A Stitch in Haste

"Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality."
--Peter Drucker

Usually I have to put in a least at little effort to explain why an article demonstrates Kip's Law. Rarely does the central planning advocate do so much of the work for me:

Now that I am living for a while in California, I am staggered by the amount of "unnecessary things" that I see in the malls that dot the suburbs. America is no different from anywhere else, of course — just more so.

The conundrum is this: All that stuff creates jobs — making it, promoting it, selling it. It's literally the stuff of growth. What I'd love to ask Peter Drucker is: How do you grow an economy without the jobs and taxes that these unnecessary things produce?
...
The market, unfortunately, does not differentiate between good and bad. If the people want junk, the market will provide. So we have to fall back on the conscience of our business leaders.

The most depressing thing about this quote was that it was written by a professor of business, who even founded a business school (albeit a British business school) and who is now a visiting professor at the Drucker School of Business.

You've read enough Kip's Law Sightings to connect the dots without much help from me:

--"Unnecessary"? To whom, by what standard?

--"Good and bad"? By what criteria?

--"Junk"? Defined how?

--"Conscience"? Critiqued how?

The answers will come, of course, from Professor Handy himself. By his standards. According to his criteria. As defined by him. In accord with his conscience.

Why? Because he's just so much smarter than you.

What a betrayal of Drucker's ideas this visitor at the school named for him is spewing out. All that "unnecessary junk" in suburban California malls is there precisely because it is neither "unnecessary" nor "junk." It is there because customers find use for it (i.e., they value it). The fact that you, or I, or Handy, might not understand this valuing of particular goods by our fellow consumers is utterly without consequence. Any other metric or methodology for measuring material value (i.e., the "worth of a good") other than "it sells; people buy it" relies on some combination of hubris, context-dropping or outright delusion.

Peter Drucker became famous for his study of General Motors. I'll instead use Ford — specifically, the famous (but not entirely truthful) Henry Ford quote regarding the Model T: "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black."

In fact, the Model T was, at least in some years, available in several colors. But Ford was indeed reluctant to adapt the design of the vehicle itself. He thought that the Model T was "all the car a person would, or could, ever need." His competitors, offering products with more features and comforts, proved him wrong. The Model T lost market share throughout the 1920s and production was halted in 1927. In the arrogant mindset of Henry Ford (or Charles Handy) we should be driving (black) Model T's to this day — rather than the "unnecessary junk" now on the roads.

A person's legitimate moral authority to declare something "unnecessary junk" ends with the decision not to buy it himself. Anything more — calls for regulating it, taxing it, banning it — based solely on one's own subjective determination that it is "unnecessary junk" — is a denial of the entire science of economics.

(Via Conglomerate.)

Kip's Law: Every advocate of central planning always — always — envisions himself as the central planner.