Why Quality and Pride are Absent - a Rant

What is Quality?

I think we may have lost touch with Quality, as a society, as a nation, as a culture, as a system.

Quality has been hijacked by Business Schools and by Management Gurus. It has become product, process and a discipline in which to earn one’s living.

And yet it is not about trendy management tools or production systems such a Total Quality Management or Six Sigma. In this sense, the particular cannot be generalised. Quality is not to be found in a manual.

It is about Pride.

Personal Pride.

Tradesmen and women had pride in the work that they owned. A process of industrialisation driven by a form of meanness known as value extraction divorced them from their work and delivered finished artefacts that they knew to be of poor quality. The workforce was disciplined into accepting this.

Collective Pride.

Pride in a purpose, which is shared.

The Germans belief in a “Volk” within which a Capitalist or commercial model can exist has been shown to be susceptible to hijack by fanatics, but what do we as a society believe in? Where is the glue? The shared goal? The reason to have pride in what we do?

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These things we appear to lack.

The way to repair this is not to deliver beautifully-crafted rhetoric and Public Relations, both of which are recognised by those who hear them as bogus means to an end, delivered by men and women without conviction.

The way to repair it is through a truly inclusive society. True belief in a shared future that we are all part of and the passionate exhortation of leaders that genuinely believe in this.

There is no more mileage in the selfish, divisive model we currently live within of ‘winner-takes-all’ capitalism that has exposed human weakness by dismissing the “I’m alright Jack” of the post-war triumphant working class and stealing his clothes.

We need to able to trust one another. Who, in Britain, believes that this country belongs to all of us? Neither the wealthy, nor the poor. We are all scarred by the broken promise of 1945. This country fought for its survival against an external aggressor capable of crushing it for the first time in perhaps a thousand years. Everyone pitched into the fight. Everyone was promised a share of the future. Clearly, the words were spoken with fingers firmly crossed. How do we rebuild that trust? By creating a country where every citizen has an equal share in the future. The big picture decisions - the framework that sets out what it means to live in Britain should be steered back from the overtly competitive towards the overtly communal and cooperative. Mutuality and the long-term should be rehabilitated.

How do we restore individual pride in what we produce? By encouraging the growth of cooperatives where people produce things that they can protect the quality of, where less of the heat goes up the chimney in profit and personal wealth, competing in a market for quality goods rather than cheap ones. Economies of scale produce bigger profits and greater individual wealth; large-scale production requires competition in high-volume, cheap goods markets. Ultimately these require low labour costs – low paid, unskilled work, often lost to low-wage economies.

Quality and pride can become stronger in a society whose citizens are genuine stakeholders in the nation and in the production of goods and wealth.

Does this sound like the Britain that you know?