Philip B. Crosby

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  Philip Bayard "Phil" Crosby, (June 18, 1926 – August 18, 2001) was a businessman and author who contributed to management, theory and advocated quality in many different ways.  Crosby initiated the Zero Defects program at the Martin Company. As the quality control manager of the Pershing missile program, Crosby was credited with a 25 percent reduction in the overall rejection rate and a 30 percent reduction in scrap costs.

  Crosby was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1926. He served in the Navy during World War II and again during the Korean War.   In between the two wars he earned a degree from the Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine.

  His first job in the field of quality was as a test technician in the quality department at the Crosley Corporation.  Eventually Mr. Crosby left and accepted a position as a reliability engineer at the Bendix Corporation in Mishawaka, Indiana. In about 1957 Mr. Crosby would leave this position after two years to become senior quality engineer at The Martin Company.  Here he helped develop the pershing missile. It was here that Mr. Crosby began developing what would become known as the Zero Defects concept.  He eventually rose to become a department head before leaving for the ITT Corporation in 1965 where he would become the director of quality.

  In 1979, Crosby started the management consulting company Philip Crosby Associates, Inc. This consulting group provided educational courses in quality management both at their headquarters in Winter Park, Florida, and at eight foreign locations.  It was in this same year that Mr. Crosby would  publish his first business book, Quality Is Free. This book would become popular at the time because of the crisis in North American quality. During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, North American manufacturers were losing market share to Japanese products largely due to the superior quality of the Japanese goods.  Crosby's response to the quality crisis was the principle of "doing it right the first time" (DIRFT).  He also included four major principles:

1. The definition of quality is conformance to requirements (requirements meaning both the product and the customer's requirements)
2. The system of quality is prevention
3. The performance standard is zero defects (relative to requirements)
4. The measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance

  His belief was that an organization that establishes good quality management principles will see savings returns that more than pay for the cost of the quality system: "quality is free". It is less expensive to do it right the first time than to pay for rework and repairs.

Reference: Wikipedia - Philip B. Crosby.

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Books by Mr. Crosby

1. Quality is Free
2. The Art of Getting your Own Sweet Way
3. Quality Without Tears