Approximately 80 people met at the Sweetwater Brewery for our monthly meeting. Those attending had the opportunity to sample the product and to take a tour of the facilities. During this meeting we also voted to elect the slate of officers that had been identified last month.

Typically, this will be the last newsletter for my term in office and the next newsletter article will be provided by the new Chair. I wanted to make sure that our members understand that it is the volunteers that make my job easy. Everything works because there are people behind the scenes making it work. We always need new volunteers to fill spots that may need additional help and for those opportunities that are vacated by members moving to a new position.

So, my sincere appreciation to all of you who have given their time to make our section the best it can be.

A few years ago Phil Crosby was a guest speaker at our meeting and I thought I would take just a moment to remind us of some of the things that Phil has written as a guide to “Quality and Me”.

“During the American Society for Quality’s recent Annual (1999) Quality Congress, I had the opportunity to speak with many quality professionals who came to visit our booth. The problem I heard most about was their relationships with management, or more accurately, the lack of relationships. Many of them bought my autobiography Quality And Me: Lessons From An Evolving Life to learn how I have dealt with long-standing conflict between managers and employees.

In short, the real problem lies with quality professionals, not with management. It isn’t that managers don’t care about quality; they really do. Managers just don’t understand quality and don’t know how to go about getting it to be an advantage instead of a problem. Their primary job is to create a reliable organization, and quality lies at the heart of that task. Unfortunately, quality professionals haven’t done a good job communicating to management the importance of quality to the organization.

(An excerpt of the reasons)

1. Quality professionals don’t know the language of management.
2. Professionals don’t know the language of quality.
3. Quality professionals have a low self-image.
4. Quality professionals don’t learn well from the nontechnical experience of others.
5. Quality professionals think quality is a technical and procedural entity.

The solution to the problems of the quality professionals doesn’t require a meltdown and reconfiguration of management or a new set of procedures: it lies in their own hands.” (http://www.qualitydigest.com/july99/html/body_crosby.html)

Thank you for your participation in the ASQ-Atlanta Section. And I look forward to seeing you at our future meetings.

Jay
Section Chair