Crosby Medal

Acceptance Speech by Peter C. Patton
(Read by Anishka Jayaswal)

Mr. President, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,

It’s my great honor to read this acceptance speech on behalf of Dr. Peter Patton who is not only my Dad’s co-author for this book but also a really great friend for our family.

Here it goes:

“I would like to thank the ASQ for the Philip Crosby Medal award by telling you how I learned the importance of quality in engineering school and how I teach it as a professor of engineering today.

I took a course on rotating machinery from a 72 year-old professor emeritus of Electrical Engineering in 1955 when I was 20. I once referred to him as “Doctor” to his secretary but she corrected me by telling me that he had no doctorate, no college degree, and had not attended high school. I asked how he could be a professor at Harvard with no formal education. She replied that as a 13 year-old lad his father had apprenticed him to Mr. Edison.

There were only two ways out of his course, you could either drop it or come out the other end with an A grade. We had to draw winding diagrams for motors and dynamos in nine colors of India ink and a single smudge was an F. A teacup-ring on a lab report also resulted in an F. He would return our homework and lab reports to be done again and again until they were perfect and received his A grade.

I didn’t realize what this engineering professor was trying to teach me until I was working myself as an engineer at Midwest Research Institute in 1959. I was certifying a computer program I had written which reduced to code the design of pre-stressed precast double T and I concrete beams for the new Interstate highway system bridges.  The program produced a set of tables which told the workers how much to tension how many Roebling cables and where, how many, and how deep the detents needed to be in order to give the beam the correct camber when it sprang out of the mold two days later. In certifying that program I realized what that old teacher, the same age I now am, incidentally, was trying to teach me. The world doesn’t need any A- bridges, or B+ aircraft structures, or C+ elevators. He taught me that everything I designed must be the best I could possibly make it.

Most technical expertise is reduced to rules of thumb; expert systems I have worked on have had as many as 4000 such rules but at any given time the human practitioner may remember only the psychologist’s rule of thumb of seven plus or minus three of them. Of course, these rules are all invoked associatively as needed by the skilled engineering designer or craftsman and occur in every trade or profession. The carpenter needs to “measure twice and cut once,” but the plumber needs to know that “hot is on the left and waste water runs downhill.” Even cowboys have a rule of thumb, “always drink upstream from the herd.”

For too much of the development of modern technology we have coasted on this rule: “there is never enough time to do it correctly the first time, but there is always time to do it over.” This “build and fix rule” sufficed for the early days of automobile development, but no automobile manufacturer could get by with it nowadays. Unfortunately it is the modus operandi of much of the software industry today, and explains much of the delay, expense, frustration, and inaccuracy as the fallout of hastily built systems. I try to teach my students that they must always take time as Philip Crosby taught, to do the job right the first time.

Thank you again for this great honor.”