Phil Crosby | |
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Born | Philip Bayard Crosby June 18, 1926 Wheeling, West Virginia, USA |
Died | August 18, 2001 Winter Park, Florida, USA |
(aged 75)
Occupation | Quality Guru |
Spouse | Peggy |
Philip Bayard "Phil" Crosby, (Wheeling, June 18, 1926 - Winter Park, August 18, 2001) was a businessman and author who contributed to management theory and quality management practices.[1]
Crosby initiated the Zero Defects program at the Martin Company Orlando, Florida, plant.[2] As the quality control manager of the Pershing missile program, Crosby was credited with a 25 percent reduction in the overall rejection rate and a 30 percent reduction in scrap costs.
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In 1979, after a career at ITT, Crosby started the management consulting company Philip Crosby Associates, Inc.[3] This consulting group provided educational courses in quality management both at their headquarters in Winter Park, Florida, and at eight foreign locations. Also in 1979, Crosby published his first business book, Quality Is Free. This book would become popular at the time because of the crisis in North American quality. During the late 1970s and into the 1980s, North American manufacturers were losing market share to Japanese products largely due to the superior quality of the Japanese goods.
Crosby's response to the quality crisis was the principle of "doing it right the first time" (DIRFT). He would also include four major principles:
His belief was that an organization that established a quality program will see savings returns that more than pay off the cost of the quality program: "quality is free".