When Baking a Pie Becomes a Leadership Lever

In 2000, Elisabeth Hendrickson was the newly hired Director of Quality Engineering at a Silicon Valley startup. Her boss called her into his office to say the company had invested heavily in testing under her leadership—a new lab, more people, test automation—and quality was worse than ever. She had no answer. That moment sent her on a years-long journey into systems thinking, and it eventually led to a realization that upends how most organizations think about quality: the person with "quality" in their title is almost never the person who can actually fix it.

The Floppy Disk That Exposed the System

Hendrickson's defining moment came when a developer tried to hand her a floppy disk in the hallway and said, "Here, test this." The software couldn't even be delivered to customers that way—it needed to go through a server, be signed with a certificate, and be vended down to clients. When she insisted the developer deliver it properly, it turned out the software wouldn't even load onto the server. It violated the rules for how software got to customers. If she had tested the floppy disk version, it would have passed all checks and then failed catastrophically in production—and it would have been her fault, because she had "quality" in her title.