Dr. William Edwards Deming was an American engineer, statistician, professor, author, lecturer, and management consultant. Educated initially as an electrical engineer and later specializing in mathematical physics, he helped develop the sampling techniques still used by the U.S. Department of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This W Edwards Deming quotes will motivate you.
Best 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.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “In God we trust; all others bring data.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“Put a good person in a bad system and the bad system wins, no contest.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “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
- “Two basic rules of life are: 1) Change is inevitable. 2) Everybody resists change.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Improve quality, you automatically improve productivity.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “It’s not enough to do your best; you must know what to do & then do your best.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“Innovation comes from people who take joy in their work.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “The ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “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
- “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“Each system is perfectly designed to give you exactly what you are getting today.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “…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
- “Manage the cause, not the result.” ~ W. Edwards Deming quotes
- “Management by results – like driving a car by looking in rearview mirror.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “The most valuable “currency” of any organization is the initiative and creativity of its members. Every leader has the solemn moral responsibility to develop these to the maximum in all his people. This is the leader’s highest priority.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“Quality is everyone’s responsibility.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “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
- “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
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“Uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “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
- “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “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.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“Stamping out fires is a lot of fun, but it is only putting things back the way they were.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Learning is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. But to survive, we must learn.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “The biggest cost of poor quality is when your customer buys it from someone else because they didn’t like yours.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “The customer is the most important part of the production line.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“A goal without a method is nonsense.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers – a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars – and on up through the university. On the job people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “We know what we told him, but we don’t know what he heard.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“Divide responsibility and nobody is responsible.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Scientific data are not taken for museum purposes; they are taken as a basis for doing something. If nothing is to be done with the data, then there is no use in collecting any. The ultimate purpose of taking data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation for action. The step intermediate between the collection of data and the action is prediction.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “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
- “Quality is pride of workmanship.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“Information is not knowledge. Let’s not confuse the two.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Defects are not free. Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Nobody goes to work to do a bad job.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Quality starts in the boardroom.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “You must not run your Organization as a functional hierarchy. You must understand it as a System.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“Understanding variation is the key to success in quality and business.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Transformation is not automatic. It must be learned; it must be led.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean that you should.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “We are being ruined by the best efforts of people who are doing the wrong thing.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
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“We are here to learn, to make a difference, and to have fun.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “To optimize the whole, we must sub-optimize the parts” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “A committee appointed by the President of a company will report what the President wishes to hear. Would they dare report otherwise?.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “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
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“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
- “The system that people work in and the interaction with people may account for 90 or 95 percent of performance.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “No one can measure the loss of business that may arise from a defective item that goes out to a customer.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “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
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“Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Scrap doesn’t come for free, we pay someone to make it.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “When asked what single event was most helpful in developing the Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein replied, “Figuring out how to think about the problem”.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “If you destroy the people of a company, you do not have much left.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Nothing happens without personal transformation.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Does experience help? NO! Not if we are doing the wrong things.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “A leader is a coach, not a judge.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
- “Research shows that the climate of an organization influences an individuals contribution far more than the individual himself.” ~ W. Edwards Deming
