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Steve Jobs On Customers and Quality

7/1/2013

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From the files of the Dr. Juran "An Immigrant's Gift" Archival Project, research and dissemination of information from the interviews conducted about Joseph Juran for the PBS Special, An Immigrant's Gift. This is part of an interview with Steve Jobs conducted on December 19, 1991, in Redwood City, California. I posted a shorter version of this excerpt on October 10, 2012. 

Here Jobs talks about customers' perceptions of quality and the nature of quality in products and services.

STEVE JOBS:  . . . Customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They don't form their opinions on  quality from who won the Deming A ward, or who won the Baldrige Award. (People) form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products, or the services. And so one can spend enormous amounts of money on quality. One can win every quality award there is. And yet, if your products don't live up to it, customers will not keep that opinion for long in their minds. 

And so I think where we have to start is with our products and our services. Not with our marketing department. And we need to get back to the basics and go improve our products and services. 

Now, again, quality isn't just the product or the service; it's having the right product. You know, knowing where the market's going and having the most innovative products is just as much a part of quality as the quality of the construction of the product when you have it.


And I think what we're seeing is the quality leaders of today have integrated that quality technology well beyond their manufacturing, now going well into their sales and marketing and out as far as they can to touch the customer. And trying to create super-efficient processes back from the customer all the way through to the delivery of the end products so that they can have the most innovative products, understand the
customer needs fastest. . . 


My thoughts: I read the words, "quality isn't just the product or service; it's having the right product" and am just amazed.  Jobs said this before the iPhone, before the iPad, before the iPod, before iTunes. He had a  commitment to the "right product", to "the most innovative products", and he changed the world. We work together. We work collectively. But sometimes it comes down to a strong will, a relentless drive to excel. Steve Jobs understood quality.


Image of Steve Jobs from Acaben at http://www.flickr.com/photos/35034346178@N01/541326656
Free to share under the following license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/


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