Phil Crosby Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quality has to be caused, not controlled.

Quality means conformance to requirements, not elegance.

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

People are conditioned to believe that error is inevitable.... However, we do not accept the same standard when it comes to our personal life. If we did, we would resign ourselves to being shortchanged now and then when we cash our paychecks. We would expect hospital nurses to drop a certain percentage of all newborn babies. We would expect to go home to the wrong house periodically. As individuals we do not tolerate these things. Thus we have a double standard, one for ourselves, one for the company.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.

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

If you don't know what the defect level is, how do you know when to get mad?

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

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

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

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.

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.

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