My name is Cass, and I am a Quality Geek. As I’m sure you’re aware – some of you painfully so – “geek” is typically a term of derision. The New Hacker’s Dictionary, for example, defines a geek as “one who eats bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater…” Nice. Malodorous? That’s just uncalled for.
I am an 80’s child, which at least in my wife’s opinion is an automatic qualifier for geekdom. One thing that separated the 80’s from other recent decades, though, was the undercurrent of geek love in the culture, exemplified by movies such as Sixteen Candles, Revenge of the Nerds, and what was perhaps the penultimate geek movie, Real Genius. In all of these films, the geek or geeks won the day by embracing their geekdom (Farmer Ted in Sixteen Candles: “Sure I’m a dipshit. But I’m the king of the dipshits.”) rather than running from it or attempting to mask it.
So I was shaped in part by bad 80’s movies. But like Anthony Michael Hall’s Farmer Ted I’m choosing to embrace my geekery. Sure it feels good, but beyond that, it’s a winning strategy. Pragmatically. I’ll quote Real Genius’ Chris Knight (Val Kilmer): “When you’re smart, people need you.” He was saying something wise here, and we would all do well to listen.
When you choose to own the geek label, you also get to choose the definition you’re applying to it. I like this one for geek: “An intellectual who is bent on a particular profession.” In embracing the quality geek label, I choose to focus professionally on a particular approach to doing business, and to brand myself in a specific manner. Namely, as a quality professional bent on the application of quality principles to business management. I’m interested in both the specific and the strategic application of quality tools and systems, for reasons not only specific to good business practices but also for reasons relating to how the quality geek approach meshes with my ideas of how to best live in the world today. You can expect to see and participate in a broad quality conversation that I intend to begin here. We’ll own the quality geek label together. As Gilbert says in Revenge of the Nerds, “Join us, because no-one will really be free until nerd persecution ends.”
