Quality Is Personal: A Foundation for Total Quality Management

This is a splendid volume. Harry Roberts and Bernard Sergesketter have written an excellent and helpful book. The great strength of the book is that the reader gets to apply the ideas for themself, not just in an "organizational fashion." Introducing the idea of a Personal Quality Checklist, the authors discuss how to manage self-improvement in a data-based way. In the process they dispense a good amount of useful wisdom about improvement, quality and psychology. Strongly recommended. It is easy to build individual or team-based projects in courses based on the idea - and to give the students the opportunity to actually apply the tools they are learning about. And the best method of learning involves doing!

The late Harry V. Roberts and Mr. Sergesketter have written an outstanding book. Intended in part as an introduction for managers to how quality improvement programs FEEL for workers, it does much more. It is an introduction to systematic self-improvement for those looking for provable results. The approach is simple. It starts with the "Personal Quality Checklist", an idea that goes back at least as far as Benjamin Franklin. The goal is to eliminate defects and reduce cycle times on repetitive personal processes. The means is systematic record-keeping. The personal processes could be brushing one's teeth, being on-time for appointments, maintenance of an exercise program. In other cases the focus might be on defects, such as saying "like" as an interjection in speech (as in, "I was, like, soooo bored, dude.") or fidgeting in class or at a meeting. The book takes various ideas from the quality movement in industry and illustrates or suggests their application in personal processes. I am sure that the very idea of this will upset some folks. They probably aren't going to be persuaded. But, if, like me, you are skeptical of most over-blown self-help books and courses, this modest, semi-scientific approach may be just the ticket for demonstrable, lasting self-improvement. If it was good enough for Ben Franklin, ....

This is a life-changing guide to quality in simple relatable terms. I always thought Quality was an enterprise thing and it didn't relate to me, the individual. It has helped me address everything from responding to requests on time to routine exercise and weight control. A must read for anyone who believes in quality principles. Everyone talks quality but to apply it personally is to truly understand the word.