§1. Attorneys, firm histories, and prefatory anecdotes [00:02]
The Fish name is just all over New York and Boston, because I think it's the same Fish. He was a great patent attorney in the 1880s and 1900s. He did the Wright brothers patent and I think he did the Alexander Graham Bell patent. He had a couple of winners there. Apparently he was a very good attorney, and his name shows up on a lot of different law firms in New York and Boston. I did a big case on batteries once for a company in New York called Fish & Neave, and their logo shows the Wright brothers' glider — they're kind of pointing out, we did the intellectual property for the Wright brothers.
Thirty-five years ago, when I was just starting to do some work with attorneys, I went to Nutter McLennan and Fish. I was sitting in the reception area, and they have a hardcopy book on the history of Nutter McLennan and Fish. Now it's just called Nutter McLennan — they dropped the Fish. I open it up to the frontispiece, and there's a picture of Louis Brandeis. So I said to the receptionist, oh, is this Judge Brandeis's old firm? And she said, who's he? That's why every time I see an attorney from Nutter McLennan and Fish I have to tell them the story. If you're pretentious enough to have a history of your firm and show that Judge Brandeis was one of the people in your firm, then you really ought to tell your receptionist who he was, because he was one of the great justices.
There's a firm in Houston that's now Norton Rose Fulbright. They have 6,000 attorneys around the world, but they used to be Norton Rose and Jaworski. Jaworski is famous because he was the guy who prosecuted Nixon in the Watergate case. I don't know if he was a good attorney, but he was a very prominent attorney.
§2. General Motors locating pin and the Motorola pager plant [02:35]
I told the story about General Motors and the failure to maintain the locating pin, which was creating tremendous amounts of scrap. If you look on Wikipedia, they have a whole series of articles on total quality management. There's Theory of Constraints, which we'll go through later, there's Six Sigma, there's Total Productive Maintenance. The General Motors Linden, New Jersey plant was producing several fractions of a percent or several percent of scrap. You'd really like to be down to a few parts per million of defects in your manufacturing process. We'll talk about the tools that people use to measure those things.
This was a simple little thing. If a maintenance engineer had ever bothered to go and look at the process, they would have realized you just replace the two-dollar locating pin — pull it out with pliers and hammer in a new one — and the guy would have been able to put the part on each time. They just never did any maintenance.
There's another story on maintenance. Did I tell you about Motorola in Boynton Beach, Florida? Around 1989 or 1990, Congress instituted the National Quality Award — we'll talk later about that award, given by the Department of Commerce to some of the best managed companies in the country in terms of product quality. Motorola was one of the first companies to win it. They had a big success story with pagers. We still have pagers — doctors use them — but they used to be much more prevalent before cell phones.
Twenty-five or thirty years ago, the problem with a pager was it took six weeks from the time you went into the store to when you could get your pager. They all look the same, but every pager is unique. There are six or seven electronic components in a pager that determine its frequency — your paging code, like your telephone number. Motorola had gone to Singapore to manufacture pagers, because they could manufacture more cheaply there. But the problem of transferring the information to Singapore, getting on the schedule, and building a unique pager for that paging zone took a lot of time. So they did the economics, and they said we can bring this back to the United States from Singapore — even with higher labor rates — because we can automate the process and have a turnaround of one to two weeks rather than six weeks. That gives you a big competitive advantage, because everybody else was making people wait six weeks.
Where else are you going to build your new plant except in a resort? Nice place where people want to live, in the sun in the winter. They built this plant in Boynton Beach. When they told the manager the layout, they had calculated an area that would allow them to do repairs on five percent of the pagers. The rule of thumb in the electronics industry in the 1980s was, if you're building printed circuit boards or some other component like that, you're going to have to expect five percent repairs. These things are too expensive to throw the whole thing out, so you have to have a repair area. This manager came in and said, take it out, we're not going to have any repair area. Everybody said, we're going to lose our shirts, we're going to throw away five percent of our product. He said no.
They start up the plant, and within a couple of months they had zero defects. This is a principle of what's called in total quality management zero defects. What they learned was that the five percent rejects existed because that was what the industry was willing to accept. The process engineers would go fix the process only until they got it down to where the rework area could handle it. By defining the size of the rework area, they had defined how much the engineers were going to do to improve the process. After that, people learned: if you don't expect to have to repair things, maybe you won't, and engineers will realize they have to go out there and fix it.
