James Adams - Good Products, Bad Products: Essential Elements to Achieving Superior Quality

Advance Praise for
Good Products, Bad Products

This book takes us beyond manufacturing quality to components of overall product quality that are often given too little attention. They are essential, but difficult to quantify. Good Products, Bad Products does a remarkable job of clarifying their nature and suggesting specific ways to better employ them. Want to produce products that people really want? Read this book.

Dave Beach, Professor, Director Product Realization Lab,
Stanford University, Hasso Platner Institute of Design

In a world that is constantly creating improved ways to achieve unimproved ends, Jim Adams takes a step back and asks, What makes a great product great to begin with? Good Products, Bad Products is a book of practical philosophy, a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of why some things get used and others are cherished. Engineers, designers, and marketers alike will come away from this book wondering how we all went so long without it.

Dev Patnaik, CEO and cofounder,
Jump Associates; author of Wired to Care

Jim Adams delights us once again with a fine product. This book should soon become a foundational read for every student, craftsman, and entrepreneur who truly aspires to make a difference.

Nicolas Shea, founder of eClass and Start-Up Chile

Jim Adamss concepts of what makes for a good product have been an essential part of our product design effort at Forbes Marshall in India for more than ten years. Our products have routinely won national innovation and design awards, and this is due in no small part to having imbibed and practiced Jims concepts.

The publication of Good Products, Bad Products is an event I have awaited for over a decade. We cannot wait to equip our engineers with their own copy. If you know Jims work, you will already be in line for this book. If you dont, a great discovery awaits.

Naushad Forbes, CEO,
Steam Engineering Businesses, Forbes Marshall;
Chairman, Innovation Council of Confederation of Indian Industry

GOOD
PRODUCTS
BAD
PRODUCTS

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS TO
ACHIEVING SUPERIOR QUALITY

JAMES L. ADAMS

Copyright 2012 by James L. Adams. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-178241-8
MHID: 0-07-178241-9

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To Marian, who strives to improve my quality

First I would like to acknowledge all of the Stanford students who took a series of courses that not only gave me the opportunity to think about the topic of product quality with them, but also provided me with excellent feedback on the course notes that became the basis for this book. This series began in 1984 with a course entitled Technology and Aesthetics, which I taught in the Stanford Values, Technology, Science and Society (VTSS) program, initially ably abetted by Barry Katz, then a lecturer in the program and now a professor of humanities and design at California College of the Arts. Beginning in 1993 this course was listed in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management at Stanford as well as in VTSS as Quality and the Products of Industry. In 1997 it was renamed Good Products, Bad Products, and since 2000 it has been taught by my good friend and colleague Professor David Beach, director of the Product Realization Lab in the Design Group of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Stanford, who has redesigned the course to suit his own style and thinking but has retained some of the previous structure and has continued to use my notes. Should any former students be reading this, thank youI hope you had as much fun and learned as much in the course as I did.

On the publication side I would like to thank my agent, John Willig of Literary Services, who found the book an appreciative home; Stephanie Frerich, enthusiastic acquisition editor of McGraw-Hill Professional, who shepherded the book through the publication process; Zachary Gajewski, development editor, who did a heroic job of cutting out extraneous material, tightening the text, and generally turning the manuscript into a much more reasonable book; Charles Fisher and the production group, who polished it and put it together; and Julia Baxter and Ann Pryor, who helped make the world aware of it.