An extremely good primer on quality at the organizational level. Even if it's your "job" to make quality products, the visibly rewarded metrics are often counter to the desired result.

The assumed management strategy is to individualize results, punish poor behavior (often directly related to errors or defects) and reward perceived good behavior ("hard work") at an individual level. In reality, this causes a complex wash of quality-undermining behavior: politics, infighting, de-motivation, perceived unfairness, and worse. Despite the well-proven and scientifically understood reality, managers and even employees are entrenched in the surface level, when in reality the problems are deeper and higher level.

This is the wisdom of W. Edwards Deming and his contemporaries. The fundamental epiphany is that quality is the result of how companies are managed. That it is a result of four things: an understanding of knowledge itself (primarily, that our prior assumptions about work are incorrect) -- an understanding of psychology (behavioral science and real motivation) -- knowledge of statistics (for the ability to optimize process, and the knowledge that all behavior has a random element, even that of individuals) -- and finally, a deep understanding of systems and their effects.

This thinking brought Japan out of its post-WWII recession. It was the origin of the Japanese quality economy—of Toyota, Honda, Sony, Panasonic, and more Japanese companies with quality products at the core of their success. The Deming prize is still given to companies which embody the values of quality.

It worked in Japan because of a cultural readiness for a systemic worldview. It does not gain traction in the US for exactly the opposite reason: we are a culture of rugged individualists, who, despite scientifically proven truth, will not drop our core idea that individuals are the cause of both our successes and our failures. This is especially true for upper management.

To be successful, as companies and as a nation, we need a major cultural shift toward systematic quality. We need companies that understand that most of the deficit in the quality of products comes not from poor individuals themselves, but poor links between them, poor management of them, and the poor systems within which they work. Simply lack of attention to systems and process in general causes a standard of organizational chaos, where we truly do rely on the excellence of individuals to keep companies afloat. This is familiar to all of us, but surely there's a better way.

If every "whose fault is it" question would be translated to "what, at its core, caused this fault"—every company would benefit—and that's true even if some fault can be found with an individual. Display extreme restraint, as the better course of action is still systemic. And this isn't a strategy of simply "blaming management"—instead, every person in the company needs to work together to improve the system surrounding them, and when every person understands why that view is important and why they're a part of it, then the improvement will begin to multiply.

This is true in software as it is in manufacturing, and I think the industry is ready for a new body of work to translate Deming's ideas to the software field. Skip Six Sigma, skip TQM—too dogmatic and heavy. Focus on Deming's core ideas: the importance of systems, understanding of key underlying concepts, and the implementation of them with good leadership from the top. It's a new old way, it is a better way, and we need it now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming