Management and Leadership
What to master
Management and leadership items test whether you can tie quality to strategy, money, and people. Know the philosophies well enough to attribute them correctly: Deming (14 Points, System of Profound Knowledge, PDCA, drive out fear), Juran (quality trilogy - planning, control, improvement; Pareto principle), Crosby (zero defects, quality is free, cost of nonconformance), Feigenbaum (total quality control; quality is everyone's job), Ishikawa (fishbone diagram, company-wide quality control).
Cost of quality appears constantly. Four buckets: prevention, appraisal, internal failure (scrap, rework, sorting, re-inspection, downtime), external failure (warranty, returns, recalls, complaint handling, lost goodwill). The reliable trap is classification: catching a bad lot by 100% sorting before shipment is internal failure, while a field return is external. Prevention plus appraisal make up the cost of good quality; the two failure categories are the cost of poor quality.
Teams and motivation also appear: Tuckman stages (forming, storming, norming, performing, adjourning), Maslow needs hierarchy, Herzberg hygiene factors versus motivators, McGregor Theory X and Y, and the distinction between a quality council (strategic, cross-functional, sets direction) and a quality circle (voluntary, workgroup level).
Worked example. A plant with $20M in sales reports prevention $200k, appraisal $300k, internal failure $400k, external failure $100k. Total COQ = $1.0M, or 5% of sales. Cost of poor quality = $500k, half the total. Rule of thumb: the 1-10-100 rule - $1 to prevent, $10 to correct internally, $100 if the defect escapes.