W. Edwards Deming quotes:

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.

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

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

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.

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.

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.

You should not ask questions without knowledge.

...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.

Lack of knowledge... that is the problem.

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 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.

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.

The prevailing system of management has crushed fun out of the workplace.

Quality is pride of workmanship.

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.

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

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

You must have a supplier relationship of constant improvement.

Managers don't like giving appraisals, and employees don't like getting them. Perhaps they're not liked because both parties suspect what the evidence has proved for decades: Traditional performance appraisals don't work.

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.

You can not define being exactly on time.

My mother was my biggest role model. She taught me to hate waste. We never wasted anything.

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 most basic problem is that performance appraisals often don't accurately assess performance.

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

It is management's job to direct the efforts of all components toward the aim of the system. The first step is clarification: everyone in the organization must understand the aim of the system, and how to direct his efforts toward it. Everyone must understand the damage and loss to the whole organization from a team that seeks to become a selfish, independent, profit center.

The emphasis should be on why we do a job.

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

Any manager can do well in an expanding market.

Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.

In God we trust; all others bring data.

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

There is very little evidence that we give a hoot about profit.

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.

People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning.

Lack of knowledge - that is the problem.

Scrap doesn't come for free, we pay someone to make it.

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.

Sub-optimization is when everyone is for himself. Optimization is when everyone is working to help the company.

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.

Plants don't close from poor workmanship, but from poor management.

Profit in business comes from repeat customers

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

Quality is everyone's responsibility.

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

A manager of people needs to understand that all people are different. This is not ranking people. He needs to understand that the performance of anyone is governed largely by the system that he works in, the responsibility of management.

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

Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.

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.

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.

Learning is not cumpulsory... neither is survival.

Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action.

Let us ask our suppliers to come and help us to solve our problems.

Everyone is a customer for somebody, or a supplier to somebody.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

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.

Uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality.

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

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.

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

For Quality: Stamp out fires, automate, computerize, M.B.O., install merit pay, rank people, best efforts, zero defects. WRONG!!!! Missing ingredient: profound knowledge.

Zero defects is a super highway going down the tube.

The big problems are where people don't realise they have one in the first place.

Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.

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.

Export anything to a friendly country except American management.

People don't like to make mistakes.

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

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

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

A committee appointed by the President of a company will report what the President wishes to hear. Would they dare report otherwise?.

A goal without a method is nonsense.

A leader is a coach, not a judge.

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

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

A leader's job is to help his people.

A man who knows not his limitations is of no use to anyone.

A manager of people knows that in this stable state it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake.

A rational prediction has an explanation based on theory.

A rule should suit the purpose.

A system can not understand itself.

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.

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

A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves in the Western world, components become selfish, competitive. We cannot afford the destructive effect of competition.

A system must have an aim. Without the aim, there is no system.

Absence of defects does not necessarily build business... Something more is required.

All models are wrong; some models are useful.

Any two people have different ideas of what is important.

Anybody can achieve gains in quality by slowing down production. That is not what we are talking about.

Anyone that enjoys his work is a pleasure to work with.

Change the rule and you will get a new number.

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

Confusing common causes with special causes will only make things worse.

Defects are not free. Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them.

Divide responsibility and nobody is responsible.

Does experience help? NO! Not if we are doing the wrong things.

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.

Don't expect smart people to listen to you without proof.

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

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?

Experience by itself teaches nothing.

Experience by itself teaches nothing... Without theory, experience has no meaning. Without theory, one has no questions to ask. Hence, without theory, there is no learning.

Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, of the machine-time, of all which raise the manufacturer's cost and price that the purchaser must pay

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.

Hard work and best efforts will not by themselves dig us out of the pit.

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.

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

Hold everybody accountable? Ridiculous!

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

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

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!

If someone can make a contribution to the company he feels important.

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

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.

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

Improve quality, you automatically improve productivity.