Where does quality come from? If I add chocolate chips to cookie batter, it makes for better cookies. Maybe quality is an ingredient, something added specifically to raise the value of an object or task. Ever had my famous Chocolate Chip Meat Loaf? Ooooooo, yummy!

Now if I slightly undercook peanut butter cookies, they get all gooey and soft. (I mash the centers with a fork and sprinkle with granulated sugar just like the cookbook says.) Maybe quality is a process. Have you ever had my famous Undercooked Chicken Cordon Blue? It is to die for. No seriously, you could get wicked sick. Stay away from it.

Okay, I give up. Let's look to the professionals. Steven M. Hoefflin is one of the most famous plastic surgeons in Hollywood. If a face is famous, chances are good that he has pealed it from the skull on one occasion or another. So, if anyone knows physical beauty - with the aesthetic of visual quality - this man must know it! In his own words:

"Why are there beautiful flowers? Huh? Why?...Let's go back 10,000 years. There were all kinds of flowers around. There were terrible-smelling flowers, ugly flowers, beautiful flowers. Now, how are flowers pollinated? Where are the bees going to go? They're going to land on the flower that smells good and is beautiful. So if you have a nice-smelling, bright flower, the bees are going to land on that and pollinate that. So progressively, you're going to isolate the terrible-smelling, ugly, whatever, flowers and progressively get more beautiful looking flowers."¹

There you have it folks, flowers are pretty and smell nice (have aesthetic quality) because the bees say so. Now, I don't have any smarmy cooking examples regarding bee cuisine (I've been out of the hive far too long), so let me say outright: I doubt I like daffodils because I take my cues from bees. And what's with the dandelion? Apparently, you don't have to be beautiful or smell nice, just bright yellow and able to make little tattoos when smashed onto the arms of young children. This little yarn from Dr. Hoefflin sounds like the typical evolution fairytale thrown around by wanna-be intelligentsia wherein anything can be said to be true if you link it to something changing over a long period of time. Such a long period of time, in fact, that it falls into of the little-known feasibility escape clause that is in the small print of the scientific method, meaning that it must be true! I actually have my own evolutionary theory: pebbles grow up into boulders. It's outside of the scope of scientific testing, sure, but I'm pretty sure if I draw it up on a nice historical timeline with little pictures and throw in a histogram from a local granite quarry, I could get it published in a few scientific journals.

(BTW, according to Evian, the source of beautiful flowers is in the water.)

From a consulting perspective, you have a few options. You can listen to informed people and do what they say, you can mimic the example set by previous endeavors, or you can do your own research and define your own standard of quality. As a wee boy, my grandmother told me not to sleep with a cat in the bed because it could sit on your head and suck the breath out of you until you died. (That's a true story.) So, I am a little shy about following what other people say without question. And, I've seen enough hacked up documents in my life to be a little shy about mimicking other people's work. That just leaves my own opinion, which is ironic because I'm pretty sure that is where I started this rant.

Having fully shown that I am the only standard of quality, read next week's stunning conclusion, where I will identify exactly where quality comes from, and how it is applied to the daily life of a consultant.

¹ Laskas, Jeanne Marie. (2005, May). The Beautiful Shall Enherit The Earth Gentlemen's Quarterly, 242.