W. Edwards Deming Famous Quotes & Sayings

It is a mistake to assume that if everybody does his job, it will be all right. The whole system may be in trouble. — W. Edwards Deming

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing. — W. Edwards Deming

We know what we told him, but we don't know what he heard. — W. Edwards Deming

People work in the system. Management creates the system — W. Edwards Deming

If you wait for people to come to you, you'll only get small problems. You must go and find them. The big problems are where people don't realize they have one in the first place. — W. Edwards Deming

Learning is not compulsory; it's voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it's voluntary. But to survive, we must learn. — W. Edwards Deming

Anybody can achieve gains in quality by slowing down production. That is not what we are talking about. — W. Edwards Deming

Information is not knowledge. Let's not confuse the two. — W. Edwards Deming

American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan. But they don't know what to copy. — W. Edwards Deming

People care more for themselves when they contribute to the system. — W. Edwards Deming

The moral is that it is necssary to innovate, to predict the needs of the customers, and give him more. He that innovates and is lucky will take the market. — W. Edwards Deming

The problem is that most courses teach what is wrong. — W. Edwards Deming

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing. — W. Edwards Deming

We are being ruined by the best efforts of people who are doing the wrong thing. — W. Edwards Deming

Scrap doesn't come for free, we pay someone to make it. — W. Edwards Deming

Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them. — W. Edwards Deming

Learning is not compulsory ... neither is survival. — W. Edwards Deming

A manager of people knows that in this stable state it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake. — W. Edwards Deming

New product and new types of service are generated, not by asking the consumer, but by knowledge, imagination, innovation, risk, trial and error on the part of the producer, backed by enough capital to develop the product or service and to stay in business during the learn months of introduction. — W. Edwards Deming

The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management! — W. Edwards Deming

He that expects to quantify in dollars the gains that will accrue to a company year by year for a program for improvement of quality expounded in [Out of the Crisis] will suffer delusion. He should know before he starts that he will be able to quantify only a trivial part of the gain. — W. Edwards Deming

A committee appointed by the President of a company will report what the President wishes to hear. Would they dare report otherwise?. — W. Edwards Deming

A person and an organization must have goals, take actions to achieve those goals, gather evidence of achievement, study and reflect on the data and from that take actions again. Thus, they are in a continuous feedback spiral toward continuous improvement. This is what 'Kaizan' means. — W. Edwards Deming

We must understand variation. — W. Edwards Deming

Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force — W. Edwards Deming

Zero defects is a super highway going down the tube. — W. Edwards Deming

Hard work and best efforts will not by themselves dig us out of the pit. — W. Edwards Deming

If you destroy the people of a company, you do not have much left. — W. Edwards Deming

People need to know what their jobs are. — W. Edwards Deming

The prevailing - and foolish - attitude is that a good manager can be a good manager anywhere, with no special knowledge of the production process he's managing. A man with a financial background may know nothing about manufacturing shoes or cars, but he's put in charge anyway. — W. Edwards Deming

The result of long-term relationships is better and better quality, and lower and lower costs. — W. Edwards Deming

We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes. — W. Edwards Deming

Competition should not be for a share of the market-but to expand the market. — W. Edwards Deming

Lack of knowledge ... that is the problem. — W. Edwards Deming

A goal without a method is nonsense. — W. Edwards Deming

A bad system will beat a good person every time. — W. Edwards Deming

When we cooperate, everybody wins. — W. Edwards Deming

You can not hear what you do not understand. — W. Edwards Deming

A rational prediction has an explanation based on theory. — W. Edwards Deming

The most important things we need to manage can't be measured. — W. Edwards Deming

You have to manage a system. The system doesn't manage itself. — W. Edwards Deming

I am forever learning and changing. — W. Edwards Deming

The principles and methods for improvement are the same for service as for manufacturing. The actual application differs, of course, from one product to another, and from one type of service to another. — W. Edwards Deming

You do not install knowledge. — W. Edwards Deming

Quality is made in the board room. A worker can deliver lower quality, but she cannot deliver quality better than the system allow. — W. Edwards Deming

The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable. — W. Edwards Deming

Let us ask our suppliers to come and help us to solve our problems. — W. Edwards Deming

