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Manage Your Human Sigma

“Quality” is easy to measure and manage in some contexts, and extremely difficult in others. Businesspeople have a pretty good idea how to judge the manufacturing process that yields a snazzy new handheld device, for example. But what about the retail employee’s attempts to sell the gadget? Or the call center employee’s efforts to help the customer navigate its eccentricities? Businesses aren’t especially good at measuring and managing the quality of those processes—or indeed of most work done by nonmanufacturing businesses and units.

A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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