Letter to your CEO on Quality

[ccochran]

Hello, all:

Have you ever wished you could send your CEO a letter to give him a wake-up call on quality and customer focus? Well, I certainly have. Too bad I waited until now to write it. When you get a moment, check out the attached article entitled "Dear Boss." I would love to hear your feedback on it: what worked, what didn't, what I forgot to include, etc.

Talk to you soon,
Craig

[Howard Atkins]

Thank you again,
As ever succinct, humorous and effective.
I need some time to digest

[Gert Sorensen]

I wish that I could have put the importance of QMS so beautifully in to words. A true delight to read it

[harry]

Hi Craig,

If quality personnels can have a fraction of your ability to articulate their ideas, then we would not have that much negative comments about QMS or complaints about 'top management' not giving support or showing commitment.

Having said that, one needs more than just just technical knowledge to be able to look at things from anothers point of view, speak his language and then recruit him to be on your side.

Well done!

[Claes Gefvenberg]

Craig, you have done it again: Great writing, just as we have come to expect from you

There is one crucial headline near the end of the document, of course: Boss, are you listening? I do hope that the target group will read it and act accordingly, but I see an obvious risk that it may pass them by:

During the years I have noted a marked reluctance to read documents of anything more than one or two pages, preferrably containing a bit of condensed information in bullet points and a bunch of flashy graphs. This phenomenon seems to increase as a person climbs higher up the organization ziggurat. Nothing strange about that, just a natural result of the fact that more people are competing for the attention of the climber...

Still, once more: Great piece of writing

/Claes

[Martijn]

no useful feedback from me either, just

[Jim Wynne]

Originally Posted by ccochran

Hello, all:

Have you ever wished you could send your CEO a letter to give him a wake-up call on quality and customer focus? Well, I certainly have. Too bad I waited until now to write it. When you get a moment, check out the attached article entitled "Dear Boss." I would love to hear your feedback on it: what worked, what didn't, what I forgot to include, etc.

Talk to you soon,
Craig

I like it, but because CEOs have notoriously short attention spans (some say due to the fact that they're very busy, but I think it's more like a cranial capacity issue) your piece would make their eyes glaze over somewhere in the middle of the second paragraph, and someone from Finance would have to come in and resuscitate them.

Here's a short version:

Dear CEO:

We're dying down here. Please stop counting the *$%!& money for a minute and get off your fat arse and help us.

Regards,

The Little People

[Atul Khandekar]

From the cover page cartoon: Quality Progress (May 2006)

What Quality Profesionals say: "So, when you look at the x-bar chart, you can see the bottom line shows the lower control limit and the top line..."

What CEOs Hear: "blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, BOTTOM LINE, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah..."