W Edwards Deming Measurement Quotes

You do not install quality; you begin to work at it. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Management's job is to know which systems are stable and which are not. ~ W. Edwards Deming

To copy is to invite disaster. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Manage the cause, not the result. ~ W. Edwards Deming

The legendary statistical consultant W. Edwards Deming, ... has called the system by which merit is appraised and rewarded 'the most powerful inhibitor to quality and productivity in the Western world' ... it is simply unfair to the extent that employees are held responsible for what are, in reality, systemic factors that are beyond their control. ~ Alfie Kohn

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. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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

In God we trust; all others must bring data. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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

Adopt a new philosophy of cooperation (win-win) in which everybody wins. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Everyone is a customer for somebody, or a supplier to somebody. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Management by results is confusing special causes with common causes. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Quality begins with the intent, which is fixed by management. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Dissatisfied customer does not complain: he just switches. ~ W. Edwards Deming

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best. - W. Edwards Deming ~ Joseph Grenny

Retroactive management emphasizes the bottom line. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Knowledge needs to be a verb. ~ W. Edwards Deming

There is no knowledge without theory. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Without theory, there are no questions. ~ W. Edwards Deming

The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Change the rule and you will get a new number. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Divide responsibility and nobody is responsible. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Management is prediction. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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? ~ W. Edwards Deming

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. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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. ~ W. Edwards Deming

A leader must have knowledge. A leader must be able to teach. ~ W. Edwards Deming

From the vantage point of the brain, doing well in school and at work involves one and the same state, the brain's sweet spot for performance. The biology of anxiety casts us out of that zone for excellence. "Banish fear" was a slogan of the late quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming. He saw that fear froze a workplace: workers were reluctant to speak up, to share new ideas, or to coordinate well, let alone to improve the quality of their output. The same slogan applies to the classroom - fear frazzles the mind, disrupting learning. ~ Daniel Goleman

Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Management by results - like driving a car by looking in rear view mirror. ~ W. Edwards Deming

If someone can make a contribution to the company he feels important. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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

The aim should be to work on the method of management. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force ~ W. Edwards Deming

Shrink, shrink variation, to reduce the loss. ~ W. Edwards Deming

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. ~ W. Edwards Deming

There is no economy in having one operation produce a part and another separate the good ones from the bad ones. ~ W. Edwards Deming