Top 100 W. Edwards Deming Quotes
#1. Management of outcomes may not be any more than a skill. It does not require knowledge.
W. Edwards Deming
#3. Forces of Destruction: grades in school, merit system, incentive pay, business plans, quotas.
W. Edwards Deming
#9. When a worker has reached a stable state, further training will not help him.
W. Edwards Deming
#10. On production floors and in corporate offices, sociological verbiage has replaced a basic understanding of human behavior.
W. Edwards Deming
#13. 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 the aim, there is no system.
W. Edwards Deming
#14. It would be a mistake to export western management to a friendly country.
W. Edwards Deming
#15. The job can't be finished only improved to please the customer.
W. Edwards Deming
#16. People care more for themselves when they contribute to the system.
W. Edwards Deming
#17. 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
#19. You can see from a flow diagram who depends on you and whom you can depend on. You can now take joy in your work.
W. Edwards Deming
#22. The ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.
W. Edwards Deming
#23. Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.
W. Edwards Deming
#31. People copy examples and then they wonder what is the trouble. They look at examples and without theory they learn nothing.
W. Edwards Deming
#34. A manager of people knows that in this stable state it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake.
W. Edwards Deming
#35. The system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.
W. Edwards Deming
#36. If someone can make a contribution to the company he feels important.
W. Edwards Deming
#37. Learn the basics of analytics and people will love you. If you don't have time to learn, hire someone.
W. Edwards Deming
#39. Does experience help? NO! Not if we are doing the wrong things.
W. Edwards Deming
#40. 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
#42. It will not suffice to have customers that are merely satisfied. Customers that are unhappy and some that are merely satisfied switch. Profit comes from repeat customers - those that boast about the product or service.
W. Edwards Deming
#43. 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
#44. You must have a supplier relationship of constant improvement.
W. Edwards Deming
#45. Adopt a new philosophy of cooperation (win-win) in which everybody wins.
W. Edwards Deming
#46. The customer invents nothing. New products and new services come from the producer.
W. Edwards Deming
#50. Competent men in every position, if they are doing their best, know all that there is to know about their work except how to improve it.
W. Edwards Deming
#53. A leader knows who is outside of the system and needs special help.
W. Edwards Deming
#54. You must not run your Organization as a functional hierarchy. You must understand it as a System.
W. Edwards Deming
#55. 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
#56. We have to bring back the individual. Management has smothered the individual.
W. Edwards Deming
#59. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-esteem, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning.
W. Edwards Deming
#60. To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for
W. Edwards Deming
#62. The customer is the most important part of the production line.
W. Edwards Deming
#63. 'Quality' means what will sell and do a customer some good - at least try to.
W. Edwards Deming
#64. Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.
W. Edwards Deming
#65. It is a mistake to assume that if everybody does his job, it will be all right. The whole system may be in trouble.
W. Edwards Deming
#66. He that would run his company on visible figures alone will in time have neither company nor figures.
W. Edwards Deming
#67. New product and new types of service are generated, not by asking the consumer, but by knowledge, imagination, innovation, risk, trial and error on the part of the producer, backed by enough capital to develop the product or service and to stay in business during the learn months of introduction.
W. Edwards Deming
#68. The most basic problem is that performance appraisals often don't accurately assess performance.
W. Edwards Deming
#70. Choice of aim is clearly a matter of clarification of values, especially on the choice between possible options.
W. Edwards Deming
#74. We cannot rely on mass inspection to improve quality, though there are times when 100 percent inspection is necessary. As Harold S. Dodge said many years ago, 'You cannot inspect quality into a product.' The quality is there or it isn't by the time it's inspected.
W. Edwards Deming
#76. What should be the aim of management? What is their job? Quality is the responsibility of the top people. Its origin is in the boardroom. They are the ones who decide.
W. Edwards Deming
#77. Sub-optimization is when everyone is for himself. Optimization is when everyone is working to help the company.
W. Edwards Deming
#80. Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.
W. Edwards Deming
#81. If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.
W. Edwards Deming
#84. The greatest waste ... is failure to use the abilities of people ... to learn about their frustrations and about the contributions that they are eager to make.
W. Edwards Deming
#86. We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes.
W. Edwards Deming
#87. If you destroy the people of a company, you do not have much left.
W. Edwards Deming
#89. The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.
W. Edwards Deming
#90. Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.
W. Edwards Deming
#92. Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement of product and service for the future, not by the quarterly dividend.
W. Edwards Deming
#93. The biggest cost of poor quality is when your customer buys it from someone else because they didn't like yours.
W. Edwards Deming
#94. The result of long-term relationships is better and better quality, and lower and lower costs.
W. Edwards Deming
#95. Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process.
W. Edwards Deming
#96. The prevailing - and foolish - attitude is that a good manager can be a good manager anywhere, with no special knowledge of the production process he's managing. A man with a financial background may know nothing about manufacturing shoes or cars, but he's put in charge anyway.
W. Edwards Deming
#97. Anybody can achieve gains in quality by slowing down production. That is not what we are talking about.
W. Edwards Deming
#98. If you wait for people to come to you, you'll only get small problems. You must go and find them. The big problems are where people don't realize they have one in the first place.
W. Edwards Deming
#99. Management's job is to know which systems are stable and which are not.
W. Edwards Deming
#100. Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.
W. Edwards Deming
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