§3. The Ford Mustang tow motor and the limits of acceptable defects [09:00]
There's another example from the early 90s. I had an LFM student working at Ford in Detroit, and we went to see the Mustang assembly line. I don't remember which plant — there are a lot of Ford plants in Detroit, thank God. When the cars would come off the line at the end of assembly, they were supposed to fill it with gas, turn the key, and a guy would drive it out into the parking lot for loading onto the railroad cars or trucks going to the dealerships. When a car wouldn't start, they'd bring in a tow motor — a forklift type of thing — and they would tow it out to another parking lot even further away, and leave it there until the mechanics could come by and figure out why it wouldn't start. A new manager came in and said, no more tow motors. If it doesn't start, you push.
All of a sudden the hourly workers were pushing cars 150 yards out to the far parking lot, and they didn't like that. So they griped to the engineers — fix whatever it is. The engineers started doing an analysis, collecting the data, figuring out why the cars wouldn't start and fixing it, so that every time they turned the key it started. Because these guys didn't want to push the cars. Sometimes the amount of manufacturing defects, which is a defect in quality, is really based on what you're willing to accept. You can fix it if you're willing to. I'm not saying that's always true, but those are two examples from the real world of total productive maintenance, and it can pay for itself. Some managers come in and they will just try to save money, and the problems don't show up on their watch — they show up on the next person's watch.
§4. Books on total productive maintenance and product design [11:24]
There are books written about total productive maintenance. This is a book by a German, Rudolf Stapelberg — eleven hundred pages, so you don't want to read the whole thing. The chapter headings are design methodology, design integrity, the risk in design, reliability and performance, availability and maintainability — which is what I was just talking about — and safety and risk. It's an engineer's book, not a management book. It has a different spin than if you read it from a business school. It actually is quantitative in many cases.
Here's another book, now in its fifth edition. When I talked at the beginning of yesterday about the big shots at MIT, the faculty who were trying to control MIT's manufacturing, and we were just the little pawns — two of them were Karl Ulrich and Steve Eppinger. Karl Ulrich's mother is a university professor at Harvard and won the Pulitzer Prize, and Steve Eppinger became the deputy dean. In 1989 they finished their doctoral theses over in mechanical engineering on product design, and they were hired at the Sloan School. I mentioned yesterday the Sloan School is the Bell Labs of business schools, and Harvard's the West Point.
If you look at the faculty at the Sloan School, most of them have never been to a business school — a distinct advantage. They come from the engineering school at MIT typically, and they apply some of the engineering principles to management. That's why they have this attitude of trying to develop the next new management principles. Karl Ulrich and Steve Eppinger, working for their tenure, started teaching a course on product design and development. I actually taught it with them for a while, along with the Rhode Island School of Design. Teams of students would design a product along with the RISD students. It was great to have the RISD students, because they could actually make things — they could prototype. The MIT students didn't know how to fold an envelope, but the RISD students knew how to go into the shop and actually prototype things. A number of the things in this book were designed by the students in the class, and they sold them to different organizations and magazines.
One of them, which I have in my office, is a paper towel dispenser that has just enough friction in the roller so that when you pull rapidly on the paper towel it rips off, but if you pull slowly you can get as many as you want. Fairly simple, but it was actually invented in one of the classes between the school of engineering, RISD, and the Sloan School. The book has gone to a fifth edition, very well respected. Some of the earlier editions had the little two-wheel scooter that people ride on — that was Karl Ulrich's. He didn't design it, they existed before, but he kind of made them popular.
§5. From inspection to certification: the supplier quality shift [15:50]
Product design fits within the whole field of total quality management — doing robust design and things like that. The American Society of Quality Control lists on their website the history of quality control. In the 1920s they call it quality control. In the 1950s, quality assurance and auditing — inspecting the quality. The idea in the 1950s was that for some products, you ship to Ford, and Ford has incoming inspectors who will accept or reject the lot. Then in the 1980s under the TQM movement they got rid of this. Ford wanted to fire their inspectors. They expected you to certify that you had a certain level of quality. They were shifting the inspection costs backwards to the suppliers, because the suppliers would do some quality control but they didn't pay too much attention, because they knew Ford was going to have inspectors and would catch the defects.
