Crosby Medal

Acceptance Speech by Bijay K. Jayaswal

Mr. President, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Allow me first of all to pay my tribute to Dr. Joseph Juran, the ultimate thinker, teacher, scholar, and a true benevolent Guru to several generations of managers in a single lifetime. I believe the best tribute that we can pay him is to work collectively and tirelessly to make this world a better place. He did that so well himself throughout his remarkable life.

Learning of the Crosby Award was both an honor and a surprise. It carries a very special meaning for me as Phil Crosby’s work, Quality is Free, introduced quality to my generation in a language that we understood.  Phil was a man of big ideas and was uniquely gifted to express them in a language that was simple and powerful at the same time. That I believe explains his enormous impact as a writer.

Phil’s legacy is colossal. Quality Management Maturity Grid is among his most celebrated contributions. This paved the way for various Capability Maturity Models including the current version, CMMI, the powerful process infrastructure for engineered products. His work on Cost of Quality again is ground-breaking and provided a framework to measure and report cost related to lack of quality and its implications on overall product cost and quality. We have devoted a whole chapter on Cost of Software Quality in our book Design for Trustworthy Software. Phil’s managerial insights showed in all his writings including his autobiography, Quality and Me. I would like to pay tribute to him by recalling a fêted excerpt from Quality is Free: “Doing things right the first time adds nothing to the cost of your product or service. Doing things wrong is what costs money.”

This award is a great honor. I should like to express my profound thanks to our publisher Prentice-Hall, in particular, Bernard Goodwin and Heather Fox for nominating us and the ASQ for bestowing this great honor on Peter and myself. We take this honor as an incentive to evangelize the value of design.

I couldn’t have done my bit in writing the book without the willing sacrifice and unconditional support of my wife, Sheila, and our two wonderful children, Avinash and Anishka. They teach me the all-important value of quality of family life everyday. They are also the source of incredible joy that is free and multiplying with time. I dedicate this award to my three musketeers.