Top 250 Quotes & Sayings by W. Edwards Deming
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American scientist W. Edwards Deming.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
A bad system will beat a good person every time.
The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
When a system is stable, telling the worker about mistakes is only tampering.
Quality is everyone's responsibility.
Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.
The big problems are where people don't realise they have one in the first place.
No one knows the cost of a defective product - don't tell me you do. You know the cost of replacing it, but not the cost of a dissatisfied customer.
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.
Research shows that the climate of an organization influences an individual's contribution far more than the individual himself.
In Japan, a company worker's position is secure. He is retrained for another job if his present job is eliminated by productivity improvement.
If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.
If you don't understand how to run an efficient operation, new machinery will just give you new problems of operation and maintenance. The sure way to increase productivity is to better administrate man and machine.
My mother was my biggest role model. She taught me to hate waste. We never wasted anything.
It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.
Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.
The result of long-term relationships is better and better quality, and lower and lower costs.
Any manager can do well in an expanding market.
If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.
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.
The emphasis should be on why we do a job.
People don't like to make mistakes.
Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.
Export anything to a friendly country except American management.
You can not define being exactly on time.
Quality is pride of workmanship.
People with targets and jobs dependent upon meeting them will probably meet the targets - even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it.
Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.
The prevailing system of management has crushed fun out of the workplace.
Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.
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.
I am forever learning and changing.
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.
'Quality' means what will sell and do a customer some good - at least try to.
Lack of knowledge... that is the problem.
You should not ask questions without knowledge.
American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan. But they don't know what to copy.
Innovation comes from the producer - not from the customer.
Hold everybody accountable? Ridiculous!
All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride.
I predicted in 1950 that in five years, manufacturers the world over would be screaming for protection. It took only four years.
We are here to make another world.
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.
Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.
It's not enough to do your best; you must know what to do & then do your best.
Innovation comes from people who take joy in their work.
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 ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.
Improve quality, you automatically improve productivity.
Manage the cause, not the result.
Put a good person in a bad system and the bad system wins, no contest.
Management by results - like driving a car by looking in rear view mirror.
...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.
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.
Two basic rules of life are: 1) Change is inevitable. 2) Everybody resists change.
In God we trust; all others bring data.
The most valuable "currency" of any organization is the initiative and creativity of its members. Every leader has the solemn moral responsibility to develop these to the maximum in all his people. This is the leader's highest priority.
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.
Each system is perfectly designed to give you exactly what you are getting today.
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