Edward Deming Quotes

In God we trust; all others bring data.

Without data, you're just another person with an opinion.

Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.

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

A bad system will beat a good person every time.

It is not enough to do your best, you must know what to do, and then do your best.

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.

Every system is perfectly designed to get the result that it does.

The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!

In God we trust; all others must bring data.

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

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

A goal without a method is cruel.

dissatisfied customer does not complain: he just switches.

You don't know what you don't know.

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and THEN do your best. —W. Edwards Deming

It is not enough to just do your best or work hard; You must know what to work on.

Quality is pride of workmanship.

Inspection to improve quality is too late, ineffective, costly. Quality comes not from inspection, but from the improvement of the production process.

    Beware of conference-room promises. (Ronald Moen.)

The transformation can only be accomplished by man, not by hardware (computers, gadgets, automation, new machinery). A company can not buy its way into quality.

it will not suffice to have customers that are merely satisfied. Customers that are unhappy and some that are merely satisfied switch. Profit comes from repeat customers—those that boast about the product or service.

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.

As long as management is quick to take credit for a firm’s successes but equally swift to blame its workers for its failures, no surefire remedy for low productivity can be expected in American manufacturing and service industries.

Management of a system, cooperation between components, not competition. Management of people.

To manage, one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for.

People generally want to do the right thing, but in a large organization, they frequently don't really understand what is the right thing.

Short-term profits are not reliable indicator of performance of management. Anybody can pay dividends by deferring maintenance, cutting out research, or acquiring another company.

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.

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.

Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement of product and service for the future, not by the quarterly dividend.

From the vantage point of the brain, doing well in school and at work involves one and the same state, the brain’s sweet spot for performance. The biology of anxiety casts us out of that zone for excellence. “Banish fear” was a slogan of the late quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming. He saw that fear froze a workplace: workers were reluctant to speak up, to share new ideas, or to coordinate well, let alone to improve the quality of their output. The same slogan applies to the classroom—fear frazzles the mind, disrupting learning.

Most American executives think they are in the business to make money, rather than products and services.

Divided responsibility means that nobody is responsible.

The purchasing department must change its focus from lowest initial cost of material purchased to lowest total cost.

Money and time spent for training will be ineffective unless inhibitors to good work are removed.

quality control departments have taken the job of quality away from the people that can contribute most to quality—management, supervisors, managers of purchasing, and production workers.

transformation begins with the individual” Dr William Edwards Deming The New Economics - 1993

Blame the process, not the people.

The most important figures needed for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable.

Christine, what is your job? Is it: To make 25 calls per hours? Or To give callers courteous satisfaction, no brushoff. It can not be both.

Schools of business responded to popular demand for finance and creative accounting. The results are decline.

No one has all the answers. Fortunately, it is not necessary to have all the answers for good management.

On production floors and in corporate offices, sociological verbiage has replaced a basic understanding of human behavior.

Competent men in every position, if they are doing their best, know all that there is to know about their work except how to improve it.

Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, and of machine-time, all of which raise the manufacturer’s cost and price that the purchaser must pay. The consumer is not always willing to subsidize this waste. The inevitable result is loss of market. Loss of market begets unemployment.

A bad system will beat a good person every time

In God we trust. All others [must] have data.

In God we trust; all others must bring data.” —W. Edwards Deming

The wealth of a nation depends on its people, management, and government, more than on its natural resources.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

There are two problems: i. Problems of today; ii. Problems of tomorrow, for the company that hopes to stay in business

I could do a much better job (fewer mistakes) if I knew what the program is to be used for. The specifications don't tell me what I need to know (programmer).

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.

The fact is, they tell me, that they are forced to cut corners to meet production. They never have time to finish anything. Push for production robs them of the chance to go into the production area to learn the problems created by the designs that they construct.

Ford hired the quality management guru Edward Deming to train his people on quality principles. In the kick-off meeting, he introduced Deming, spoke briefly about the critical need for quality management and then, leaving Deming to do the rest, left the room. As he was walking out, he realized Deming was following him. Surprised, he asked what had happened. In answer, Deming famously quipped that he was simply following the leader. Ford immediately realized his mistake and turned back to sit down with his team to learn about Total Quality Management (TQM).

