I recently listened and watched a panel of automotive quality experts put together by Quality Magazine. QUALity is not dead by any means. I also follow all the automotive recalls and am frustrated to see basic heat treating issues, assembly issues, and, now, software issues as causes.
I have no QUALms talking about QUALity, even if it is no longer the talk of business much. What is? Artificial intelligence, AI, of course. And that is something that needs a serious QUALity check before taking its output. A group of us were recently discussing how the output changes each time you run a query and how hard it is to test (a stochastic process). It’s worse than testing software that, for the most part, gives the same output for the same input (a deterministic process). But, more and more, AI is being either embedded in car operations on the road or accessed remotely in the cloud. A delivery truck recently found its way into the middle of a lake because it was routed (by software and AI) along the wrong way. https://www.walb.com/video/2026/02/17/amazon-deliver-van-stuck-after-following-gps/
QUALity is still to be found in every company. One process of importance to every company is Business Development, encompassing Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service. An important aspect of marketing is to deliver QUALified leads to sales so that they can quickly close business. Sales people don’t want to waste time on people not interested, not willing, lacking the money, or not having the authority.
You can measure the QUALity of the QUALified lead and how quickly the lead can convert to cash. Some of it will be quantitative, and some will be QUALitative. In the area of business growth and transformational change, marketing needs to assess the desire of the leaders to make changes in the business. That will be a QUALitative measure. On the Customer Service end of Business Development, companies often measure the likelihood of reordering, the willingness to recommend to others, the satisfaction measured by Net Promoter Score. These are somewhere between quantitative and QUALitative measures on a scale.
Some of the podcasts talk about how to hire the right people. Some say you need specific skills, while others say they hire for cultural fit and then teach the necessary skills. The latter can work for people starting at the ground level in a franchise with a great training system. It won’t work if trying to hire the coach of a winning sports team or an expert in finance and tax. These people need access to a set of QUALifiers. It’s similar to Marketing needing a list of QUALifier questions to determine if the lead is QUALified.
QUALity should be a measure in all parts of business. Part of the culture of a company should include this QUALia philosophy. Often, the process of investing a QUALia or QUALitative item, such as the color of the paint on a car or the its smoothness, leads to better understanding of the process and the choke points.
In your business, consider what a re-emphasis on QUALity can provide for your brand promise, core values, mission, vision, score card, accountability, financial results, and more.
ONLY READ ON YOU ARE A BIT NERDY
In case you are wondering, my process involves listening, reading, and watching many things. It gives me a glimpse of a better way, allows me to see the complexity and simplify it, so that we can clarify what needs to happen next, by whom, by when. Yes, I did use the free version of GEMINI to give me some additional thoughts. Below is my prompt, the answer, and an additional list of thoughts it gave me before creating this blog, article, and podcast.
Cross Functional teamwork often needed to improve quality.
https://onlinexperiences.com/scripts/Server.nxp
Quality Leaders Forum: How Automotive Leaders Are Redefining Quality
Prompt: give me a list of wards that begin with “qual”
Whether you’re looking for words to win a game of Scrabble or just trying to expand your vocabulary, the “qual” prefix—mostly derived from the Latin qualis (of what kind)—offers some heavy hitters.
Here is a list of words starting with qual, categorized by their usage:
Common Everyday Words
- Qualify: To meet the necessary requirements or to limit a statement.
- Quality: The standard of something; a distinctive attribute or characteristic.
- Qualified: Having the official qualifications; limited or modified.
- Qualifier: A person or thing that qualifies; in grammar, a word that attributes a quality.
Science & Research
- Qualitative: Relating to, measuring, or measured by the quality of something (rather than its quantity).
- Qualitative Analysis: The identification of the chemical constituents of a sample.
Less Common & Niche Words
- Qualm: An uneasy feeling of doubt, worry, or fear; a misgiving.
- Qualia: (Philosophy) Individual instances of subjective, conscious experience (e.g., the specific redness of an apple).
- Qualitative: (Used as a noun in linguistics) A word that expresses quality.
Quick Reference Table
| Word | Part of Speech | Brief Definition |
| Qualm | Noun | A sudden feeling of apprehension. |
| Qualify | Verb | To reach a required standard. |
| Quality | Noun | Grade of excellence. |
| Qualitative | Adjective | Focused on description/traits. |
Would you like me to provide some example sentences for any of these to see how they’re used in context?
Additional thoughts from recent things I’ve read, seen, or listened to or from past experience:
Brand Promise
Core Values
Culture
KPIs Leading and Lagging, quantifiable, meaningful, stable, indicator, unit, frequency, positive, negative
Accountability
Impact on financials
Insurance
Recalls
expectations
Missing turning qualitative into quantitative.
Time as a measure
Trust
Black Belts
Software code as lines. Software as a series of invisible gears that have to mesh and work together.
Does quality equal or translate to value?
