Quality and Innovation

I have a 6-year-old, which means I also must have sparklers on the 4th of July. (And that’s about it; I don’t trust my klutziness to be in the proximity of most explosives.) So this year, I drove down to South Carolina on the eve of the 4th to make my purchase. I got 96 sparklers for $5.00 – WOW, that’s only 5.2 cents per sparkler, I thought – what a great value! We got them home, night fell, emotions got high, and my kid was concerned that our sparklers would be so fantastic that all the neighbors would come to watch. (“Do we have enough seats in the yard?” he asked.)

It was dark… we were ready. We lit the sparklers. Expecting a ball of sparks at least 6 inches in diameter, I jumped back after I lit the end of the stick. I was looking forward to the part where we could write our names in the dark air, letting the letters hang there – a rite of passage in youth, or so I assumed. A little tiny penny-sized flare zizzled up, and a few sparks shot out straight to the ground, and 10 seconds later it was over. Just 3 sparklers left giant, noxious clouds of irritating ash and dust that filled up the neighborhood, to the point where we couldn’t light any more after just one round.

WHAT????!!? I thought. I wasn’t alone… I looked over and saw a sad, puzzled face looking back at me. “Are you sure you got real sparklers this time?” I was sure, but what I’d purchased – though a great perceived value, at first – turned out to be very low perceived quality. Why? My expectations were that any decent company making sparklers would have standards… nice ball of sparks, 60-second-plus duration, smoky cloud that would not put you in the hospital or give you Black Lung. My expectations were unmet by the product, and as a result, both perceived quality and perceived value plummeted.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, there is a difference between how you perceive quality, and how you perceive value (according to Mitra, 2002):

• Perceived quality happens before you buy, adopt, or experience something.
• Perceived value depends on how well the product, service or experience meets your expectations after you buy, adopt or experience it.
• Perceived quality and perceived value are moderated by your expectations. Your expectations can (and often do!) change after you buy, adopt or experience something. Perceived value is NOT invariant, nor is it independent of perceived quality – your perception of value can change after you buy, adopt or experience similar products or participate in similar activities, because then you have a more rich basis for comparison.

This made me wonder just why people are buying these sparklers… as a sparkler connoisseur since this incident, I have noticed that pretty much all sparklers that are sold are the exact same variety that we got. Which means there must be a lot of people buying this brand of sparklers… and the company certainly wouldn’t be making them if people weren’t buying them. If we keep buying low quality products, how will manufacturers ever know that they’re not meeting minimum quality standards? I know this is significant in safety critical industries, or industries where there’s intense competition, but this whole sparkler debacle made me realize that as consumers, there are probably many fronts where we’re selling ourselves out. I’m sure there are plenty of families who also bought the same sparklers and thought they sucked, but they probably rationalized it by thinking that any sparklers are better than no sparklers for my kids. I might have thought the same thing, but I’m now of the opinion that NO sparklers are better than crappy sparklers, because buying duds sends the wrong message into the Invisible Brain of our Invisible Hand-guided global economy.

So what does this have to do with bagels? Here’s what. As I was lamenting the sad state of the sparklers, I thought to myself, “This would never happen in New York City if we were dealing with bagels.” Why? Because people there know a good bagel when they eat one, the price point is well known (as is willingness-to-pay), and people will not tolerate bagels that are subpar. They will vote with their feet. Bad bagels will cease and desist. The market will eat them, if they don’t meet the very high quality standards of the local bagel consumers.

My appeal to consumers is to ask yourselves this question. How bad does the quality OR value of a consumer product have to get before you’ll just say no, and send a proper signal back into the economy? If you don’t signal now, what makes you think the quality levels will stay the same as they are now?

LET EVERYTHING BE YOUR BAGEL. Don’t settle for minimally acceptable quality unless you’re ready for it to sink even lower.

This post is a collaboration between Eric Sessoms at MyCustomerCloud & Nicole Radziwill.

Everyone knows what a tool is. We use tools all the time, every day. Hammers to drive nails… cars to drive to work… glasses to read a book. Tools help us do stuff. They make our jobs easier, our lives simpler, and our existence more orderly. But we have to remember that tools only exist to help us achieve our goals… we humans are the real brains behind the brawn of our tools! And we have to figure out what goals we’re trying to achieve – or else we could inadvertently use our tools and technologies to just stumble about without making any progress towards our goals!

In the words of the political scientist Langdon Winner [1], “What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded.” It’s the context of what you’re trying to achieve that makes a tool work – or fail miserably!

(This post is bound to be controversial – so please, if you have an opinion, write a comment. I’m really interested in hearing what others think and feel about this concept.)

