Steve Jobs on Quality: Beyond Marketing to True Customer Experience (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: It's fine. Steve Jobs is fine. President of Next Computer Incorporated. The type of people that do not use quality in their marketing are the Japanese. You never see them using quality in their marketing. It's only the American companies that do. And yet, if you ask people on the street which products have the best reputation for quality, they will tell you the Japanese products. Now, why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They don't form their opinions on quality from who won the Deming Award or who won the Baldrige Award. They 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. Having the right product, knowing where the market is 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 product so that they can have the most innovative products, understand the customer needs fastest, etc., etc. In most companies, if you're new and you ask, you know, why is it done this way? The answer is because that's the way we do it here or because that's the way it's always been done. And in my opinion, the largest contribution of much of this quality thinking is to approach these ways of doing things, these processes, scientifically, where there is a theory behind why we do them. There is a description of what we do, and most importantly, there is an opportunity to always question what we do. And this is a radically different approach to business processes than the traditional one because it's always done this way. And that single shift is everything in my opinion because in that shift is a tremendous optimistic point of view about the people that work in a company. It says these people are very smart. They're not pawns. They're very smart. And if given the opportunity to change and improve, they will. They will improve the processes if there's a mechanism for it. And that optimistic humanism I find very appealing. And I think we have countless examples that it works.