Engaging an audience on the technical aspects of quality work can be a challenge: inspection, audits, and measurement systems analysis are hardly the stuff of a lecture that you will find gripping and inspirational.

I’ve been pleased to see so many organizations embrace a robust approach to quality improvement through methods like Lean and Six Sigma. There are indeed some detractors out there, but for the most part these are people that have observed failed deployments of quality initiatives. 

Imagine this: Company A is an internationally respected, world-class company that manufactures high-end kitchen appliances. Their products are coveted by homeowners across the globe. 

Back in the day when attending live, face-to-face conferences was “a thing,” I always looked forward to the breaks when I could join my peers around that long, huge table put out by the hotel offering a variety of Danishes, fruit, and of course, coffee.

The first time it happened was in 2009. I was about to take the helm of a 34-foot catamaran in the British Virgin Islands as captain, my baptism into the world of “bareboat” sailing. “You’re good to go,” said the dockhand. 

In 1969, I had a microphone perched next to the radio, prepared to record each Beatles song played, just to satisfy my obsession at the time. What resulted on my old reel-to-reel player was a series of songs missing the first five seconds of each.

I’m a Type-A personality with a sense of urgency to explain everything. Give me a little data, and I will use every statistical tool I can wrap around these rationalizations to help explain an observation. But here is something that I cannot explain: why do we tolerate such poor gages?

In a classic Dilbert cartoon, the “client” proudly claims to Dogbert the consultant that “every three months, an existing customer acquires another product.” Dogbert replies, “what if you don’t count warranty replacements?”

It was summer camp and I was 12 years old. The game was called “Capture the Flag.” The goal is for one of two teams to capture the enemy’s flag, and return it to their base. Our battlefield was spread over a huge forest with rolling hills.