When your quality decreases, so does the demand for your product or services.

Keeping high standards will certainly help, but so will not losing touch with who you are and what you are doing. Why did you get into this business in the first place? People certainly change or shift over time and doing so to the point where you are no longer relevant is a risk.

I sometimes find that people go so far down a path that it is difficult for them to recover. Becoming fixated on a problem or approach is a great way to get things done, and also a great way to get lost.

Many companies have quality control programs to help them manage their processes and to ensure that particular standards are being met, but to me they seem reactive. Why not look forward and think of it as quality creation?

This implies that you are staying constantly aware of what you are doing, actively taking in feedback from employees or customers, and you have the ability to immediately make adjustments to how or what you are producing.

One of the greatest benefits of this is that you now have opportunity to capitalize on your mistakes in real time. Actively creating quality is about not being a slave to process, and to approach everything you create with a fresh perspective every time.