But people had learned by watching the Japanese — that's not the way the Japanese did it. The Japanese made the suppliers control the quality and certify that parts were good. In the 1990s I was in Columbus, Ohio to give a talk to a group at dinner. The head of this group was a supplier of parts to Honda, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler — lots of automotive plants in the Midwest. We started dinner at six o'clock, and he didn't show up until 6:45, when they were serving dessert. He was all apologetic — he had gotten a call from Toyota that morning at 11, and they said, we have a problem with your parts, be up here at one o'clock. His office was two hours away from the Toyota plant, so they were basically saying leave right now and come see us. He had been in a meeting all afternoon with Toyota on how to fix the problem.
I said, so you find that the Japanese are pretty demanding? He said, I'd much rather work with the Japanese. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, yes, they're very demanding, and when they had a problem with my parts they would call me up and I had to get up there and fix it, but they would work with me. If it was General Motors back in the early 90s, and there was a problem with parts, General Motors said, supply us new parts by tomorrow morning at nine o'clock, or we're going to sue you. That was how they cooperated. That was the early days before what we now call supply chain management. If you take business school courses they'll talk about supply chain management, but twenty-five years ago there was an adversarial relationship between buyer and seller in the manufacturing business.
Student: [discusses dealer/franchise relationships and allocations]
Right — looking at both your supplier, and your customers, the dealerships, which became the supply side. But it actually goes back to Eiji Toyoda, who had respect for people. You have respect for your supplier, you have respect for your customer, and you work with them as a team, as opposed to the adversarial relationship — like Alcoa, the union and the management. That's partly the Japanese culture. The Japanese don't want to be embarrassed.
In the 1980s I lived in Japan for a year, and I was going over there quite a bit. People would say, oh, bring me back the latest electronic thing — the Sony Walkman and cameras and all kinds of equipment that Sony and Panasonic were developing. I'd go over there, and I found the equipment was more expensive in Japan than it was in the United States, same products. They had some newer models, but you couldn't get them in the United States. The reason was the Japanese wanted to try them out on their own people before they shipped them internationally.
I told you the story about the Honda being considered a piece of junk in the early 70s — it would rust out, showing red rust within a year of buying it. The Japanese were mortified, as part of the culture, that people were making jokes about a Honda Civic being a piece of junk because it was rusty within twelve months. What they did to respond was to fix it. Now the Honda Civic is a great car with lots of reliability. It's partly the Japanese culture, and Toyota — Eiji Toyoda had this respect for your suppliers and your customers and working with them. It's Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y. Do you respect the people you work with? Do you think they're trying to do a good job? Do you want them to work with you to help? Or are you just going to threaten them if they don't perform? You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. The Japanese were the ones who taught the Americans through the principles of total quality management.
§6. Quality assurance vs. quality control: the welding code and Lloyd's of London [23:21]
We have quality management today, but there are many interpretations of what quality is. Lots of management professors make lots of money going around and giving their interpretation. Since this is a structural materials course, let me give you my one slide from a structural materials handbook. This is the definition of quality assurance and quality control in the structural welding code of the American Welding Society. Every building, every bridge in the United States, by law — by the building codes — calls out this standard, which is a consensus standard developed by the welding society. They call out the details of what a contractor's inspector is. The contractor's inspector — and this is a quote — in some industries this may be referred to as quality control or quality inspection. You have some fabricator building trusses for a new building or for a bridge, he has welders and he has inspectors. He employs his own inspectors — but that's sort of the fox watching the henhouse.
Nowadays it says in an organization the quality group has to report directly to top management in a separate line from the operating or working group, so that the manager of quality is not the same as the manager of production. You keep them separate, so the same person doesn't have a conflict of interest. They both report to the top — the CEO or the president — and the president is going to have to work out the fight between them, because there will always be conflicts. The quality people want something in more detail, and the production people want to let things through — that's what they're getting paid to produce. The in-house inspector is called the quality control inspector. There's also a verification inspector, an independent outside quality assurance person who comes in and audits the production.
In shipbuilding — I've spent a lot of time in shipbuilding with the Navy and commercial shipbuilding — going back hundreds of years, the owners of the ships when they were being built would hire someone, typically a company called Lloyd's of London. Lloyd's of London goes back 400 years, and nowadays about ten different entities are called Lloyd's of London, but we don't have to worry about that. The shipyard would build a ship, the owner would hire Lloyd's of London, and Lloyd's of London would put people in that shipyard walking around as inspectors, and they had the authority to stop production. This has been going on for hundreds of years — this is not new total quality management.
