Matt Ström-Awn makes the argument that companies can achieve sustainable excellence by empowering everyone at each level to take ownership of quality, rather than relying solely on top-down mandates or standardized procedures.

But more and more I’ve come to believe that quality isn’t a slogan, a program, or a scorecard. It’s a promise kept at the edge by the people doing the work. And, ideally, quality is fundamental to the product itself, where users can judge it without our permission. That’s the shift we need: away from heroics at the center, toward systems that make quality inevitable.

The stakes are high. Centralized quality — slogans, KPIs, executive decrees — can produce positive results, but it’s brittle. Decentralized quality — continuous feedback, distributed ownership, emergent standards — builds resilience. In this essay, I’d like to make the case that the future belongs to those who can decentralize their mindset and approach to quality.

Ström-Awn offers multiple case studies, contrasting centralized systems with decentralized ones, using Ford, Amazon, Apple, Toyota, Netflix, 3M, Morning Star, W.L. Gore, Valve, Barnes & Noble, and Microsoft under Satya Nadella as examples.

These stories share a common thread: organizations that trusted their frontline workers to identify and solve quality problems. But decentralized quality has its own vulnerabilities. Valve’s radical structure has been criticized for creating informal power hierarchies and making it difficult to coordinate large projects. Some ex-employees describe a “high school clique” atmosphere where popular workers accumulate influence while others struggle. Without traditional management oversight, initiatives can moulder, or veer in directions that don’t serve broader company goals.

Still, these examples show a different path for achieving quality, where excellence is defined in the course of building a product. Unlike centralized approaches relying on visionary (but fallible) leaders, decentralized systems are resilient to individual failures, adaptable to change, and empowering to builders. The andon cord, the rolling desk, and the local bookstore manager each represent a small bet on human judgment over institutional control. Those bets look like they’re paying off.