W. Edwards Deming Quotes

Management's job is to optimize the whole system.

Quality starts in the boardroom.

Part of America's industrial problems is the aim of its corporate managers. Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products or service. The Japanese corporate credo, on the other hand, is that a company should become the world's most efficient provider of whatever product and service it offers. Once it becomes the world leader and continues to offer good products, profits follow.

Manage the cause, not the result.

The customer invents nothing. New products and new services come from the producer.

A leader must have knowledge. A leader must be able to teach.

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

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

Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.

You do not find knowledge in a dictionary, only information.

The individual has been crushed by our style of management today.

When asked what single event was most helpful in developing the Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein replied, "Figuring out how to think about the problem".

It would be a mistake to export western management to a friendly country.

When a system is stable, telling the worker about mistakes is only tampering.

A leader is a coach, not a judge.

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

A system can not understand itself.

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.

It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth

Profit in business comes from repeat customers

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.

Stamping out fires is a lot of fun, but it is only putting things back the way they were.

Quality is everyone's responsibility.

You can only elevate individual performance by elevating that of the entire system.

We must understand variation.

3% of the problems have figures, 97% of the problems do not.

All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride.

Without theory, there are no questions.

We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes.

When we cooperate, everybody wins.

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.

It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of a specific activity or method. It must always relate to a better life for everyone.

Knowledge is theory. We should be thankful if action of management is based on theory. Knowledge has temporal spread. Information is not knowledge. The world is drowning in information but is slow in acquisition of knowledge. There is no substitute for knowledge.

The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable.

Managing by results only makes things worse.

Any manager can do well in an expanding market.

Management's job is to know which systems are stable and which are not.

Sub-optimization is when everyone is for himself. Optimization is when everyone is working to help the company.

One need not be eminent in any part of profound knowledge in order to understand it and to apply it. The various segments of the system of profound knowledge cannot be separated. They interact with each other. For example knowledge about psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.

Retroactive management emphasizes the bottom line.

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

Now, we learn that a system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

It's not enough to do your best; you must know what to do & then do your best.

We must satisfy our customers.

We are here to learn, to make a difference and to have fun.

I am not reporting things about people. I am reporting things about practices.

Change the rule and you will get a new number.