The Day I Learned What Quality Really Means

It was a regular morning—or so I thought. My job was to pick up an 84-year-old Japanese quality expert from his hotel and take him to the manufacturing plant where he was helping us implement Quality Circles. He had decades of experience in continuous improvement, and our leadership had brought him in to guide us.

That morning, however, he didn’t come down on time. Concerned, I went up to his room and found him visibly agitated. He pointed toward the mini-fridge and, with urgency, showed me a sealed glass bottle of water. Inside it, a small piece of broken glass was visible. The bottle’s seal was also partially torn.

“This is a serious safety issue,” he said. “I have already reported it to the hotel, but I need to know why this happened.”

I reassured him that I’d escalate the matter. When I approached the hotel management, their response was swift: "Sir, we sincerely apologize. We will replace the bottle immediately."

I pushed further, asking them to investigate how such a defective bottle had made its way to a guest’s room. They seemed perplexed. Instead of looking into the root cause, they offered the guest a free room upgrade as compensation.

When I informed the Japanese expert about this, he shook his head. "I don’t want an upgrade. I want to know how this happened so it never happens again."

The hotel staff, confused and unprepared for such a response, didn’t know how to proceed. Eventually, he refused to stay at the hotel any longer, insisting that if they couldn’t identify the root cause, then the place wasn’t safe. I had no choice but to shift him to another hotel.

That day, I realized something profound. In Pakistan—whether in business or daily life—when something goes wrong, our instinct is often to cover up (Mitti pao) the issue rather than fix it at its core. A mistake is seen as something to be hidden or compensated for, not as an opportunity for learning and prevention.

But in countries like Japan, the birthplace of the modern quality movement, the approach is different. They don’t just want a quick fix. They want to understand the process so that the problem never occurs again.

Lessons I Took Away That Day:

? Fixing a mistake is not the same as solving a problem. A replacement bottle or a free upgrade doesn’t prevent the next incident. Identifying and correcting the root cause does.

? Short-term solutions create long-term failures. Cover-ups might make things seem fine today, but unresolved issues will always resurface.

? True quality is in the process, not just the product. Whether it’s a water bottle, a manufacturing defect, or a service failure, looking at how something happened is far more valuable than just addressing what happened.

That experience has stayed with me throughout my career in quality management. Every time I see an organization struggling with recurring problems, I remember the old Japanese expert and his insistence on finding the truth—not just a temporary fix.

Because in the end, quality isn’t about making things right after they go wrong. It’s about making sure they don’t go wrong in the first place.

#Quality #Leadership #LessonsFromExperience #ProcessImprovement #RootCauseAnalysis