In God we trust; all others must bring data. ~ W. Edwards Deming

As Edwards Deming said, “A bad system will beat a good person every time.

The aim of supervision should be to help people and machines and gadgets to do a better job.

The timid and the fainthearted, and people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.

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.

Experience alone, without theory, teaches management nothing about what to do to improve quality and competitive position, nor how to do it.

A new president came, talked with the head of sales, design, manufacturing, consumer research, and so forth. Everybody was doing a superb job, and had been doing so for years. Nobody had any problems. Yet somehow or other the company was going down the tube. Why? The answer was simple. Each staff area was sub-optimizing its own work, but not working as a team for the company.

Systemization If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. —W. EDWARDS DEMING, PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT EXPERT AND PIONEER OF STATISTICAL PROCESS CONTROL

Experience alone, without theory, teaches management nothing about what to do to improve quality and competitive position, nor how to do it. Experience will answer a question, and a question comes from theory.

Folklore has it in America that quality and production are incompatible; that you can not have both. A plant manager will usually tell you that it is either or. In his experience, if he pushes quality, he falls behind in production. If he pushes production, his quality suffers. This will be his experience when he knows not what quality is nor how to achieve it. A clear, concise answer came forth in a meeting with 22 production workers, all union representatives, in response to my question, "Why is it that productivity increase as quality improves?" Less rework. There is no better answer. Another version often comes forth: Not so much waste.

Management must understand design of product and of service, procurement of materials, problems of production, process control, and barriers on the job that rob the hourly worker of his birthright, the right to pride of workmanship.

MBWA (management by walking around) is hardly ever effective. The reason is that someone in management, walking around, has little idea about what questions to ask, and usually does not pause long enough at any spot to get the right answer.

term Lean was coined by John Krafcik in a 1988 article based on his master’s thesis at MIT Sloan School of Management1 and then popularized in The Machine that Changed the World and Lean Thinking. Lean Thinking summarized Womack and Jones’s findings from studying how Toyota operates, an approach that was spearheaded by Taiichi Ohno, codified by Shigeo Shingo, and strongly influenced by the work of W. Edwards Deming, Joseph Juran, Henry Ford, and U.S. grocery stores. Lean Thinking framed Toyota’s

Poor quality begets poor quality and lowers productivity all along the line, and some of the faulty product goes out the door, into the hands of the customer. And unhappy customer tells his friends. The multiplying effect of an unhappy customer is one of those unknown and unknowable figures, and likewise for the multiplying effect of a happy customer, who brings in business.

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 an aim, there is no system. A system must be managed. The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization. We cannot afford the destructive effect of competition.” – W. Edwards Deming The New Economics

Thought Leadership “The new economics for industry, government, education” Book by W. Edwards Deming “In God we trust. All others must bring data.” William Edwards Deming, Statistician, Professor and Author #smitanairjain #leadership #womenintech #thoughtleaders #tedxspeaker #technology #tech #success #strategy #startuplife #startupbusiness #startup #mentor #leaders #itmanagement #itleaders #innovation #informationtechnology #influencers #Influencer #hightech #fintechinfluencer #fintech #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #economy #economics #development #businessintelligence #business

One of my students told the class that he worked in a bank in which everybody made note of every action—a telephone call, a calculation, use of a computer, waiting on a customer, etc. There was a standard time for every act, and everybody was rated every day. Some days this man would make a score of 50, next day 260, etc. Everybody was ranked on his score, the lower the score, the higher the rank. Morale was understandably low. “My rate is 155 pieces per day. I can’t come near this figure—and we all have the problem—without turning out a lot of defective items.” She must bury her pride of workmanship to make her quota, or lose pay and maybe also her job. It could well be that with intelligent supervision and help, and with no inherited defects, this operator could produce in a day and with less effort many more good items than her stated rate. Some people in management claim that they have a better plan: dock her for a defective item. This sounds great. Make it clear that this is not the place for mistakes and defective items. Actually, this may be cruel supervision. Who declares an item to be defective? Is it clear to the worker and to the inspector—both of them—what constitutes a defective item? Would it have been declared defective yesterday? Who made the defective item? The worker, or the system? Where is the evidence?

