W. Edwards Deming Quotes

Management of outcomes may not be any more than a skill. It does not require knowledge.

You do not install quality; you begin to work at it.

I think that people here expect miracles. American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan - but they don't know what to copy!

The result of long-term relationships is better and better quality, and lower and lower costs.

You have to manage a system. The system doesn't manage itself.

The main difference between service and manufacturing is the service department doesn't know that they have a product.

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.

Transformation is not automatic. It must be learned; it must be led.

It's management's job to know.

The job can't be finished only improved to please the customer.

The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort.

The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain - stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment - over the long term.

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.

A system must be managed. It will not manage itself.

We are here to make another world.

Eighty percent of American managers cannot answer with any measure of confidence these seemingly simple questions: What is my job? What in it really counts? How well am I doing?

It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of activity or methods. It must always relate directly to how life is better for everyone. . . . The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include plans for the future. The aim is a value judgment.

Improve quality, you automatically improve productivity.

When people try to do what they can not do, they wish to give up.

Innovation comes from people who take joy in their work.

People work in the system. Management creates the system

Innovation comes from the producer - not from the customer.

The biggest cost of poor quality is when your customer buys it from someone else because they didn't like yours.

The greatest waste … is failure to use the abilities of people…to learn about their frustrations and about the contributions that they are eager to make.

People learn in different ways: reading, listening, pictures, watching.

We should be guided by theory, not by numbers.

The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!

Divide responsibility and nobody is responsible.

Without questions, there is no learning.

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.

Each system is perfectly designed to give you exactly what you are getting today.

A rule should suit the purpose.

Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.

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.

Shrink, shrink variation, to reduce the loss.

The problem is that most courses teach what is wrong.

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

You can see from a flow diagram who depends on you and whom you can depend on. You can now take joy in your work.

Management does not know what a system is.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.

The greatest losses are unknown and unknowable.

Any two people have different ideas of what is important.

The customer is the most important part of the production line.

There must be consistency in direction.

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

Competition should not be for a share of the market-but to expand the market.

When a worker has reached a stable state, further training will not help him.

Management by results is confusing special causes with common causes.