W. Edwards Deming Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

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
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
A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves in the Western world, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centres, and thus destroy the system.... The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization. We can not afford the destructive effect of competition.

W. Edwards Deming
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.

W. Edwards Deming
The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system can not understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside.

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

W. Edwards Deming
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!

W. Edwards Deming
It is wrong to suppose that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it – a costly myth

W. Edwards Deming
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.

W. Edwards Deming
Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.

W. Edwards Deming
They realized that the gains that you get by statistical methods are gains that you get without new machinery, without new people. Anybody can produce quality if he lowers his production rate. That is not what I am talking about. Statistical thinking and statistical methods are to Japanese production workers, foremen, and all the way through the company, a second language. In statistical control you have a reproducible product hour after hour, day after day. And see how comforting that is to management, they now know what they can produce, they know what their costs are going to be.

W. Edwards Deming
What is the variation trying to tell us about a process, about the people in the process?

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

W. Edwards Deming
It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of a specific activity or method. It must always relate to a better life for everyone.

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

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

W. Edwards Deming
Management's job. 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 centre.

W. Edwards Deming
The various segments of the system of profound knowledge proposed here cannot be separated. They interact with each other. Thus, knowledge of psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.

W. Edwards Deming
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...

W. Edwards Deming
No one can measure the loss of business that may arise from a defective item that goes out to a customer.

W. Edwards Deming
Precision is expressed by an international standard, viz., the standard error. It measures the average of the difference between a complete coverage and a long series of estimates formed from samples drawn from this complete coverage by a particular procedure or drawing, and processed by a particular estimating formula.

W. Edwards Deming
The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!

W. Edwards Deming
... the principle that where there is fear, there will be wrong figures....

W. Edwards Deming
The customer is the most important part of the production line.

W. Edwards Deming
What is a system? 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 an aim, there is no system. The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include plans for the future. The aim is a value judgment. (We are of course talking here about a man-made system.)

W. Edwards Deming
Learning is not compulsory; it's voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it's voluntary. But to survive, we must learn.

W. Edwards Deming
The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they we taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management.

W. Edwards Deming