I Know It When I See It: A Modern Fable about Quality

This book was handed around my engineering team 15 years ago, and it sparked some great dialog which lead to real improvements in our work as a team. I've since left that organization, employed now at a small software company as their quality director. This time, I plan to be the one handing around the copies.

I read this book back in the 80s and it is still quite relevant today. It talks about a fictional company called Punctuation and how it lost market share to an up and coming company. The reason they lost market share was due to quality. How to reverse that trend is the nature of this story. Suffice to say many companies (and bosses) continue to fall into the same traps to regain their market share and profitablity. This is a great and quick read about what quality should be. Since it is so brief and the language is so simple, most reading audiences can easily understand the topic and moral of the story. It would be a great book to hand out to production, service, and management personnel.

John Guaspari's instructive and amusing fable about "Quality" has been a favorite in the business world since it was first published in 1985. As it points out what to do and what not to do in the pursuit of quality and market share, the book illustrates the ups and downs of Punctuation, Inc., the mythical company founded by the inventor of punctuation. This thought-provoking and entertaining little book takes only an hour or two to read, but the author intends for its message to stick with you for a lifetime. We [...] recommend this book to executives, managers, customer-service employees and those who run their own businesses.

This is a realy good, short and entertaining introduction to quality management. It takes 20 minutes to read, but capures 20years of experience

A great book that educates on many of the misadventures of quality-enhancement efforts. Fun to read.