Top 39 Quotes & Sayings by Phil Crosby

Very few of the great leaders ever get through their careers without failing, sometimes dramatically.

Making a wrong decision is understandable. Refusing to search continually for learning is not.

Change should be a friend. It should happen by plan, not by accident.

If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.

Selecting the right person for the right job is the largest part of coaching.

The great discoveries are usually obvious.

Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric.

Successful people breed success.

Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.

You don't have to be noisy to be effective.

The audience only pays attention as long as you know where you are going.

A rule to live by: I won't use anything I can't explain in five minutes.

No one can remember more than three points.

In a true zero-defects approach, there are no unimportant items.

You have to lead people gently toward what they already know is right.

Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.

Quality has to be caused, not controlled.

Being convinced one knows the whole story is the surest way to fail.

We can spend our whole lives underachieving.

People are conditioned to believe that error is inevitable.... However, we do not accept the same standard when it comes to our personal life. If we did, we would resign ourselves to being shortchanged now and then when we cash our paychecks. We would expect hospital nurses to drop a certain percentage of all newborn babies. We would expect to go home to the wrong house periodically. As individuals we do not tolerate these things. Thus we have a double standard, one for ourselves, one for the company.

Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.

Quality means conformance to requirements, not elegance.

If we deliver on time, but the product has defects, we have not delivered on time.

Quality is such an attractive banner that sometimes we think we can get away with just waving it, without doing the hard work necessary to achieve it.

It isn't what you find, it's what you do about what you find.

You are going to be measured anyway by some means, fair or foul. Usually the one doing the measuring has nothing specific in mind; so he does it by the seat of his pants. Careers are destroyed in this manner.

Most things don't work like they are supposed to work.

If you don't know what the defect level is, how do you know when to get mad?

When in doubt, delete it.

The customer deserves to receive exactly what we have promised to produce - a clean room, a hot cup of coffee, a nonporous casing, a trip to the moon on goassamer wings.

It is not possible to know what you need to learn.

Many managers feel, somewhat cynically, that people are being paid to do their jobs and that's that. This attitude reflects an insensitivity to people that is a trademark of many hockey-style managers.

The cost of quality is the expense of doing things wrong.

Quality is free. It's not a gift, but it's free. The 'unquality' things are what cost money.

Problems breed problems, and the lack of a disciplined method of openly attacking them breeds more problems.

When you're out of quality, you're out of business.

It is always cheaper to do the job right the first time.

We must define quality as conformance to specifications if we are to manage it.

Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.