Seth’s Blog: Quality, scale and the regular kind

I’ve been reading this post over on Seth’s Blog: Quality, scale and the regular kind.

When we talk about quality, it’s easy to get confused.

That’s because there are two kinds of quality being discussed. The most common way it’s talked about in business is “meeting specifications.” An item has quality if it’s built the way it was designed to be built.

There’s another sort of quality, though. This is the quality of, “is it worth doing?”. The quality of specialness and humanity, of passion and remarkability.

Hence the conflict. The first sort of quality is easy to mandate, reasonably easy to scale and it fits into a spreadsheet very nicely. I wonder if we’re getting past that.

To me the Quality of something depends on the criteria being applied to it. From the neutral point of view, the Quality of something is simply the inseparable sum of its essential attributes or properties and the Quality of something does not determine its value (the philosophical value as well as economic value).

Subjectively, something might be good because it is useful, because it is beautiful, or simply because it exists. Determining or finding Quality therefore involves an understanding of use, beauty and existence – what is useful, what is beautiful and what exists. The usefulness aspect is reflected in the common usage of quality. In common vernacular use, quality can mean:

• a high degree of excellence (“a quality product”),
• a degree of excellence or the lack of it (“work of average quality”),
• or a property of something (“the addictive quality of alcohol”).

Robert M. Pirsig, in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, studies the Metaphysics of Quality, and examines the distinctions and relationship between classical and romantic Quality, seeking to reconcile the two views and understand how they stand in relationship to each other.

In this context the two aspects of classical object-oriented and romantic subject-oriented Quality roughly parallel aesthetic Quality and functional Quality. The resolution of the book points to a view of Quality which relegates this subject-object dualism to a product of a non-dualistic Absolute.

Related articles

• BOOK REVIEW: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (psychedelichippiemusic.blogspot.com)
• Npr’s Top 100 (marksarvas.blogs.com)
• Books of The Times: Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche, They Ride Hogs Over It (nytimes.com)

 Enjoy this post? Be sure to subscribe!

Comments

By shaun sayers on July 25th, 2009 at 4:50 pm

I recently read Seth Godin's book "The Dip". He really does have a way of summarising the emotions and dynamics of business in an accessible way. The Dip only has about 70 small pages, but you could argue that a single point made strongly and succinctly is more effective than lots of points strung and to end in a more comprehensive text that leaves you wondering what you're supposed to think

I work in quality, as you know, but unlike a lot of my peers I am not an engineer by background. Consequently I have little interest in those quality things that seem to obsess engineers. That's not to say that I don't think that engineers don't play an important role, just that they come into their own, in my opinion, in the middle part of the process. They make things possible and they make things happen. As a rule I'm happier if they are kept well clear of customer facing parts of the process (front end and tail end) as they tend to yearn for predictability, a predictability that the customer is not always willing to provide. Strategy, sales, marketing and customer relationship management are as critical to business success as conformity and durability, but they rely in no small measure on the mastery of psychology

Anyway. In the post you linked to Seth Godin says there are two kinds of quality and my point, I think, is that I fully agree with him