Last week, I read the Harvard Business Review’s 2011 Agenda, in which HBR reported on what projects key business and management leaders will be working on during the upcoming year. I was directed to the report by a Facebook post from Daniel Pink, author of Drive, who was a contributor. One of the subjects he touched on really moved me:

I wonder if we have reached the limits of the profit motive. It is a powerful force, of course, but perhaps it’s somehow inadequate and insufficiently inspiring for 21st century work. More and more we’re seeing that the most enduring and effective companies marry the profit motive to what we might think of as the “purpose motive”—the belief that businesses must stand for something and contribute to the world. Maybe the path out of our economic doldrums is not a tighter focus on profits, processes, or productivity but the broader awakening of a sense of purpose in our enterprises.

As someone who ponders quality and “lean thinking” all the time, this really got the little voice in my head going: Is profit waste? When we’re thinking about waste in the “traditional lean sense,” overproduction is the first sin. Isn’t profit just overproduction of revenue? Sure, but you might argue, it’s profit that helps a business expand and grow. That’s true, IF that profit is turned into investments or retained earnings that become future investments. (But how much of a company’s profit is turned into lottery-sized bonuses to executives who then pursue a personal life of overconsumption? How much of a company’s profit is the direct result of using wasteful ingredients in production, such as using packaging that clutters landfills for years? Doesn’t this equate the profit that’s generated with the waste that’s generated?)

This made me wonder whether other people have questioned whether profit is waste. I did a Google search and came up with very little… but did find two hits of interest. The first is an old article from Volume 36 of The Arena, a critical journal published from 1889-1896 and 1900-1909 and edited by a guy named Benjamin Orange Flower. It was recognized as audacious and unorthodox, and upon its demise The Arena was declared a “fearless exponent of advanced liberal thought” – so apparently, people were a little taken aback by the social mission and tone of the publication at that time as well.  The second was a blog post on the writings of the philosopher Bataille from the 1960’s, who believed that “…a series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect that the squandering of profits” and “the fate of all profit is waste” – that is, that profit is waste.

In the Arena article, entitled “Consumption of Wealth: Individual and Collective” by C. C. Hitchcock, the author starts his article by loosely addressing the disparity of wealth in society first noted by the Italian engineer, sociologist, economist and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto, and then starts making connections with the income production of typical families of the early 20^th century. He asserts that it is the profit motive in capitalism that’s responsible for the laborer (who creates value and wealth on a daily basis) earning little to nothing, while “by others who may produce nothing we see wealth approximated in sums running up into millions in a single year.”

What is Hitchcock’s solution to the inequality? He says if you want to consume more, you should create value in proportion to the level you wish to consume. Executives of multi-billion-dollar companies might argue that indeed, they are creating value for millions of people, and doesn’t that justify the consumption? At the end of his article, Hitchcock concedes that his whole argument is in place to support socialism, so that “burdened souls” can benefit from “added courage and strength to bear patiently the deprivations and disappointments of life.”

This sounds pretty incongruent with the rest of his argument to me. I tend to like the idea of socialism as a utopian concept, and completely dislike it when I think about all the able-bodied lazy people sitting around getting handouts without lifting a finger. (I know some of these people personally.)

What is Bataille’s solution to the inequality? He says that productivity itself is perhaps a myth. So what? Why pursue productivity when its end goal is just waste? His writings seem to suggest that finding meaning and enjoyment in life is superior to achieving productivity.

If that’s the case, I might stop Getting Things Done (GTD) and start Getting to Meaning (GTM). That last acronym is mine, people!

What sorts of next generation business models could we come up with if we looked at profit the same way we look at inventory holding costs, or waiting, or excessive motion in a process, or defects? Furthermore, is there a cost of profit? (I don’t know what this last question might even mean, but I’ll be thinking about it more and more in the upcoming weeks.)

Why do our business metrics STOP at profit? Why don’t we track where the profit goes, and what it’s spent on, and whether that spending generates any true value? Follow the money… that’s the only way we will be able to test whether profit is indeed waste.

If you have at least 5 years broad experience in quality, please help us validate the “Quality Systems Development Roadmap” originally published in Quality Progress in 2008 (http://asq.org/quality-progress/2008/09/basic-quality/starting-from-scratch.html). This is part of an expert systems project developed by Doug Jin, a student at James Madison University, under the guidance of Nicole Radziwill, JMU faculty member and ASQ member leader.

The 5-page, 13-question survey will be available until January 15, 2011 or 1500 responses are received, whatever comes first, so contribute now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W2LYFYP!

I love the most recent XKCD that takes a swing at the soulless customer service scripts that prevent mere mortal CSRs from actually connecting with their customer and delivering authentic customer service.

This adds a new dimension to “Getting Blocked” – “I’d like to help you, but I just don’t know enough to figure this out for you, so you’re going to have to wait (possibly forever) for advice from one of our (possibly nonexistent) technology ninjas”.

However, I’d like to enthusiastically support the notion of Expert Easter Eggs so that people with challenging problems can connect to CSRs with great skills whose mouths are watering for those challenges! Great idea, XKCD.

