business quote

No, but it sure rings true with me.

not

Not exactly. It kinda sounds like a rehashed version of "Do you know what business you are in?" It's a common aphorism, where business owners don't know who their customers are, or what the company really offers to customers. The classic example was the railroads, where they constantly thought that they were in the "moving things by rail car" business. If it couldn't be moved by their existing rolling stock, they didn't want to deal with it. Over the last 150 years or so, the railroads have had to have everything from refrigerator cars to semi trailers literally shoved down their throats in their untiring effort to chase away paying business that didn't quite fit their "moving things by rail car" business model. Eventually, they realized that they were in the "transporting things" business, but by then it was too late.

It's also much like writing down a job description. Employees are usually asked to do that for every reason except the right one. Sometimes it's just before a layoff or to justify one's position during downsizing. However, the correct reason is so that they understand their function and purpose in the company without duplication, much like the company is suppose to know what business that they are in.

Writing down the company or employee reason for existence also has a nasty side effect. It tends to freeze the description, which hinders flexibility. Companies usually do not seek opportunities outside of their area of expertise on the assumption that their lack of experience might create some manner of unexpected problem. I worked for a company that redirected an entire division (about 75 tech employees) when opportunity knocked. I've also worked for a company that would have still been researching the opportunity long after it was gone. In the former company, had I written down the company business description, or my job description, it would have been obsolete overnight. In the latter company, it would have been bureaucratically frozen in place.

My version of the quote is: "The search for a company or job description is the surest sign of its absence".

not

It sounds wonderfully like the antidote to ISO-9000 walls of process and procedural documentation controlled documents with quality measured in cubic metres thereof. It tended to lock bad processes in place because no-one could face updating the "quality" documentation!

Japanese companies are far more likely to make tiny incremental improvements and 100 1% improvements gets you 270% overall gain.

To me it sounds more related to the ISO9000, BS5750 type mission.

"document what you do, then do it"

Either someone trying to promote it, or sarcastically distorting it to reflect real-life.

I had a spoof ISO-9000 making toast procedure designed to illustrate that having a reproducible process is not necessarily true quality:

1. Set toaster to maximum time.
2. Insert thick sliced bread in toaster and switch on.
3. When smoke and flames are emitted eject toast.
4. Scrape toast until uniform colour matching Pantone 451C
5. Throw away large pile of carbonised bread crumbs.
6. Ship toast to customer.

Actually it was BS5750 I was mocking which was the UK version which had worst all of the tedious verbose adminstrative inconvenience of ISO9000 but with none of the useful international recognition.

How much better to have a shorter procedure that says

1. Set toaster to setting 2.5
2. Insert medium sliced bread in toaster and switch on
3. Check against Pantone 451C and adjust toaster settings as needed
4. Ship toast to customer.

BS5750 had a nasty habit of locking in daft company procedures forever.

author

1. Discover major new product has catastrophic failure mode where it leaks hydraulic fluid.
2. Realise problem can be eliminated by a simple specification change to surface finish of a component.
3. Decide to hold off change for a year while the new quality system is first perfected, all the product drawings redone, all the parts retested, FEA analysis done, 3D models of all the parts made. Meanwhile shipping failure-prone product all this time. Wouldn't want to introduce an improperly controlled change would we?

Been there and done that. Actually the funniest one I ever saw was shipping half million pound 19" racked kit with front door covers that didn't fit properly due to the impact of the new "quality" system.

Surprise surprise the customers did notice this and were not happy!

When the company I was working at instituted ISO-9000 they hired some outside consultants that went into this sort of thing, as a danger to be avoided. They stressed the fact that the people responsible for the documentation needed to be the people responsible for shipping quality product -- when you put them in a side office and reward them for the amount of reinforcing required below their bookshelves, then you don't get quality.

Oddly enough, the company actually managed to institute ISO-9000 in a way that enhanced quality.

I worked for a DOD company going for their CMMI cert. We were working on a project plan for a new device and were adding hours to implement the CMMI docs and the meetings that would be required. We got a stern reprimand from the head guy saying that if it wasn't going to save us money, why would we be using it! So we had to redo the numbers without the explicit hours for CMMI. It went down a bit, but the real problem was that more than half the company had been there for less than a year and few of us knew how to do a plan at this place. I have a habit of underbidding stuff normally and this place seemed ripe for lots of wasted time. So I ended up padding my hours significantly.

In the end it was the mechanical design that drove the costs. A couple of injection molds aren't very cheap. I've never understood why cases can't be more off the shelf.