This is the first of several posts about my personal history with manufacturing quality. While I have never had the word “quality” in my job title, and it has never been my exclusive focus, I can’t name a project I have worked on in the past 44 years that didn’t have a quality dimension.

Controversial views about quality have earned me rebukes from quality professionals, who gave me reading lists. To see the error of my ways, all I had to do was study the complete works of Walter Shewhart, W. Edwards Deming, and Donald J. Wheeler. It never occurred to them that I might be familiar with these authors.

There are also other authors on quality that my contradictors ignored or dismissed, like J.M. Juran, Kaoru Ishikawa, or Douglas Montgomery. I didn’t see them as any less worthy of consideration than the ones they were adamant about.

I don’t think any of these authors intended their works to be scripture. Instead, they aimed to assist their contemporaries in addressing their quality issues with the technical and human resources available. We should do the same today. I recently heard from Sam McPherson of a piece of advice haiku author Matsuo Bashō gave to a painter in 1693: “Do not follow the footsteps of the ancients, seek what they sought instead.” This is what I have been doing.