When cleaning, is it quality or quantity that counts?

Dr. Bill Bellows, a member of our council, writing in the Lean Management Journal said: “The word ‘quality’ has Latin roots, beginning as ‘qualitas,’ coined by Roman philosopher and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero … Cicero spoke of qualitas with his peers when focusing on the property of an object, rather than its quantitas or quantity.”

He continues: “Two-thousand years later, when writing The New Economics, Deming wrote, ‘The basic problem anywhere is quality. What is quality? A product or a service possesses quality if it helps somebody and enjoys a good and sustainable market.’”

“Deming saw quality as a property [associated with a craft and how this craft connects with other crafts]. Long after Cicero and well before Deming, quality as a property was the responsibility of a broad network of guilds, associations of artisans who controlled the practice of their craft in a given region, each with their own revered trademark, ever mindful of their artisan peers.”

He adds: “What makes a great guitarist is not only how well he/she is trained to play the guitar, but the mindfulness of how a guitarist fits into a collection of musicians and the greater system in which they perform, including customers and suppliers. That is, quality per Dr. Deming is not looking at anything in isolation, but how it fits into the system of which it is a part.”

The Indoor Health Council believes the cleaning craft should focus on protecting health in a qualitative not quantitative approach to maintaining indoor spaces.

We welcome input on this post.