The most basic problem is that performance appraisals often don't accurately assess performance. — W. Edwards Deming

People need to know how their job contributes. — W. Edwards Deming

Any substantial improvement must come from action on the system, the responsibility of management. Wishing and pleading and begging the workers to do better was totally futile. — W. Edwards Deming

No one can measure the loss of business that may arise from a defective item that goes out to a customer. — W. Edwards Deming

Declining productivity and quality means your unit production costs stay high but you don't have as much to sell. Your workers don't want to be paid less, so to maintain profits, you increase your prices. That's inflation. — W. Edwards Deming

You can not achieve an aim unless you have a method. — W. Edwards Deming

The source of innovation is freedom. All we have - new knowledge, invention - comes from freedom. Discoveries and new knowledge come from freedom. When somebody is responsible only to himself, [has] only himself to satisfy, then you'll have invention, new thought, now product, new design, new ideas. — W. Edwards Deming

Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, and of machine-time, all of which raise the manufacturer's cost and price that the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste. The inevitable result is loss of market. Loss of market begets unemployment. — W. Edwards Deming

Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment. — W. Edwards Deming

The emphasis should be on why we do a job. — W. Edwards Deming

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action. — W. Edwards Deming

Change the rule and you will get a new number. — W. Edwards Deming

You can expect what you inspect. — W. Edwards Deming

Meeting specifications is not enough. — W. Edwards Deming

You do not find knowledge in a dictionary, only information. — W. Edwards Deming

Confusing common causes with special causes will only make things worse. — W. Edwards Deming

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. — W. Edwards Deming

In Japan, a company worker's position is secure. He is retrained for another job if his present job is eliminated by productivity improvement. — W. Edwards Deming

Without data, you're just another person with an opinion. — W. Edwards Deming

Management by results - like driving a car by looking in rear view mirror. — W. Edwards Deming

The system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance. — W. Edwards Deming

Scientific data are not taken for museum purposes; they are taken as a basis for doing something. If nothing is to be done with the data, then there is no use in collecting any. The ultimate purpose of taking data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation for action. The step intermediate between the collection of data and the action is prediction. — W. Edwards Deming

What should be the aim of management? What is their job? Quality is the responsibility of the top people. Its origin is in the boardroom. They are the ones who decide. — W. Edwards Deming

Choice of aim is clearly a matter of clarification of values, especially on the choice between possible options. — W. Edwards Deming

A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without the aim, there is no system. — W. Edwards Deming

All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride. — W. Edwards Deming

Innovation comes from the producer - not from the customer. — W. Edwards Deming

The questions are more important than the answers. — W. Edwards Deming

Management is prediction. — W. Edwards Deming

Anyone that enjoys his work is a pleasure to work with. — W. Edwards Deming

Improve quality, you automatically improve productivity. — W. Edwards Deming

Learning is not cumpulsory ... neither is survival. — W. Edwards Deming

Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process. — W. Edwards Deming

Without theory there is nothing to modify or learn. — W. Edwards Deming

In God we trust; all others bring data. — W. Edwards Deming

You can not plan to make a discovery. You do not plan innovation. — W. Edwards Deming

Manage the cause, not the result. — W. Edwards Deming

Management does not know what a system is. — W. Edwards Deming

For Quality: Stamp out fires, automate, computerize, M.B.O., install merit pay, rank people, best efforts, zero defects. WRONG!!!! Missing ingredient: profound knowledge. — W. Edwards Deming

Shrink, shrink variation, to reduce the loss. — W. Edwards Deming

She learns, after she finishes the job, that she programmed very well the specifications as delivered to her, but that they were deficient. If she had only known the purpose of the program, she could have done it right for the purpose, even though the specifications were deficient. — W. Edwards Deming

In 1945, the world was in a shambles. American companies had no competition. So nobody really thought much about quality. Why should they? The world bought everything America produced. It was a prescription for disaster. — W. Edwards Deming

You can only elevate individual performance by elevating that of the entire system. — W. Edwards Deming

Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better. — W. Edwards Deming

Does the customer invent new product or service? The customer generates nothing. No customer asked for electric lights. There was gas and gas mantles, which gave good light. — W. Edwards Deming

I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this: 94% belongs to the system responsibility of management 6% special — W. Edwards Deming