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THE DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS OF QUALITY
Learn how each of eight well-known gurus answers this question
"IN 1908, HENRY M. LELAND astonished the members of the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) by having three of his Cadillac cars dismantled at Brooklands, and by having the component parts thoroughly mixed up.
His engineers set to work, taking any available part, and built the cars up again in front of the RAC members' eyes. Then they drove the cars off in triumph around the track.
Today, we take it for granted that the most intricate pieces of a car's machinery can be replaced with an off-the-shelf duplicate. But in 1908, a car engine was still seen as an individually crafted organism, a handmade job. That was how most engines had to be made, since the engineering of their parts was seldom consistent.
Few components arrived from the machine shop without the need for some extra filing or adjustment before they could be incorporated into an engine, and the secret of the phenomenal quantity and speed with which Henry Ford had produced first the Model N and then the Model T had been in the quality of Ford machining."
SO WROTE ROBERT LACEY IN HIS excellent book Ford: The Men and the Machine.1
If you walk through a manufacturing or assembly plant anywhere in the world today, you will see bins of parts that, except for very small manufacturing differences, are identical. The parts in a particular bin are identical in the sense that they are all designed for a specific function and are interchangeable with respect to that function.
To satisfy their specific purpose, parts must be of high quality. Although it was a simple matter to type the phrase "high quality" on this page-and although most of us use the term "quality" in a way we think makes sense and is understandable to everyone else-we will soon discover a useful definition of quality is not easy to develop.
Background
Quality standards not substantially different from ours have been evident for centuries. The strategies and tools for assuring quality may have changed, but basic customer expectations have been fairly constant for a long time
Even though Henry Ford, for example, had no special training in quality assurance,...