Quotes from W. Edwards Deming

It is not enough to just do your best or work hard; You must know what to work on.

Inspection to improve quality is too late, ineffective, costly. Quality comes not from inspection, but from the improvement of the production process.

Beware of conference-room promises. (Ronald Moen.)

Quality is pride of workmanship.

The transformation can only be accomplished by man, not by hardware (computers, gadgets, automation, new machinery). A company can not buy its way into quality.

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.

Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement of product and service for the future, not by the quarterly dividend.

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.

Many customers form their opinions about the product or about the service solely by their contacts with the people that they see—contact men, I will call them.

As long as management is quick to take credit for a firm's successes but equally swift to blame its workers for its failures, no surefire remedy for low productivity can be expected in American manufacturing and service industries.

Short-term profits are not reliable indicator of performance of management. Anybody can pay dividends by deferring maintenance, cutting out research, or acquiring another company.

People generally want to do the right thing, but in a large organization, they frequently don't really understand what is the right thing.

Divided responsibility means that nobody is responsible.

quality control departments have taken the job of quality away from the people that can contribute most to quality—management, supervisors, managers of purchasing, and production workers.

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

Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products and services.

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

Management of a system, cooperation between components, not competition. Management of people.

Schools of business responded to popular demand for finance and creative accounting. The results are decline.

Christine, what is your job? Is it: To make 25 calls per hours? Or To give callers courteous satisfaction, no brushoff. It can not be both.

Competent men in every position, if they are doing their best, know all that there is to know about their work except how to improve it.

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

The timid and the fainthearted, and people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.

In God we trust. All others [must] have data.