Don't Sacrifice Quality for Short-term Profit Goals

Books on productivity would tell you that management's decision to pursue short-term profit goals by curbing quality would result is various kinds of losses, including, rework, defects, loss of customer goodwill, etc.

Well i tasted this thing on the first day of a small start-up - namely a juice cafe - in college. I brought a labor guy with me, trusting his experience working in homes as chef, etc. He after seeing how costly our drink was, as it used 4-6 different kinds of fruits and/or fruit juices (packaged/unpackaged) concluded on day # 1 that this business won't make a nickel. Hence, he started to use some water in it to dilute it, to reduce costs. This juice was never meant to use water. Nonetheless, i made a big mistake and let him do that, thinking what difference can this little amount of water can make.

During the day & afterward, the most crucial negative customer feedback we got was that there was too much water in it - perhaps he mistook water for fruits & juices! Some asking to add something else apart from water.

How disastrous! From next day onwards we didn't add single droplet of water apart from what was coming through fruit juice; except in 1 juice which has to have water in it.

I forgot a fundamental business lesson: all investments are not covered on day 1! Moreover, you saw how low commitment to quality resulted in loss of goodwill & defects. Its important to note that the excess of water is "critical-to-quality" (CTQ) in juices for customers. It wasn't something customer didn't care about.

Intellectual Dishonesty

Assignments which are data-holic, by that i mean which require number crunching on an independent institution, in which we've not worked as students, can be challenging. In Pakistan, although ERP systems are rampant in use, small organizations may not be eccentric about recording data, and even those which do, are not often willing to share. Apart from all this, i've this tendency these days to make up data. Its worst thing to do.

First, because you're not fooling anyone but yourself. Over years, the habit may persist, and in real world wrong information mean loss of competitive advantage and loss. Second, its certainly a short-cut of which we as nation are fond of. Third, lack of rigor won't do any good to personal development, as Iqbal once remarked that philosophy not written with hardship and khoon-e-jigar (blood of liver, literal meaning :D) would always remain imperfect and wide off mark.