There are four certification agencies in the world. You will not be able to get insurance on a ship unless you are certified by the American Bureau of Shipping, which is the largest, or DnV, a Norwegian company called Det Norske Veritas, or Bureau Veritas in France, or Lloyd's of London. They control all the world's maritime insurance. If they don't have someone certified that the ship was built properly, it doesn't float — it doesn't get insurance, which means it doesn't go out on the high seas. The US Navy does the same thing. I have in this same classroom during the summer about ten naval officers in their early 30s, most of whom have either been working on a ship as engineering officers, or worked in a shipyard. Up at Bath, Maine, where they have a shipyard that does commercial construction, they have about six or seven Navy inspectors, and those guys every day are out there where the welding and fabrication are going on, looking to see if everybody's following all the standards and requirements.
§7. Two stories from the shipyard: the Raytheon shutdown and the destroyer boiler weld [28:31]
Back in the 80s, I had been in Japan and just got back, and I got a phone call from Raytheon here in Massachusetts. They had a production facility making parts for the Aegis missile defense system — if you're trying to knock out a ship, they have a whole slew of rounds that would knock down some incoming missile. So it's pretty critical to the safety of the ship. Some Navy inspector was walking through the shop, and he noticed a guy using a handheld torch — actually an oxy-acetylene torch — because one of the aluminum bars was bent and he was heating it up to bend it back into shape so he could finish building the part. The Navy inspector said, where's your procedure on that? This is the early 80s, before things like ISO 9000 which require you to have procedures. But the Navy had procedures, because — remember I told you a lot of the total quality management came out of the SUBSAFE program — the Navy in the 1960s had instituted: you must have documented procedures for how you're going to manufacture something.
The guy in the shop straightening this thing with heat didn't know — he was probably lucky if he graduated from high school. He had just learned that if you have a piece of steel, you heat it up and you straighten it and everything's fine. That's not true for aluminum alloys — you can drop the strength by a factor of two and wipe out the heat treatment that gave you the strength. The Navy inspector goes to the quality control guy for Raytheon and asks, where's your procedure on this? They had no procedure. The whole plant, 400 workers, shut down. Can't produce another piece until you prove to the Navy that you have not destroyed the integrity of the product.
I get a call on Tuesday or Wednesday morning, and they say, we need someone to come and tell the Navy that what we're doing is alright. I've had that before, where they wanted me to tell the Navy something was alright and I couldn't do it because it wasn't alright. In this case I said, look, I just got back from Japan two weeks ago, I don't really have time. Why don't you call Professor Mortensen, who is the Alcoa professor in our department — he was a young assistant professor, he should know something about aluminum, right? Well, Professor Mortensen didn't even have a car — he was young and he was from Europe, and you don't need cars in Europe. So they sent a cab to pick him up at MIT and take him out to Waltham. He goes out and looks at it, and he says, you should talk to Professor Eagar. So they call me up in the afternoon — Professor Mortensen couldn't tell us the answer, can you come out? I said, look, I live in Belmont, I'll stop on the way home. But I won't get there till six o'clock. They'll stay — the whole plant is shut down. So I go out, they show me the problem, and I said this is a tempest in a teapot. I won't go through the technical details — I cover it in one of my welding courses. They said, we need something written for the Navy. So I went home and wrote it up. This was back in '85, before most people even had word processors. I was going to Penn State University the next morning. I dropped it off with my secretary, she typed it up, and gave it to them. By Friday they were back in operation because I had convinced the Navy it was just a tempest in a teapot.
I've had other things which were not a tempest in a teapot. The Navy had a destroyer — they used to have a Navy Yard that repaired destroyers here in Boston — and this was back in 1977 or so. I was a young assistant professor. They called up and said, we've been trying to make this weld, we can't make this weld, the ship has been in dry dock for six weeks and it's going to be late, and every day not in drydock costs about $100,000. So I go out there — well, actually I go to the library first to look at the problem. I'm like 27 or 28 years old, I didn't have any white hair back then. I walk in, I look at the library, and I find, no, you can't do what they want to do. Twenty years ago, people had done studies on this, and it will crack ten years later. This is your boiler — it runs your ship — so no, it looks good for a little while but eventually it's going to fail. So I go out there and I tell them, I can't just say it's okay to do this because it's not. They said, well, how are you going to fix it? I said, well, tell me more about it. So they told me more about it, and I came up with a way that they might not get their cracking. I was all ready to get out of there. I was a little embarrassed because I was a 27-year-old kid and these guys had been working in the shipyard for years. I said, well, I'll see you. I wanted to get out of there because I didn't have any self-confidence about whether this was really going to work. But I just used my scientific principles.
