How Quality Dies

The other day I suggested that quality could be restored in our culture by better use of processes and resources; let me clarify that point further here, by specifying who are the resources that create and guide the processes. Quality is not merely about processes and money and technical resources; it’s inevitably about people. A far better writer than I made this point many years ago in one of the philosophical classics of the 20th century, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If there is no quality in the person, there will be none in the product.

Today, I spent another morning on job boards and postings, email, and on the telephone with recruiters, headhunters, and IT body shops. The routine involved is distressingly shallow and repetitive: the body shop gets my submission; there is an exchange of emails involving questions of location, citizenship, pay rate, and experience; then comes the call. Most often, it is an Indian voice — based on my experience with such folks, I bet that he can probably write better than many Americans; but his voice stiffens and stumbles over the strange intonations and inflections of English speech in a familiar way — like a drunkard walking past the police station on his way home, he adopts a rigid posture that only makes him more ridiculous, more faltering.

Part of the problem is that he is clearly reading from a script, filling out a form. He is in obvious dread of leaving a single line of his form incomplete, so he takes a forceful tone. He asks questions that would require a long discussion to adequately explore, and cuts me off after less than a minute. He is intolerant of the mildest ambiguity; he can’t understand that experience does not occur in a pigeonhole box, and that a man can fill half a dozen different roles within the same time frame. In short, the fear and confusion driving him fill the air between us; I read them as clearly as I do the words before me now.

He has been made a cipher, a functionary rather than an independent professional. This is the first knife-thrust into the body of quality, and it is inevitably fatal. He asks if I have four or more years’ experience with media conglomerates; I smile and remind him that if I had, would it not be on my resume? Then I try to teach him how to penetrate the obduracy of his clients: native talent and task-experience — the work-specific background rather than any institutional history — are far more important than prior affiliation. If, as they often claim, corporations desire “think-out-of-the-box” types, then they will readily perceive and accept this truth. Then I conclude for him: I cannot be what I am not; I cannot fulfill a false ideal: if your client would like to directly discuss their concerns with me, I am never far from the phone.

This usually concludes the interview: the poor fellow is too afraid to go on. He has been rigidly trained to suppress every free thought that may arise within him. He has been taught to fear himself. The body of Quality is now bleeding profusely; her life is fading in the cellular air. I wish the fellow well and say good-bye, knowing that I will never hear from him again.

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One of the grave errors made by New Agers, Libertarians, and revolutionaries alike is that there is an intrinsic enmity between the individual and the institution. Sometimes, this is indeed how the relationship does develop, but not through a natural discord or some innate incompatibility between them. It only arises when the institution claims and is allowed primacy, rulership, autocracy. This is what kills Quality, because it oppresses, even obliterates, the individual. When the fear of the institution tells us that we cannot think, feel, and act for ourselves; that we cannot lead the organization with our own personal light — then the very oxygen of Quality has been shut off. This is what creates poisoned and defective products; this is what makes the organization stagnate and decline; this is what leads to mass product recalls; this is what makes companies, nations, and economies collapse.

Could we ever reach a point where a CEO, a Chamber of Commerce, or a politician might recognize this truth, and attempt to create a work environment in which the individual has primacy, where people lead and the company follows? I admit it would seem a foolish, indeed a laughably idiotic hope to entertain of the corporate. A corporation is like a religion in that way: it acknowledges one God, one Way, one exclusive and proprietary path to Salvation. The search for both God and Success have become the filling out of forms. In both, the central question is not: “what will lead me forward, back to my self — how can I lead my organization?;” but “what will keep me exactly where I am — what will keep my fear at bay?” Both leaders and servants of the corporate share the same driving, defining fear: they stand rigidly, mulishly in the same place, hoping that the monolith of shadows that they serve will protect them, hold them exactly where they are, shield them from the terror that smokes beneath their veil of pretense. Even as they do, however, the ground they so desperately hold crumbles beneath them.

Despite all that, we must still reflect reality to them, in the hope that some, or even one of them, will recognize it in time to understand that superficial change does not create Quality — you cannot rebrand the company, make new forms, or reload the corner offices and expect healing, recovery, or transformation. As Mr. Pirsig said in his classic book: “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”