Philip Crosby Biography Philip Crosby was Born in West Virginia in 1926.

After serving in WWII and the Korean War he has worked for Crosley, Martin-Marietta and ITT where he was corporate vice president for 14 years. Philip Crosby Associates, Inc., founded in 1979, was his management consulting firm that served served hundreds of companies. Since retiring in 1991 he has founded Career IV, Inc., Philip Crosby Associates II, Inc. and the Quality College. Phil Crosby died in August, 2001, but his legacy will live on in better quality in thousands of organizations.

Four Absolutes of Quality Management

In 1979, after a career at ITT, Crosby started the management consulting company Philip Crosby Associates, Inc. This consulting group provided educational courses in quality management both at their headquarters in Winter Park, Florida, and at eight foreign locations. Also in 1979, Crosby published his first business book, Quality Is Free. This book would become popular at the time because of the crisis in North American quality. During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, North American manufacturers were losing market share to Japanese products largely due to the superior quality of the Japanese goods. His belief was that an organization that established a quality program will see savings returns that more than pay off the cost of the quality program: "quality is free". Crosby's response to the quality crisis was the principle of "doing it right the first time" (DIRFT). He would also include four major principles: 1. The definition of quality is conformance to requirements (requirements meaning both the product specifications and the customer's requirements) Every product or service has a requirement: a description of what the customer needs. When a particular product meets that requirement, it has achieved quality, provided that the requirement accurately describes what the enterprise and the customer actually need. This technical sense should not be confused with more common usages that indicate weight or goodness or precious materials or some absolute idealized standard

2. The system of quality is prevention The second principle is based on the observation that it is nearly always less troublesome, more certain and less expensive to prevent defects than to discover and correct them.

3. The performance standard is zero defects The third is based on the normative nature of requirements: if a requirement expresses what is genuinely needed, then any unit that does not meet requirements will not satisfy the need and is no good. If units that do not meet requirements actually do satisfy the need, then the requirement should be changed to reflect reality. 4. The measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance The fourth principle is the key to the methodology. Phil Crosby believes that every defect represents a cost, which is often hidden. These costs include inspection time, rework, wasted material and labor, lost revenue and the cost of customer dissatisfaction. When properly identified and accounted for, the magnitude of these costs can be made apparent, which has three advantages. First, it provides a cost-justification for steps to improve quality. The title of the book, "Quality is free," expresses the belief that improvements in quality will return savings more than equal to the costs. Second, it provides a way to measure progress, which is essential to maintaining management commitment and to rewarding employees. Third, by making the goal measurable, actions can be made concrete and decisions can be made on the basis of relative return.

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