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Quality lead in numb fun

Would you outsource quality control?  Yes, if quality did not matter to you.  I recently heard of a multinational company which delegates quality control to an outsider.  Quality obviously does not matter much to them.  Wait, you say, an outsider can be more objective in measure quality.

Well, as a consultant to executives and as a consumer of their products, I know that an organization which relies on quality control is not serious about quality. Quality control happens after the fact. It is too late.

Quality assurance, however, aims to avoid quality issues in the first place.  Quality assurance is a mind-set that happens before the act, as it were.

The difference between quality control and quality assurance is that the one is like a pregnancy test (measurement) and the other is like a contraceptive (prevention). 

And outsourcing quality control?  Well, it is like washing your hands of the naughty behavior your teenagers get up to.

Which lead in leadership?

If you don’t understand the lead in your leadership, you might have to wash your hands more often than not.  So, what do the letters “L E A D” spell?  Lead as in leader or lead as in heavy?

And the answer is . . . both.  And so it is with leadership.  Sometimes it means ‘to lead’ and other times it means ‘to weigh down’; sometimes it means “let’s go!” and other times it means “slow down”.

An effective leader makes you want to do something.  It is that wanting to, that self-desire, which makes the doing so much lighter.  Yet, a really effective leader has the savvy to rein you in, to curb your irrational enthusiasm, to make you pace yourself so that you don’t flame out before time out.

You will be a much more effective leader when you decide in advance which ‘l e a d’ in leadership you should use in any given situation – lead to make lighter or lead to anchor down.

Comfortably numb again and again

On a lighter note, why does Little Johnny hit himself on the head over and over?  Because, he says, it feels so good when he stops.  That was a joke when I was young.  And that is also the opposite of systematic desensitization.

Systematic desensitization happens when you do something over and over until the ‘over and over’ overcomes the resistance you had to doing it in the first place.  For example, you fear doing something, but you force yourself to do it anyway, again and again, until the fear goes away.  Or you keep doing something you dislike until the dislike goes away.

Maybe that’s why you still have the job you used to hate.  You kept on doing it day after day until you became, wait for it, comfortably numb.

Little Johnny knows that it would feel good when he stops.  The question, however, is this.  Will he stop before he becomes desensitized, before he becomes comfortably numb?

When fun is hard work

Here is something so uncomfortable that I don’t find it at all funny.  Companies who want, no, who insist that you have fun at work.

Actually, I do find it funny.  Funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.  How can fun be fun if it is mandated!

Fun is defined as light-hearted pleasure; amusement; playfulness.  Play tends to be fun when it is spontaneous.  When fun is compulsory, then play becomes hard work.  Thus, by implication, work cannot be play.

Nor should it.  The business bottom line matters not to make someone rich, but because so many families depend on it for their livelihood.  Viewed this way, work is serious, because it has serious consequences.  When it is trivialized into formalized fun, then funny peculiar things tend to happen.  Things go wrong.

∞

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