,

• school administrators forced by legislatures to compete for funds on rote-memory national tests,

• members of religious congregations who persist faithfully in exercising their faith in spite of  restrictive church leaders,

• church leaders trying to make good decisions while unknowingly trapped in a competition mode rather than working from true cooperation,

• preachers who honestly think (and were taught that way in the preacher schools they attended) that "preaching the word" means to constantly beat-up their congregation rather than build up the members starting from their real strengths,

• volunteers who persist even though they are insulted and slapped-down for their efforts,

• organizers who keep struggling at good causes even though their innovative efforts are rejected by the larger System around them,

• front-line workers that band together to serve their customers well even though they are penalized by their organization for doing such,

• supervisors and mid-level managers that establish an oasis of mutual respect even though the organization fights against them, and

• Top-Level Executives that struggle to change entire Systems steeped in tradition, inertia, suspicion, and self-interest.

To all-of-the-above, I say there is hope!  There are excellent, good, productive ways that you can fight the System---and make things better for everyone!

The key is in understanding and knowing how to most-effectively use...Quality Principles and Mechanisms.

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