W. Edwards Deming Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

The only excuse for taking a survey is to enable a rational decision to be made on some problem that has arisen and on which decision, right or wrong, will be made.

W. Edwards Deming
A statistician's responsibility is not confined to plans: he must also seek assurance of cooperation in field and office, and maintain constant touch with the work, also with the interpretation of the results.

W. Edwards Deming
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.

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

W. Edwards Deming
Sampling is the science and art of controlling and measuring the reliability of useful statistical information through the theory of probability.

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
It is important to realize that it is not the one measurement, alone, but its relation to the rest of the sequence that is of interest.

W. Edwards Deming
Statistical research is particularly necessary in the government service because of the high level of quality and economy that the public has the right to expect in government statistics.

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

W. Edwards Deming
If the cost of classifying a sampling unit were zero, one could always safely recommend fantastic plans of stratified sampling, with no worry about costs. The fact is, though, that there is always a price to pay...

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

W. Edwards Deming
Under the usual teaching, the trusting student, to pass the course must forsake all the scientific sense that he has accumulated so far, and learn the book, mistakes and all.

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

W. Edwards Deming
The statistician's report to management should not talk about probabilities. It will merely give outside margins of error for the results of chief importance.

W. Edwards Deming
A good engineer, or a good economist, or a good chemist, already has a good start, because the statistical method is only good science brought up to date by the recognition that all laws are subject to the variations which occur in nature.

W. Edwards Deming
The minute a statistician steps into the position of the executive who must make decisions and defend them, the statistician ceases to be a statistician.

W. Edwards Deming
Your study of statistical methods will not displace any other knowledge that you have; rather, it will extend your knowledge of engineering, chemistry, or economics, and make it more useful.

W. Edwards Deming
We must know more about a plan than the probabilities of selection. We must know also the procedure by which to draw the sampling units, and the formula or procedure by which to calulate the estimate.

W. Edwards Deming
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.

W. Edwards Deming
A chunk is a convenient slice of a population.

W. Edwards Deming
You need not be a mathematical statistician to do good statistical work, but you will need the guidance of a first class mathematical statistician.

W. Edwards Deming
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

W. Edwards Deming
The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain - stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment - over the long term.

W. Edwards Deming
Pencil and paper for construction of distributions, scatter diagrams, and run-charts to compare small groups and to detect trends are more efficient methods of estimation than statistical inference that depends on variances and standard errors, as the simple techniques preserve the information in the original data.

W. Edwards Deming
It would be splendid if all action required in social, economic, and industrial planning could be based on scientific laws; but actually, so many of the laws remain yet to be discovered that most action must be taken on the basis of knowledge of the subject matter in related fields.

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 questionnaire is never perfect: some are simply better than others.

W. Edwards Deming
There is only one kind of whiskey, but two broad classes of data, good and bad.

W. Edwards Deming
The principles and methods for improvement are the same for service as for manufacturing. The actual application differs, of course, from one product to another, and from one type of service to another.

W. Edwards Deming
It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to - that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated. Support is not enough; action is required.

W. Edwards Deming