Kipling's six honest men..

"I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who."

In an interesting article, Ronan Nugent describes his experiences as a young engineer in an firm trying to achieve ISO 9001 certification. Often frustrated by the practices of his coworkers, Nugent resorted to Kipling's six honest men to approach problems using plain common sense. As he says, ISO 9001 isn't rocket science, and most problems can be approached by asking the simple questions, What, Why, When, How, Where and Who.