Eric Frazier of the Charlotte Observer told the story of Alyssa Rushing this week – a 20 year old student at the University of South Carolina whose mother has offered her $300 to “detox from Facebook” for a month. Alyssa’s mother, Melynda, wanted her daughter to focus on studying instead of social media – and viewed the challenge as a way to help Alyssa recoup the time she was wasting online:

Her mom, with just 40 Facebook friends, said she got on the network solely because she wanted to keep up with her children on it. Her idea for the $300 challenge came from her own past. As a busy mom trying to raise children, she once swore off TV and gained extra time to get things done.

She’s sure the same will be true for her daughter, especially given how distracting Facebook can be.

Next Tuesday, we’ll know if Alyssa was able to meet the challenge, because her month will be up. The question that I’m most interested in, though, is whether the one month pay-for-performance will lead to any long-term shifts in behavior. For a change to be permanent, the motivation must come from within. Although external motivators (like $300) might provide the impetus to get off Facebook now, what happens when the cash is no longer flowing? In 2009, the Wall Street Journal reported a higher success rate among smokers who were paid to quit, versus those who were not. However, there are no long-term indicators available. And besides, research shows that carrots and sticks don’t always work, anyway.

When I did my 42-day social media detox in the summer of 2010, all I was looking for was relief from the incessant online chatter – the anxiety and exhaustion that came from being frenetically, perpetually, and continuously distracted by status updates. As I peeled back the layers covering my anxiety, I realized there was a whole Pandora’s box of twisted emotions and my online habits were actually distracting me from dealing with the real issues all around me.

I check Facebook and other social media much less now – but my motivation is purely intrinsic: if I don’t keep a healthy distance, the anxiety will start to enshroud me again, and who knows where I’ll end up then. For me, it’s a matter of preserving mental and emotional happiness.

It’s kind of like dealing with an eating disorder. You can’t exactly swear off food since you need to eat to live – you just need to set very good boundaries detailing how you interact with food, and avoid putting yourself in situations that will threaten your health and well-being.

The game is all about devising effective structures to help you deal with your obsessions. And I think this is a huge issue for ensuring your own quality of life – at least in the very personal world inside your head.

In May, when I decided to disconnect from checking social media and email over 500 times a day to write Disconnected: Technology Addiction & the Search for Authenticity in Virtual Life, I had no idea how contemporary the idea of disconnecting from social media would become.

Give me your Droids, your iPhones, your Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates, your text messages, your Google Chats! Let’s see what happens to life as we know it if we take a time capsule way back into the mid-1990’s, stop clicking on our mobile devices, and start engaging more with the real world and real people around us. It sounds like such a trite experiment, and yet it’s one of those compelling exercises that can really help us understand the concept of mindfulness – the ability to live in the moment, slow down, and appreciate all that is for what it is. At least that’s what it did for me (as soon as I could compel myself to actually follow through to see what would happen – technology detox is NOT easy and I am a self-admitted addictive multitasker).

Like the experiment being run at the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania university that’s garnered so much press this month, my personal exercise was more of a brownout than a blackout. Face it – life totally without technology can be impractical and unproductive in many ways, especially when you have a job that relies on it. But how much is too much? That’s the trick I wrote about in my book… avoiding technology asceticism (blackout) while setting pertinent Rules of Engagement that limit social media technology use (brownout) to promote mindfulness. It results in you using technology rather than it using you.

So what’s going on in Harrisburg? According to Paige Chapman at the Chronicle on September 9, 2010:

Professors have experimented with assigning technology fasts for their students—by discouraging gadget use for five days, for example, or rewarding extra credit for a semester without Facebook.

Harrisburg University of Science and Technology is going one step further with a “social-media blackout.” Starting Monday, the Pennsylvania institution will block Facebook, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, and MySpace on the campus network for a week. Faculty and staff members will be affected as well as students.

“Telling students to imagine a time before Facebook is like telling them to imagine living in a world with dinosaurs,” said Eric D. Darr, Harrisburg’s executive vice president and provost. “It’s not real. What we’re doing is trying to make it real.”

Here are some more of the links I’ve found over the past few days on the social media blackout concept. I’m listing them here for personal reference, and plan to grow it as I find more interesting links on the topic, but you might find the list useful too.

• Washington Post: Harrisonburg University Plans Social Media Blackout (Sep 9)
• NPR: University Declares a Week Without Social Media (Sep 12)
• Technorati: Harrisburg University Plans Social Media Blackout, Has Lost All Short Term Memory (Sep 12)
• Huffington Post: Harrisburg University Plans Week-Long Social Media Blackout (Sep 14)
• Chronicle: Harrisburg U’s Social Media Blackout More of a Brownout (Sep 16)
• Results Pending: PA School Social Media Blackout Experiment (Sep 20)
• The Hindu: University Tries Out Social Media Blackout (Sep 21)

By the way. many people have asked whether my 42-day experiment resulted in a long term behavior shift… and the answer is YES, it did. Now, I only check my Droid, Facebook, Twitter, email and the rest about 50 to 75 times a day. This might still be considered a problem, but I’m pretty happy that I reduced my habit by a factor of 10. So are most of the people who have to interact with me on a daily basis.