Top 100 Deming Quotes
#1. She had chosen him; she had made him hers. She had done it out of love and duty. -Deming
Melissa De La Cruz
#2. The late W. Edwards Deming, guru of Quality management, once declared, 'The most important things we need to manage can't be measured.' If that's true of what we need to manage, it should be even more obvious that it's true of what we need to teach.
Alfie Kohn
#3. No-one can put in his best performance unless he feels secure," Deming wrote,
Julian Birkinshaw
#4. Transformation begins with the individual Dr William Edwards Deming
The New Economics - 1993
Priyavrat Thareja
#5. The "patron saint" of Japanese quality control, ironically, is an American named W. Edwards Deming, who was virtually unknown in his own country until his ideas of quality control began to make such a big impact on Japanese companies.
Akio Morita
#6. W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught that any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem. The problem is inherent in the system.2 As a leader, you own responsibility for the system.
Chris McChesney
#7. It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best. - W. Edwards Deming
Joseph Grenny
#8. I believe that, the prevailing system of management is, at its core, dedicated to mediocrity. It forces people to work harder and harder to compensate for failing to tap the spirit and collective intelligence that characterizes working together at their best. Deming saw this clearly,
Peter M. Senge
#9. After you defined Quality, it was the turn of quantity. Now apply judicious quality control. Select what can be improved? Strive for achieving the perceived Quality as above. Practically, a virtuous circle to this Quality is followed through deploying Deming's PDSA
Priyavrat Thareja
#10. Management of outcomes may not be any more than a skill. It does not require knowledge.
W. Edwards Deming
#11. The big problems are where people don't realise they have one in the first place.
W. Edwards Deming
#13. Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
Barbara Deming
#14. Forces of Destruction: grades in school, merit system, incentive pay, business plans, quotas.
W. Edwards Deming
#16. We are being ruined by the best efforts of people who are doing the wrong thing.
W. Edwards Deming
#17. One need not be eminent in any part of profound knowledge in order to understand it and to apply it. The various segments of the system of profound knowledge cannot be separated. They interact with each other. For example knowledge about psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation.
W. Edwards Deming
#18. A person and an organization must have goals, take actions to achieve those goals, gather evidence of achievement, study and reflect on the data and from that take actions again. Thus, they are in a continuous feedback spiral toward continuous improvement. This is what 'Kaizan' means.
W. Edwards Deming
#20. I like to use research to enlarge the poem. And sometimes a rhetorical or syntactical gesture stitches the poem along.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#21. Two basic rules of life are: 1) Change is inevitable. 2) Everybody resists change.
W. Edwards Deming
#22. I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this: 94% belongs to the system responsibility of management 6% special
W. Edwards Deming
#23. Competition should not be for a share of the market-but to expand the market.
W. Edwards Deming
#24. A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
Barbara Deming
#25. People with targets and jobs dependent upon meeting them will probably meet the targets - even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it.
W. Edwards Deming
#27. I'm a geophysicist who has conducted and published climate studies in top-rank scientific journals. My perspective on Mr. Inhofe and the issue of global warming is informed not only by my knowledge of climate science but also by my studies of the history and philosophy of science.
David Deming
#29. It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.
Barbara Deming
#30. Declining productivity and quality means your unit production costs stay high but you don't have as much to sell. Your workers don't want to be paid less, so to maintain profits, you increase your prices. That's inflation.
W. Edwards Deming
#31. Global warming has long since passed from scientific hypothesis to the realm of pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo.
David Deming
#35. The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
W. Edwards Deming
#36. No one has all the answers. Fortunately, it is not necessary to have all the answers for good management.
W. Edwards Deming
#37. The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!
W. Edwards Deming
#39. When a worker has reached a stable state, further training will not help him.
W. Edwards Deming
#40. I learned always to trust my own deep sense of what I should do, and not just obediently trust the judgment of others - even others better than I am.
Barbara Deming
#41. 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
#42. On production floors and in corporate offices, sociological verbiage has replaced a basic understanding of human behavior.
W. Edwards Deming
#43. We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women - whose stories, for all our differences, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.
Barbara Deming
#45. The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
Barbara Deming
#46. I'm interested in thinking about how are we contributing to the culture, what we can write that might help us deepen the culture, make us more reflective, make us more empathetic, make us feel our connectedness in other ways.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#47. Monetary rewards are not a substitute for intrinsic motivation.
W. Edwards Deming
#49. Management by results is confusing special causes with common causes.
W. Edwards Deming
#50. 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
#52. Eighty-five percent of the reasons for failure are deficiencies in the systems and process rather than the employee. The role of management is to change the process rather than badgering individuals to do better.
W. Edwards Deming
#53. It would be a mistake to export western management to a friendly country.
W. Edwards Deming
#54. Understanding variation is the key to success in quality and business.
W. Edwards Deming
#55. Let us ask our suppliers to come and help us to solve our problems.
W. Edwards Deming
#56. The job can't be finished only improved to please the customer.
W. Edwards Deming
#58. It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of activity or methods. It must always relate directly to how life is better for everyone ... 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.
W. Edwards Deming
#59. The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system can not understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside.
W. Edwards Deming
#60. For me teaching has provided community and livelihood and the satisfaction of passing along what I've learned to others.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#61. People care more for themselves when they contribute to the system.
W. Edwards Deming
#62. 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
#64. In 1945, the world was in a shambles. American companies had no competition. So nobody really thought much about quality. Why should they? The world bought everything America produced. It was a prescription for disaster.
W. Edwards Deming
#65. Just because you can measure everything doesn't mean that you should.
W. Edwards Deming
#66. 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
#67. Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.
W. Edwards Deming
#69. Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.
Barbara Deming
#70. 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
#73. What makes a scientist great is the care that he takes in telling you what is wrong with his results, so that you will not misuse them.
W. Edwards Deming
#76. Managers don't like giving appraisals, and employees don't like getting them. Perhaps they're not liked because both parties suspect what the evidence has proved for decades: Traditional performance appraisals don't work.
W. Edwards Deming
#77. Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.
W. Edwards Deming
#78. Export anything to a friendly country except American management.
W. Edwards Deming
#79. It's not enough to do your best; you must know what to do & then do your best.
W. Edwards Deming
#81. When we're writing anything, we're bearing witness to the time we live in and how it's different from any other time in history.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#82. A lot of times students will come up to me and say, "Well, I can't write because I don't know what I think about such-and-such." And I say, "That's why you have to write." You don't wait until you know, because then who cares - it's static.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#83. The ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.
W. Edwards Deming
#84. The individual has been crushed by our style of management today.
W. Edwards Deming
#85. Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.
W. Edwards Deming
#87. The point is to change one's life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point is so to act that one can master them now.
Barbara Deming
#89. Climate change is a moral challenge, not simply an economic or technological problem. It is linked to social justice, because it is the poor citizens of the world who will suffer the most from our excesses.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
#91. Knowledge is theory. We should be thankful if action of management is based on theory. Knowledge has temporal spread. Information is not knowledge. The world is drowning in information but is slow in acquisition of knowledge. There is no substitute for knowledge.
W. Edwards Deming
#92. Mere allocation of huge sums of money for quality will not bring quality.
W. Edwards Deming
#94. 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
#96. If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.
W. Edwards Deming
#97. Impossible is Nothing
Deming
#100. I like to joke that I started writing long poems out the anxiety over ending and starting poems. It just seemed easier to keep going.
Alison Hawthorne Deming
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