Wretchard said:
“that they were so busy measuring compliance that there was no time to ask if the basic business made sense”

I’m reminded of my experience in the mid to late 90s going thru the adoption of ISO9000 at an electronics designer/manufacturer.

We jumped thru all the hoops to get our ‘quality system’ certified, which was a whole racket in and of itself — you pay one arm of some group to help get you certified, then others audit you. Once you’re in, the auditors always find *something* so you have to keep paying them to come back, perhaps wtih greater than ‘normal’ frequency to check on the followup, but they somehow never ding you hard enough to lose your cert, and possibly pull the plug on their gravy train.

As to the certification itself, all it meant was that your ‘system’ had some internal consistency — it did not mean jack shit about your actual *quality* where the rubber met the road. You could produce shit, but as long as you went thru the motions of the process, everything was kosher.