He was doing several of these every year, 4-day sessions, and he had just lost his personal assistant, or I should say scared him off. Knuth thought that would be a wonderful thing for me to do for awhile, so I spent a little bit of time carrying his bags.
An excerpt from next week’s Business901 Podcast:
Joe Dager: In our conversation before the podcast started, you mentioned that you came from the quality area.
Tim Sanders: I did. I went to University of Arizona Graduate School. I started there in the early 80’s, and I was in the business communications area, and I settled into an internship with Hughes Aircraft, which was in Tucson. I worked in the personal development department that owned the quality circle project. Quality circles were these group meetings, multi-departmental meetings to figure out root causes of variation. There was a lecturer coming to the university that my professor Don Knuth knew really, really well – Ed Deming. Ed had just come back from Japan. He had finished a tour. He started at Ford Motors in ’81 and by this time, he was doing several of these every year, 4-day sessions, and he had just lost his personal assistant, or I should say scared him off. Knuth thought that would be a wonderful thing for me to do for awhile, so I spent a little bit of time carrying his bags.
I got to understand at the ground floor the nature of quality management by statistical process and control, just kind of started me on a journey and I ended up at Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems a few years later when they were just launching cellular phones. I helped determine quality issues for the handset manufacturers that we work with such as O’Keefe Data and then later, Nokia. 
Joe: When I read Deming, Joiner, Scholtes and those people, it makes so much sense to me in the sales and marketing space. But quality and the thinking that took place have went so much towards manufacturing. It seems that connection was lost in the 90’s in process improvement. But those guys, I read, and I get the sales and marketing aspect from them.
Tim: Well, absolutely, because quality is just rapid problem solving. The pursuit of quality is the pursuit of the elimination of variation. That was, at least, the beginning of it. For those of you listening, you know that Deming was dispatched by General MacArthur to Japan after World War II during the occupation because MacArthur was so frustrated, he couldn’t complete a phone call or do a single radio broadcast in Japan because of their variation in manufacturing.
He grabs Deming, who is a disciple of Shewhart at AT&T Bell Labs, the Shewhart Cycle, you guys remember plan-do-check-act. Deming had turned around the census bureau using this. That’s kind of the beginning, but Deming at the end of the day says quality is whatever the damn customer says it is, and it’s our job to solve our problems to solve their problems.
Joe, doesn’t that sound like sales? I mean, we have to solve a bunch of our little prospecting presentation closing problems just to get the right to solve the customer’s problem, and quality works exactly the same way. The one thing I would say that’s interesting is that the quality movement started in the heaviest, ugliest industries like manufacturing. It made its way over decades into services, into education and when I was an executive at Yahoo, as we saw Google overtake us, the quality movement hit UX, and the quality movement hit Web services, and that’s the way these things always work.
About W. Edwards Deming: Known as the father of the Japanese post-war industrial revival, Deming was an American statesman, professor, author, lecturer, and consultant and is believed to have been the leading speaker for the quality revolution in the world.
About Tim Sanders: Tim has spent most of his career on the cutting edge of innovation and change. He was on the ground floor of the quality movement, the launch of the mobile phone industry and, most notably, the birth of the world wide web. He was an early stage member of Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner’s broadcast.com, which had the largest opening day IPO in history. After Yahoo acquired the company, Tim was tapped to lead their ValueLab, which enabled sales teams to close hundreds of millions of dollars of new business through rapid collaboration. By 2001, he rose to the position of Chief Solutions Officer and later, the company’s Leadership Coach. In 2005, he founded Deeper Media, which provides consulting and training services for leading companies, trade associations and government agencies. Tim recently authored a new book, Dealstorming: The Secret Weapon That Can Solve Your Toughest Sales Challenges.
A short add-on excerpt tomorrow!