Philip Crosby wrote Quality Is Free to explain quality to management in terms they could understand. The book addresses the misconceptions of quality management, and relates the story of how a worldwide quality process was installed into the ITT Corporation. The book contains many case histories to explain just what quality is and how it can be improved on purpose. Several million copies of Quality is Free have been sold, and it is available in many languages.  You can purchase a copy of Quality Is Free on Amazon.com or a copy of Quality Without Tears, which furthered Mr. Crosby’s philosophy, from PCA’s Quality Store.     Below, we have listed some of the most powerful and practical phrases from Quality Is Free for you.

Why spend all this time finding and fixing and fighting when you could prevent the incident in the first place? Management has to get right in there and be active when it comes to quality. The first struggle, and it is never over, is to overcome the "conventional wisdom" regarding quality. What should be obvious from the outset is that people perform to the standards of their leaders. If management thinks people don't care, then people won't care. The problem of quality management is not what people don't know about it. The problem is what the think they do know. The first erroneous assumption is that quality means goodness, or luxury, or shininess, or weight. We must define quality as 'conformance to requirements' if we are to manage it. Quality management is a systematic way of guaranteeing that organized activities happen the way they are planned. Prevention is not hard to do—it is just hard to sell. What Awakening is really afraid of is commitment to the future. Uncertainty doesn't know about the future and so can't be bothered by it. Awakening knows about it, and is bothered. Both do nothing, but for different reasons. The result is the same. Attitudes are really what it is all about. Just because the general manager and the department heads have gotten religion doesn't mean that anyone else has. The most effective way to bring operating and other management people to their senses is to put them in contact with someone they will believe. People really like to be measured when the measurement is fair and open. People will only tell you the troubles that others cause for them. They will not reveal what they make happen themselves. Good things only happen when planned; bad things happen on their own. There is a theory of human behavior that says people subconsciously retard their own intellectual growth. The bigoted, the narrow-minded, the stubborn, and the perpetually optimistic have all stopped learning. The customer deserves to receive exactly what we have promised to produce. I do not know of a single product safety problem where the basic cause was something other than a lack of integrity judgment on the part of some management individual. Once in a while you come up with something for which there is no solution. Then you make a judgment and accept the situation, and life goes on. Count on one or two per career. Quality improvement has no chance unless the individuals are ready to recognize that improvement is necessary. Quality is free, but no one is ever going to know it if there isn't some sort of agreed-on system of measurement. Helping management to recognize that they must be personally committed to participating in the program raises the level of visibility for quality and ensures everyone's cooperation so long as there is some progress.

The executive's problem in understanding and utilizing the labor force is compounded by the fact that people are not interested in doing something just because they have been told to do it. To help in a positive manner, you must be genuinely interested in people and results. Your efforts to help are based on a genuine concern for the individual, and are not to further your own ends. Then the help will be accepted. You can create solutions to complicated problems by being the only one to break that complicated problem down to its basic causes. The most valuable manager is one who can first create, and then implement. If the leader is the only one who knows what game is being played, then the leader is obviously the only one who can win. The art of following should not be looked on as something to be learned just to fulfill a temporary obligation on the way to becoming supreme exalted rooster. Pretending all the time is a terrifying management style to adopt. Listening. You can convey no greater honor than to actually hear what someone has to say. Implementing. There comes a time when someone has to actually get the job done. Leading. Leaders start to fail when they begin to believe their own material. Pretending. If you're going to be an actor, be a good one, but stay out of management. Quality is free. But it is not a gift. The biggest problem manager's face comes when they are actually expected to accomplish all the things they have been saying could be accomplished if only everybody would listen to them. ZD is the attitude of defect prevention. It means, 'do the job right the first time.' Make a commitment to a standard, communicate it, recognize performance, and then recycle. It is much less expensive to prevent errors than to rework, scrap, or service them. Most managers are so concerned with today, and with getting our own real and imagined problems settled, that we are incapable of planning corrective or positive actions more than a week or so ahead. Corrective action is just a matter of getting all the rocks rolled over and seeing what is under them. But there is no substitute for the words 'Zero Defects.' They are absolutely clear. It is always cheaper to do the job right the first time. Workers perform like the attitude of management. Many of the most frustrating and expensive problems we see today come from paperwork and similar communication devices. The way to get started on making certain is to recognize that we cause problems for ourselves, and we must find ways to prevent them. (Quality is Free pages 250-264, Philip B. Crosby)

© 2005 Philip Crosby Associates.