Made Well

An essential reckoning with America's 250-year relationship with quality - and why the lesson keeps needing to be relearned.

Made Well: America's 250-Year Quality Drama is a narrative history told in six acts. It begins with the craftsmen of colonial America, silversmiths and gunsmiths and cabinetmakers who marked their work with their names and stood behind it personally, and ends in the present, where artificial intelligence systems inspect manufactured goods at a thousand units per minute and still, with remarkable regularity, miss what matters.

Between those endpoints is the story of three things that are usually told separately and need to be understood together.

• The ideas. From Eli Whitney's staged demonstration of interchangeable parts in 1801 through Walter Shewhart's control chart in 1924 through W. Edwards Deming's lectures in Tokyo in 1950 through the statistical and digital tools of today, the intellectual history of quality is a story of genuine brilliance - consistently available, consistently underused.
• The failures. The quality gap that allowed Japan to dismantle American manufacturing's global dominance in the 1970s and 1980s was a a choice. The Boeing 737 MAX crashes of 2018 and 2019 were the predictable result of an organization that had optimized for the appearance of quality rather than its substance. These failures have a pattern, and the pattern is the foundation of this book.
• The people. The workers in Youngstown whose livelihoods depended on decisions made in boardrooms they would never enter. The engineers who raised concerns that were heard and set aside. The families of Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302. The patients who trusted that the mark on their medication meant what it said.