W. Edwards Deming Quotes

Shrink, shrink variation, to reduce the loss.

Understanding variation is the key to success in quality and business.

I predicted in 1950 that in five years, manufacturers the world over would be screaming for protection. It took only four years.

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.

Quality starts in the boardroom.

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.

Management's job is to optimize the whole system.

You can not achieve an aim unless you have a method.

Management does not know what a system is.

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.

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.

Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.

Innovation comes from the producer - not from the customer.

It will not suffice to have customers that are merely satisfied. Customers that are unhappy and some that are merely satisfied switch. Profit comes from repeat customers - those that boast about the product or service.

People need to know what their jobs are.

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

A leader knows who is outside of the system and needs special help.

If you destroy the people of a company, you do not have much left.

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

Management by results is confusing special causes with common causes.

We have to bring back the individual. Management has smothered the individual.

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

Without questions, there is no learning.

Two basic rules of life are: 1) Change is inevitable. 2) Everybody resists change.

It does not happen all at once. There is no instant pudding.

Knowledge is the key.

To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge, knowledge for leadership of transformation.

A rational prediction has an explanation based on theory.

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

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

Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

The emphasis should be on why we do a job.

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

On production floors and in corporate offices, sociological verbiage has replaced a basic understanding of human behavior.

Foremost is the principle that the purpose of consumer research is to understand the customer's needs and wishes, and thus design product and service that will provide better living for him in the future. A second principle is that no one can guess the future loss of business from a dissatisfied customer.

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

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.

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.

Managing by results only makes things worse.

You do not install knowledge.

The aim should be to work on the method of management.

The problem is that most courses teach what is wrong.

Without theory, there are no questions.

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

Quality begins with the intent, which is fixed by management.

A rule should suit the purpose.

Improve quality, you automatically improve productivity.

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.

He that would run his company on visible figures alone will in time have neither company nor figures.

Quality is everyone's responsibility.

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

Dissatisfied customer does not complain: he just switches.

Management by results - like driving a car by looking in rear view mirror.

Learn the basics of analytics and people will love you. If you don't have time to learn, hire someone.

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.

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

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

Retroactive management emphasizes the bottom line.

We cannot rely on mass inspection to improve quality, though there are times when 100 percent inspection is necessary. As Harold S. Dodge said many years ago, 'You cannot inspect quality into a product.' The quality is there or it isn't by the time it's inspected.

Monetary rewards are not a substitute for intrinsic motivation.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.

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

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

Research shows that the climate of an organization influences an individual's contribution far more than the individual himself.

Mere allocation of huge sums of money for quality will not bring quality.

Innovation comes from people who take joy in their work.

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.

Manage the cause, not the result.

We are here for an education.

'Quality' means what will sell and do a customer some good - at least try to.

You can expect what you inspect.

A goal without a method is nonsense.

Without theory there is nothing to modify or learn.

We should be guided by theory, not by numbers.

To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for

People are entitled to joy in work.

What makes a scientist great is the care that he takes in telling you what is wrong with his results, so that you will not misuse them.

Adopt a new philosophy of cooperation (win-win) in which everybody wins.

Forces of Destruction: grades in school, merit system, incentive pay, business plans, quotas.

Nobody goes to work to do a bad job.

The pay and privilege of the captains of industry are now so closely linked to the quarterly dividend that they may find it personally unrewarding to do what is right for the company.

Management is prediction.

It's management's job to know.

No one has all the answers. Fortunately, it is not necessary to have all the answers for good management.

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.

The ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.

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

People copy examples and then they wonder what is the trouble. They look at examples and without theory they learn nothing.

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.

In God we trust; all others must bring data.

The greatest losses are unknown and unknowable.

Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.