Phil Crosby Quotes

#1. 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 goassamer wings.

Phil Crosby

#2. Change should be a friend. It should happen by plan, not by accident.

Phil Crosby

#3. Quality is such an attractive banner that sometimes we think we can get away with just waving it, without doing the hard work necessary to achieve it.

Phil Crosby

#4. Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.

Phil Crosby

#5. Being convinced one knows the whole story is the surest way to fail.

Phil Crosby

#6. When in doubt, delete it.

Phil Crosby

#7. Successful people breed success.

Phil Crosby

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

Phil Crosby

#9. Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.

Phil Crosby

#10. If we deliver on time, but the product has defects, we have not delivered on time.

Phil Crosby

#11. Very few of the great leaders ever get through their careers without failing, sometimes dramatically.

Phil Crosby

#12. Most things don't work like they are supposed to work.

Phil Crosby

#13. We can spend our whole lives underachieving.

Phil Crosby

#14. The great discoveries are usually obvious.

Phil Crosby

#15. When you're out of quality, you're out of business.

Phil Crosby

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

Phil Crosby

#17. The cost of quality is the expense of doing things wrong.

Phil Crosby

#18. It isn't what you find, it's what you do about what you find.

Phil Crosby

#19. You don't have to be noisy to be effective.

Phil Crosby

#20. Problems breed problems, and the lack of a disciplined method of openly attacking them breeds more problems.

Phil Crosby

#21. The audience only pays attention as long as you know where you are going.

Phil Crosby

#22. Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.

Phil Crosby

#23. A rule to live by: I won't use anything I can't explain in five minutes.

Phil Crosby

#24. Selecting the right person for the right job is the largest part of coaching.

Phil Crosby

#25. No one can remember more than three points.

Phil Crosby

#26. Making a wrong decision is understandable. Refusing to search continually for learning is not.

Phil Crosby

#27. Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.

Phil Crosby

#28. It is always cheaper to do the job right the first time.

Phil Crosby

#29. Quality is free. It's not a gift, but it's free. The 'unquality' things are what cost money.

Phil Crosby

#30. Quality has to be caused, not controlled.

Phil Crosby

#31. 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.

Phil Crosby

#32. It is not possible to know what you need to learn.

Phil Crosby

#33. If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.

Phil Crosby

#34. You have to lead people gently toward what they already know is right.

Phil Crosby

#35. 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.

Phil Crosby

#36. We must define quality as conformance to specifications if we are to manage it.

Phil Crosby