of Zero Defects in a Quality Management Maturity Grid, in a 14-step quality improvement program, and in the concept of the "Absolutes of Quality Management". The quality improvement program incorporated ideas developed or popularized by others (for example, cost of quality (step 4), employee education (step 8), and quality councils (step 13)) with the core motivation techniques of booklets, films, posters, speeches, and the "ZD Day" centerpiece. Absolutes of Quality Management According to Crosby, there are four Absolutes: 1. "The definition of quality is conformance to requirements" Newcomers to manufacturing bring their own vague impressions of what quality involves. But in order to tackle quality-related problems, there must be widespread agreement on the specifics of what quality means for a particular product. Customer needs and expectations must be reduced to measurable quantities like length, or smoothness, or roundness and a standard must be specified for each. These become the requirements for a product and the organization must inspect, or measure what comes out of the production process against those standards to determine whether the product conforms to those requirements or not. An important implication of this is that if management does not specify these requirements workers invent their own which may not align with what management would have intended had they provided explicit requirements to begin with. 0 2. "The system of quality is prevention" Companies typically focus on inspection to ensure that defective product doesn't reach the customer. But this is both costly and still lets nonconformances through. Prevention, in the form of "pledging ourselves to make a constant conscious effort to do our jobs right the first time", is the only way to guarantee zero defects. Beyond that, examining the production process for steps where defects can occur and mistake proofing them contributes to defect-free production. 3. "The performance standard is Zero Defects" Workers, at least during the post–World War II economic expansion, had a lackadaisical attitude on the whole toward work. Crosby saw statistical quality control and the MIL-Q-9858 standard as contributing to this through acceptable quality levels—a concept that allows a certain number of acceptable defects and reinforces the attitude that mistakes are inevitable. Another contributor is the self-imposed pressure to produce something to sell, even if that thing is defective. Workers must "make the attitude of Zero Defects [their] personal standard." 4. "The measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance" To convince executives to