Every year we have to suffer through the marketing blitz of Sermin Vanderbilt’s annual ISO 9001 conference, which is just another part of the US TAG 176 consultant wing’s self-promotion machine. This year, coming off the ISO 9001:2015 revision, marks the most egregious and disgusting presentation of TAG cronies, on full public display, possibly ever.

Take a look at this promo piece, and see how many names you can spot that have been involved, in one way or another, in the various scandals, complaints and allegations that are drowing the TAG 176 under the flood of its own hubris:

Click here to see the latest slate of speakers.

Not only is it chaired by ever-bedeviled TAG leader Lorri Hunt, but it features appearances by ANAB’s Randy Dougherty and John Knappenberger (apparently re-thinking their retirement, or they can’t find anyone who wants to replace them) as well as Dale Gordon, TAG leaders with dubious book-deals such as Hunt’s co-author Craig Williams and Denise Robitaille, Omnex’s Dan Reid, and two consultants with Cavendish Scott, Colin Gray and Matt Leiphart. I am particularly disappointed in the latter, since the Cavendish Scott team had previously seemed to take positions that were more aligned with users, but now appear to have gone all-in and just joined the “let’s use our TAG credential to market the shit out of ourselves” crowd.

Then there’s the aerospace guys, including Boeing’s Alan Daniels, coming off his trouncing by Alka Jarvis in an election he wasn’t even allowed to be included in, despite being nominated, and Lockheed Martin’s dunce-in-residence Buddy Cressionnie, who insiders report was elevated to their “standards guy” because he wasn’t doing them any good anywhere else. (Seriously, that’s what I have been told.

What’s true about nearly all — if not literally all — of the speakers, is that they have no experience at all in implementing ISO 9001:2015, only in helping to write it, or promote it. It’s as if one held a huge seminar on continuously variable transmission repair, and then all the speakers were the car dealers’ finance guys who tell you how much that additional undercoat protection is going to cost, and only know how to replace the batteries in their four-function calculators. But nevertheless, these dubious individuals with dysfunctional moral compasses are nevertheless touted as “the top experts in the world!” on ISO 9001. Riiiiiight.

111The American Quality Institute’s various governing bodies are a further wellspring of TAG cronies and private Consultants Gone Wild, including Lorri Hunt, Jack West, Desnie Robitaille, Charles Cianfrani, Alan Daniels, Dan Reid, and of course Lisa Uhrig. Consider this: it cannot be an accident that you see these names repeated over and over, in TAG leadership positions, book covers, Quality Digest articles, CB and AB advisory boards, ASQ leadership positions, Quality Progress articles, and endless seminars. The same 20 people, over and over over, sucking up all the marketing and publishing space, overtly promoting themselves and their private practices, in order to enrich themselves. There are thousands of consultants and authors and volunteers across the world, and yet we only hear the same 20 or so names, decade after decade.

The message is simple, and apparently Cavendish Scott has learned this and is now benefiting: if you play ball, we will let you into the inner circle and you can learn to personally profit from your work on the TAG or IAQG. If you contradict us in the least, you will never gain entry to that inner circle, and will be denied all the advantages of the massive marketing machine. We will then engage in all sorts of aggressive and potentially illegal activities to shut you down, such as gaslighting, intimidation, trademark bullying lawsuits, and even death threats.

So, anyway, if you want to meet this group of Batman Villains in the flesh,  go see them in my own home state of Florida, a stone’s throw from my house, March 20-22 at the Buena Vista Palace Hotel in Orlando. It’s near Disney and golf courses, so if you find yourself gagging too much,  you can leave early and do something entertaining.

So why am I not going? It’s simple: first, they’d probably never let me in the door. But more importantly, I have this thing called a successful consulting practice, and I am so busy actually doing implementations of ISO 9001, I don’t have time to spend my entire life writing books and going to conferences trying to falsely convince everyone that I know how to implement ISO 9001. Consider this: if these people had actual, functioning consultancies, how do they have the time to spend their entire career only going to TAG meetings and conferences?

If I spent all my time at these events, my clients would fire me. Which, I suspect, is why so many of these so-called “top experts” don’t ever bother to list their clients, since they probably don’t exist; much like their “practical experience” in implementing ISO 9001.

 

 

About Christopher Paris

Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 30 years' experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the author of Surviving ISO 9001 and Surviving AS9100. He reviews wines for the irreverent wine blog, Winepisser.

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