Saturday, February 28, 2009

The value of quality to a craftsman

I'm still reading "The Craftsman" by Richard Sennett.

I read this morning that a focus on people within a company can drive the craftsman away. If you want to attract and retain craftsman, a company should instead focus on quality of the product.

Sennett describes Deming as complex and cautionary. The complexity is that to arouse the aspiration for quality and make good on it, the organization itself has to be well crafted in form. It needs open immediate communication, but it needs to wait to bring its products to market until they are really good. Deming knew these aspects of organization seldom appear on management charts of who reports to whom. Deming was not, however, a simple salesman, a booster of quality; he recognized that quality-driven work, focused on achieving good concrete results, does not necessarily unify or sustain organizations.

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