W. Edwards Deming Quotes

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.

Put a good person in a bad system and the bad system wins, no contest.

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.

In God we trust; all others bring data.

Improve quality, you automatically improve productivity.

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.

Manage the cause, not the result.

Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.

Two basic rules of life are: 1) Change is inevitable. 2) Everybody resists change.

It's not enough to do your best; you must know what to do & then do your best.

Each system is perfectly designed to give you exactly what you are getting today.

Innovation comes from people who take joy in their work.

The ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.

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.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.

People work in the system. Management creates the system

The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort.

Quality is everyone's responsibility.

We are here to learn, to make a difference and to have fun.

Everyone is a customer for somebody, or a supplier to somebody.

The biggest cost of poor quality is when your customer buys it from someone else because they didn't like yours.

Don't expect smart people to listen to you without proof.

The customer is the most important part of the production line.

Management by results - like driving a car by looking in rear view mirror.

Transformation is not automatic. It must be learned; it must be led.