They said, oh no, we'll do a test while you're here. So they welded up, and we had to wait a half an hour, and the foreman, who was like 60 years old, the whole time said, this is not going to work, this is not going to work. I'm sitting there — I don't know if it'll work or not, I just thought of how I'd try to solve it. He does the inspection after a half an hour — let it cool down — and the inspection is what's called dye penetrant. You spray on this white developer, and he'd been saying for 45 minutes this is not going to work. All the management is standing there, he sprays the stuff on — no crack. I had two ways I could walk out of there, as a dog or as a hero. Turns out I walked out as a hero. That was very important in my consulting career, to learn confidence. You just apply the correct principles, and more often than not you'll be right, but you have to have enough assurance that you're not really showing them that you're quaking in your boots.
§8. ISO 9000, the National Quality Award, and the FDA [36:03]
They have quality assurance and quality control inspectors in shipyards or any other fabrication facility for bridges and buildings. It's part of the code, the code is written into law in most states. After total quality management became more popular in the 1980s, the Europeans were looking on at what was going on, and they came up with something called ISO 9000 — International Standards Organization. Like the dysfunctional competition at MIT, there's a dysfunctional competition between the European Community and the United States. Everybody wants to be the ones who designed the codes and standards, because if you are the standard, then you get the business. The Europeans were going to leapfrog us, and they came up with ISO 9000 around 1990. It has a number of principles: customer focus, leadership, involvement of people, process approach, systems approach, continual improvement, factual approach to decision-making — don't just guess — and mutually beneficial supplier relationship, that supply chain you hear about. These are written into ISO 9000. ISO 9000 got a big boost when Ford said we will not accept anything from our Tier 1 suppliers unless they're ISO 9000 certified, in the early 90s. So if you wanted to sell to Ford, one of the largest companies in the world, you better have ISO 9000 certification. ISO 9000 is really just a list of total quality management principles.
Student: [asks about ISO 9000 — substance unclear]
I'll get to that. Worth reading — there's an article that Brian Haslam, one of my postdocs, wrote up for another matter that's going to arbitration in a couple of weeks, about good manufacturing practices. He was mostly reviewing a book on ISO 9000.
Here's the competition between the US and the European Community on quality standards. Let me back up. I mentioned the National Quality Award. Malcolm Baldrige was Secretary of Commerce, and in the early 1980s he was very big on improving quality in manufacturing. The Japanese were just killing us in the marketplace with their Toyotas — we had this junky General Motors and Ford and Chrysler product, and people were just buying Toyotas. That was great for paying for Star Wars, which was Reagan's defense build-up, but it wasn't great for our balance of trade. Malcolm Baldrige was a very knowledgeable quality manufacturing person. He actually died in a rodeo accident. People lobbied Congress, and Congress created a National Quality Award — this is before ISO 9000. You get a nice plaque if your company wins, but you have to put a team of about ten people full-time for a year or two on documenting everything you do as a company in quality management to win the National Quality Award, and they only give out about half a dozen a year. Wikipedia says they've given out about a hundred and some over the last 30 years. It's managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the big laboratory of the Department of Commerce. It was driven by Japanese competitiveness in the 1980s. The quality criteria are leadership, strategy, customers, measurement, workforce, operations and results — not all that different from ISO 9000, just different words. They've given out a hundred and thirteen awards through 2016, across manufacturing, service, small business, education, healthcare and nonprofit.
In the first few years this came out, about 90% of the companies that won it in the first five years went out of business in the next year or so. So it was sort of a joke — if you spent all your time working to get this award, you wouldn't be producing good product. But some companies are still in business. There is a strong competition. The term Good Manufacturing Practice, according to Wikipedia, was first used by the US Navy in 1984 in a memo of the Defense Department. The Defense Department procures hundreds of billions of dollars worth of materials, airplanes and things like that. They had learned about the Thresher and Admiral Rickover — that they were doing a lousy job of quality control on nuclear submarines, and they lost the ship with all hands on board. It was a tragedy for the Navy. The Navy set up the SUBSAFE program, a set of quality standards which I can trace through this guy Edwards Deming, who was a consultant out of one of the New York universities to the Navy and other people. No one would listen to him in this country — he went over to Japan in the 1970s and helped the Japanese with their quality standards. Then in the 1980s when the United States got a little humility, they actually started listening to Deming, and he became sort of a folk hero.
