Why did I write my first book?

Frustration (and opportunity)

By the time I wrote my first book, I’d been a Quality Manager in a few different industries: aerospace, internet, semiconductor. We’d decided it was time to go back to the US after 6 years overseas, and there wasn’t a place for me in the company’s offices here (not one that didn’t report to my husband anyway – and even if they’d allowed that, we wanted to stay married! So I was between jobs.

The first thing I’d worked on at my previous company was to oversee the update of their process for developing new products, which touched every aspect of the organization, so I had a good idea of how things worked, at a high level. The last thing I worked on there, years later, was to participate in the revamp of their entire process system. They’d hired a consultant firm to come in and lead us, and those people kept telling us they had the One Right Way(TM) to do this. Some (not all!) of my colleagues leapt gleefully in and started adding complexity left and right, generally without talking to the people who would be responsible for actually executing those processes.

I was convinced that it didn’t have to be that hard, and that there was more than one way to do it (and that simpler is generally better, wherever possible). I knew that people who don’t have a voice in the work they do are likely to sabotage processes foisted on them by simply not following them, especially since they are quite likely to be wrong.

So I wrote a book explaining the basics of process creation and implementation, so that people could make informed decisions of how processes should work at their company.

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