Letter to your CEO on Quality

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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
 

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  • Dear CEO by Craig Cochran (Quality Digest July2006).doc
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Gert Sorensen

I wish that I could have put the importance of QMS so beautifully in to words. A true delight to read it :agree1:
 

harry

Trusted Information Resource
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!
 
Craig, you have done it again: Great writing, just as we have come to expect from you :applause:

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 :agree:

/Claes
 

Jim Wynne

Leader
Admin
ccochran said:
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
 
A

Atul Khandekar

What CEOs Hear

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..."
 

Steve Prevette

Deming Disciple
Leader
Super Moderator
A good lament, but unlikely to have any effect on a CEO out there. CEO's and managers are people too. It is possible to poke and prod the system (and the CEO) all be it a slow process. A key though is to indeed learn to speak the CEO's language. I generally dislike six sigma, but one of the lessons from them is to quantify quality issues as dollar costs. Even the direct costs of a quality issue can be surprisingly high.

I recently attended the ASSE (American Society of Safety Engineers) and was surprised to see several topics on learning to speak management, talking dollar costs for safety problems. The opening speaker was especially amazing - Stan Slap (http://www.asse.org/annualpdc_06_mainb.htm and http://www.slapworld.com/about_slap/slap_the_guy.html). He had some great comments about leadership, and a killer song parody "I want my Strategy" (sung to "I want my MTV"). If I could ever get my hands on that file I would love it.
 
P

pldey42

Sorry Craig, I agree with some of the others, who said it's too long.

Mark Twain wrote once, to a friend, "Sorry, I didn't have time to write you a short letter -- so here's a long one instead." It's hard to write short pieces, but the benefit is focus.

I don't agree with those who said CEO's have small attention spans. It's a mistake, methinks, to think this way (because they'll sense one's lack of respect) and the good ones know that by writing something short you concentrate your own attention, and focus. So, first, I'd say it must be short, a page or at most two.

Next, I'd delete the thanks for the party. It sounds obsequious and made me feel, "Yeah, yeah, get to the point." If the party really was that good, and the joke that funny, I'd send him a letter on just that point immediately after the party. He would more likely feel then that your thanks were genuine.

It's not clear to me whether this is a CEO who has bought into ISO 9001, or one that's said "Get me the certificate". Either way, in the introductory paragraph I'd remind him of the context and his involvement so far. If he has not been involved at all, I'd write quite a different letter ... or rather, I'd go visit: you can't build initial commitment in a letter, methinks.

To structure a letter in order to appeal to a CEO I'd try to answer these questions, from his perspective:

What do I want from him? (They often say, "Yes -- but what do you want me to _do_?)
What will be the benefit to the business of so doing?
What will it cost?
Whom else is doing it?

(The letter might not be written so baldly, but these key points would sing out.)

This last question is key, and rarely asked (although Six Sigma programs appear to understand it). CEOs are risk-averse and you can give them all the data and rationale in the world you like -- but if they're the first, or if nobody they know is doing something similarly, and successfully, they'll just hate to be first. Those that are first, the Bransons and Chamers of the world, don't need letters, they're already in your face asking where their management system is.

Just my 2c,
Patrick
 
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