In the early 90s, around 1992, the US Food and Drug Administration got interested in good manufacturing processes. They actually wrote it into law — Congress had Congress write a law: you cannot produce pharmaceuticals, you cannot produce medical instruments and implants, unless you can show that you have the documentation and procedures and that you are following them. There are attorneys out there who will go in and try to prove that some medical instrument company is not following the things they had to submit to the Food and Drug Administration saying this is how we will manufacture the part, and we will not deviate from what we said in all these documents.
It's Title 21 CFR — Code of Federal Regulations, the law Congress writes. In the early 90s, the World Health Organization followed suit in 1992, and the EU followed in 2013 for drug quality assurance. It's not just drugs — it's food quality too, all the FDA. All of this actually went back to 1906. Upton Sinclair wrote a book about how bad the meat producing industry was, and got Congress to write the Food and Drug Act of 1906.
So I'm finally getting to Steve's question. For Tier 1 suppliers — big parts, supplying directly to Ford — in the early 90s Ford said you must be ISO 9001 certified. What's the difference between ISO 9001 and ISO 9000? ISO 9000 actually has two meanings. If you go to their website, it will say ISO 9000 is a family of standards on quality management. This course is about quality management. So ISO 9000 is the whole megillah. ISO 9000-2015 is actually a document which gives you the fundamentals and overview and the vocabulary — a glossary of terms. ISO 9001, which is what Steve asked about, current edition 2015, is a quality management system to which organizations can be certified. It can be sector-specific — industry groups go in and say, as an industry, these are the quality metrics that you must measure, you must document, you must show that you're using statistical process control to follow, and you can give me numbers, and you will keep track of the lots so if anything goes wrong I know where to go find it.
Student: [follow-up — inaudible]
§9. Design defect immunity for defense contractors and closing on TQM [46:36]
The industry can get together and apply to ISO, the International Standards Organization. They'll have a committee of ten people working for a year saying, these are the metrics that we are going to require everyone to have, and you will not change anything unless you tell us. They call that freezing of the design. If the Defense Department is building a new helicopter, Sikorsky or Bell or somebody is going to do the detail design, and they must then present that to the Naval Air Systems Command or the Air Force or whoever is contracting for that helicopter. If the government accepts the design, then the government is considered the designer of that helicopter.
There's a law — actually a Supreme Court decision in the early 90s — where you cannot sue Bell or Sikorsky or McDonnell Douglas, which used to be in the helicopter business and is now part of Boeing Vertol — you cannot sue them on a design defect theory, because the government designed it. What Congress said is, in order to have the newest and latest and greatest and most secure defense systems, we are going to be at the cutting edge, we are going to make mistakes when you're at the cutting edge, and you cannot sue us for a design defect because the government approved it. The company presented it to the government, the government accepts it in writing. Then the company manufactures. If the company doesn't manufacture according to the written procedures or the drawings, you can sue them, because that's not where the government designed it. But you can't sue defense manufacturers on a design defect theory.
Things get pretty complicated — you're not going to learn it all in any one course. If you go to ISO, they can give you a document and tell you exactly, if you're in the petroleum business, what you have to do to get certified. You've got to have documents — this is employment for a lot of engineers, and that's all they do, help make sure the documentation is being done.
In the meantime, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which started around 1913 in the United States, has let the Europeans take over the standards writing for quality, and ISO 9000 is now really an international standard. Most US companies — I go visit some company, big banner out in front of the building, ten feet high, ISO 9000 certified. What does it mean? It means there's been a lot of paperwork and they're supposed to be following a set of written standards of how they do things. You wouldn't believe how detailed some of this gets — like how do you put the staple in the papers.
Let's get back to what this course is. We'll talk about this next time I lecture, sometime next week. What is TQM? Is it a bunch of buzzwords that have no real meaning? Is it a revolution in thick [thinking]? Some of the top CEOs in the country — Jack Welch, Larry Bossidy, Ray Stata from Analog Devices — think it's great. Is it just the renaming of hundred-year-old concepts? Is it worthwhile? Is it none of the above, all of the above? You can decide for yourself. Some people think it's great, and some people think it's bull. See you next time. Steve will be in our class this week.