When Quality Is Wrong
Writing, designing, tweaking anything, we work to bring what we do to the highest level. Who decides what the highest level is? Who determines the definition of quality? At first we think we do.
But we don’t.
The customer does.
If the customer can’t see what we add, it’s not quality.
If the customer doesn’t value our additional tweak, that’s not quality either.
If the customer doesn’t want that bell or that whistle, we may have gotten her way, we may have actually taken something from him.
If the customer can’t tell shades of blue as well as we can, we may have just made the customer wait.
In each of those cases, we weren’t adding value by investing our time what we added was . . .
COST.
What’s really silly is that some of us will sit back and wait for a thank you, a thank you that will never come from customers who want what we called quality. Thanks come so much more quickly when we give our customers something they want.
I don’t want a new chair. I want this one fixed.
