Top 100 Edwards Deming Quotes
#1. Management of outcomes may not be any more than a skill. It does not require knowledge.
W. Edwards Deming
#2. The big problems are where people don't realise they have one in the first place.
W. Edwards Deming
#4. Forces of Destruction: grades in school, merit system, incentive pay, business plans, quotas.
W. Edwards Deming
#6. We are being ruined by the best efforts of people who are doing the wrong thing.
W. Edwards Deming
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. Two basic rules of life are: 1) Change is inevitable. 2) Everybody resists change.
W. Edwards Deming
#11. 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
#12. Competition should not be for a share of the market-but to expand the market.
W. Edwards Deming
#13. 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
#15. 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
#19. The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
W. Edwards Deming
#20. No one has all the answers. Fortunately, it is not necessary to have all the answers for good management.
W. Edwards Deming
#21. The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!
W. Edwards Deming
#23. When a worker has reached a stable state, further training will not help him.
W. Edwards Deming
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. On production floors and in corporate offices, sociological verbiage has replaced a basic understanding of human behavior.
W. Edwards Deming
#28. Monetary rewards are not a substitute for intrinsic motivation.
W. Edwards Deming
#30. Management by results is confusing special causes with common causes.
W. Edwards Deming
#31. 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
#33. 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
#34. It would be a mistake to export western management to a friendly country.
W. Edwards Deming
#35. Understanding variation is the key to success in quality and business.
W. Edwards Deming
#36. Let us ask our suppliers to come and help us to solve our problems.
W. Edwards Deming
#37. The job can't be finished only improved to please the customer.
W. Edwards Deming
#39. 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
#40. The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system can not understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside.
W. Edwards Deming
#41. People care more for themselves when they contribute to the system.
W. Edwards Deming
#42. 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
#44. 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
#45. Just because you can measure everything doesn't mean that you should.
W. Edwards Deming
#46. 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
#47. 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
#49. 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
#52. 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
#55. 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
#56. Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.
W. Edwards Deming
#57. Export anything to a friendly country except American management.
W. Edwards Deming
#58. It's not enough to do your best; you must know what to do & then do your best.
W. Edwards Deming
#60. The ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.
W. Edwards Deming
#61. The individual has been crushed by our style of management today.
W. Edwards Deming
#62. Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.
W. Edwards Deming
#66. 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
#67. Mere allocation of huge sums of money for quality will not bring quality.
W. Edwards Deming
#69. 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
#71. If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.
W. Edwards Deming
#74. Any substantial improvement must come from action on the system, the responsibility of management. Wishing and pleading and begging the workers to do better was totally futile.
W. Edwards Deming
#76. No one knows the cost of a defective product - don't tell me you do. You know the cost of replacing it, but not the cost of a dissatisfied customer.
W. Edwards Deming
#77. She learns, after she finishes the job, that she programmed very well the specifications as delivered to her, but that they were deficient. If she had only known the purpose of the program, she could have done it right for the purpose, even though the specifications were deficient.
W. Edwards Deming
#78. Put a good person in a bad system and the bad system wins, no contest.
W. Edwards Deming
#82. What we need to do is learn to work in the system, by which I mean that everybody, every team, every platform, every division, every component is there not for individual competitive profit or recognition, but for contribution to the system as a whole on a win-win basis.
W. Edwards Deming
#83. The pay and privilege of the captains of industry are now so closely linked to the quarterly dividend that they may find it personally unrewarding to do what is right for the company.
W. Edwards Deming
#85. Eighty percent of American managers cannot answer with any measure of confidence these seemingly simple questions: What is my job? What in it really counts? How well am I doing?
W. Edwards Deming
#86. People copy examples and then they wonder what is the trouble. They look at examples and without theory they learn nothing.
W. Edwards Deming
#88. Many customers form their opinions about the product or about the service solely by their contacts with the people that they see - contact men, I will call them.
W. Edwards Deming
#89. The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable.
W. Edwards Deming
#92. Everyone is a customer for somebody, or a supplier to somebody.
W. Edwards Deming
#96. A manager of people knows that in this stable state it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake.
W. Edwards Deming
#97. If you don't understand how to run an efficient operation, new machinery will just give you new problems of operation and maintenance. The sure way to increase productivity is to better administrate man and machine.
W. Edwards Deming
#98. The system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.
W. Edwards Deming
#99. For Quality: Stamp out fires, automate, computerize, M.B.O., install merit pay, rank people, best efforts, zero defects. WRONG!!!! Missing ingredient: profound knowledge.
W. Edwards Deming
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