This notion might be pushed even further by suggesting that it is in the interest of
manufacturers to attend to all the interesting quality requirements of their product, in order
to deprive their customers of the interesting discovery that they are not to specification.
Customers will have enough problems controlling their own quality and will feel
completely disinclined to add to their burden by accepting yours. Customers are people, and
after all, in our mechanistic scheme of things people are generally perceived to be nuisances;
this is a legacy of our rationalist and scientific culture. It is the motivation behind the
millennial dream of the ‘workerless factory’ from which people have been exiled by
automation. Trouble is, though, that the achieving and sustaining of high process and
product quality is the direct result of the application of creativity, imagination, analysis,
synthesis, willpower – people things. This is where quality leadership has its roots, in the
vision of quality which is the essential precursor of its attainment.