W. Edwards Deming - People Quotes

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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.

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
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
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
What is the variation trying to tell us about a process, about the people in the process?

W. Edwards Deming
In Europe and in America, people are now more interested in the cost of quality and in systems of quality-audit. But in Japan, we are keeping very strong interest to improve quality by use of methods which you started.... when we improve quality we also improve productivity, just as you told us in 1950 would happen.

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

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