Customer Reviews

I Know It When I See It: A Modern Fable About Quality

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John Guaspari's instructive and amusing fable about "Quality" has been a favorite in the business world since it was first published in 1985. As it points out what to do and what not to do in the pursuit of quality and market share, the book illustrates the ups and downs of Punctuation, Inc., the mythical company founded by the inventor of punctuation. This thought-provoking and entertaining little book takes only an hour or two to read, but the author intends for its message to stick with you for a lifetime. We [...] recommend this book to executives, managers, customer-service employees and those who run their own businesses.

A great book that educates on many of the misadventures of quality-enhancement efforts. Fun to read.

I read this book back in the 80s and it is still quite relevant today. It talks about a fictional company called Punctuation and how it lost market share to an up and coming company. The reason they lost market share was due to quality. How to reverse that trend is the nature of this story. Suffice to say many companies (and bosses) continue to fall into the same traps to regain their market share and profitablity.
This is a great and quick read about what quality should be. Since it is so brief and the language is so simple, most reading audiences can easily understand the topic and moral of the story. It would be a great book to hand out to production, service, and management personnel.

This is a realy good, short and entertaining introduction to quality management. It takes 20 minutes to read, but capures 20years of experience

Length:: 0:49 Mins

This book is another in the series of books that is designed to teach a lesson in business management through the use of a fable. In this case, the focus is on the quality of their product. Punctuation Inc. is a company that makes punctuation symbols and for many years they have been the industry leader with a dominant market share. Up until now, there have been rivals, but all have failed and are no longer in contention.
However, a persistent upstart called Process Inc. has managed to pull market share from Punctuation for several consecutive quarters. In order to get a handle on the problem, Boss goes to a store and carries out a discussion with a shopper about why she is purchasing Process Inc. products rather than those of Punctuation Inc. She says that it is due to higher quality, and when asked precisely what she means, her response is, "I don't know, but I know it when I see it."
Back at Punctuation, Boss is puzzled and his first try to recapture market share is to get on the intercom and tell the employees, "Try Harder! Do Better!" This fails miserably as the employees resent the implication that they have not been trying. The next step is to hire a large number of inspectors to catch defects. As a sensible person would expect, this does not work as well as the manufacturing employees resent someone looking over their shoulder. After additional failures, the Boss finally realizes that is the customers that determine what quality is and whether Punctuation is delivering it. This revelation leads to a company turnaround and the book closes with Punctuation having a celebratory party over their newfound success.
While the message is certainly appropriate, the parable here is weak. To be effective as a lesson, the parable must have a bit of reality attached to it and in this case, there is little to none. If the product would have been something where the customers could point to specific defects and the company developed specific solutions to fix them the story would have had more power.

This book was handed around my engineering team 15 years ago, and it sparked some great dialog which lead to real improvements in our work as a team. I've since left that organization, employed now at a small software company as their quality director. This time, I plan to be the one handing around the copies.