Philip B. Crosby Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

In a true zero-defects approach, there are no unimportant items.

Philip B. Crosby
A rule to live by: I won't use anything I can't explain in five minutes.

Philip B. Crosby
Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric.

Philip B. Crosby
Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.

Philip B. Crosby
Quality management is a systematic way of guaranteeing that organized activities happen the way they are planned.

Philip B. Crosby
Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.

Philip B. Crosby
Quality is free, but no one is ever going to know it if there isn't some sort of agreed-on system of measurement. Quality has always suffered from the lack of an obvious method of measurement in spite of the fact such a method was developed by General Electric in the 1950' s as a tool for determining the need for corrective action on a specific product line.

Philip B. Crosby
Quality is conformance to requirements - nothing more, nothing less.

Philip B. Crosby
The customer deserves to receive exactly what we have promised to produce — a clean room, a hot cup of coffee, a nonporous casing, a trip to the moon on gossamer wings.

Philip B. Crosby
We must define quality as conformance to specifications if we are to manage it.

Philip B. Crosby
If we deliver on time, but the product has defects, we have not delivered on time.

Philip B. Crosby
Most managers are so concerned with today, and with getting our own real and imagined problems settled, that we are incapable of planning corrective or positive actions more than a week or so ahead.

Philip B. Crosby
The problem of quality management is not what people don't know about it. The problem is what the think they do know.

Philip B. Crosby
Problems breed problems, and the lack of a disciplined method of openly attacking them breeds more problems.

Philip B. Crosby
You are going to be measured anyway by some means, fair or foul. Usually the one doing the measuring has nothing specific in mind; so he does it by the seat of his pants. Careers are destroyed in this manner.

Philip B. Crosby
The first erroneous assumption is that quality means goodness, or luxury, or shininess or weight. The word "quality" is used to signify the relative worth of things in such phrases as "good quality," "bad quality," and that brave new statement 'quality of life.' 'Quality of life' is a cliche because each listener assumes that the speaker means exactly what he or she, the listener, means by the phrase. It is a situation in which individuals talk dreamily about something without ever bothering to define it.

Philip B. Crosby
You have to lead people gently toward what they already know is right.

Philip B. Crosby
If you don't know what the defect level is, how do you know when to get mad?

Philip B. Crosby
The cost of quality is the expense of doing things wrong.

Philip B. Crosby
Many managers feel, somewhat cynically, that people are being paid to do their jobs and that's that. This attitude reflects an insensitivity to people that is a trademark of many hockey-style managers.

Philip B. Crosby