As Nate Silver, author of The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don’t, points out, “ice cream sales and forest fires are correlated because both occur more often in the summer heat. But there is no causation; you don’t light a patch of the Montana brush on fire when you buy a pint of Häagen-Dazs.” Of course, it’s no surprise that correlation isn’t the same as causality. But although most organizations know that, I don’t think they act as if there is a difference. They’re comfortable with correlation. It allows managers to sleep at night. But correlation does not reveal the one thing that matters most in innovation—the causality behind why I might purchase a particular solution. Yet few innovators frame their primary challenge around the discovery of a cause. Instead, they focus on how they can make their products better, more profitable, or differentiated from the competition. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement that transformed manufacturing, once said: “If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.” After decades of watching great companies fail over and over again, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is, indeed, a better question to ask: What job did you hire that product to do? For me, this is a neat idea. When we buy a product, we essentially “hire” something to get a job done. If it does the job well, when we are confronted with the same job, we hire that same product again. And if the product does a crummy job, we “fire” it and look around for something else we might hire to solve the problem. Every day stuff happens to us. Jobs arise in our lives that we need to get done. Some jobs are little (“ pass the time while waiting in line”), some are big (“ find a more fulfilling career”). Some surface unpredictably (“ dress for an out-of-town business meeting after the airline lost my suitcase”), some regularly (“ pack a healthy, tasty lunch for my daughter to take to school”). Other times we know they’re coming. When we realize we have a job to do, we reach out and pull something into our lives to get the job done. I might, for example, choose to buy the New York Times because I have a job to fill my time while waiting for a doctor’s appointment and I don’t want to read the boring magazines available in the lobby. Or perhaps because I’m a basketball fan and it’s March Madness time. It’s only when a job arises in my life that the Times can solve for me that I’ll choose to hire the paper to do it. Or perhaps I have it delivered to my door so that my neighbors think I’m informed—and nothing about their ZIP code or median household income will tell the Times that either.

Processes are invisible from a customer’s standpoint—but the results of those processes are not. Processes can profoundly affect whether a customer chooses your product or service in the long run. And they may be a company’s best bet to ensure that the customer’s job, and not efficiency or productivity, remains the focal point for innovation in the long run. Absence of a process, as is the case with most traditional hospitals, is actually still a process. Things are getting done, however chaotically. But that’s not a good sign. W. Edwards Deming, father of the quality movement, may have put it best: “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, then you don’t know what you are doing.

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

Cleaning data in the analytics value chain violates the third of quality guru W. Edwards Deming’s 14 principles19 of business transformation: Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for massive inspection by building quality into the product in the first place. Rather than inspecting cars at the end of an assembly line and scrapping the ones that fail, it makes much better sense to design quality into the process and build high-quality cars. Similarly, it is much smarter to build data quality directly into the source systems that generate data than it is to trap and correct errors farther down the chain.

Superpower #3: Track for Accountability In God we trust; all others must bring data. —W. Edwards Deming

W. Edwards Deming

A bad person will beat a good person every time

Corrective action and validation form one of the key parts of the Plan-Do-Study-Act cycle, from Dr. W. Edwards Deming.¶¶ •Plan: the conceptualization of new ideas and actions to rectify or improve a situation. •Do: the substantiation of those ideas in action. •Study: the deliberate and rigorous assessment of what had happened versus what was expected and an attempt to explain causally the reasons for those inaccuracies. •Act: the new behaviors informed by what was discovered during study; the validation and correction part of the feedback loop.

In his book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming lays out the leadership principles that became known as TQL, or Total Quality Leadership. This had a big effect on me. It showed me how efforts to improve the process made the organization more efficient, while efforts to monitor the process made the organization less efficient.

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.

W. Edwards Deming is credited with saying that “A bad system will beat a good person every time,

Dr. W. Edwards Deming said, “Management by walking around is hardly ever effective.” The reason being that someone in management, walking around, typically has little idea about what questions to ask, and usually does not pause long enough at any spot to get the right answer. Dr. Deming also stated quite clearly, “Most problems (85% to 95%) are system (process) problems, not people problems.

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. Although a particular person can be a big problem, if you find yourself blaming the people, you should look again.

W. Edwards Deming wrote, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you are doing.

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.

In God we trust, all others must bring data" - American Statistician W. Edwards Deming

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best. W. Edwards Deming

A few years ago writer Art Kleiner interviewed the late W. Edwards Deming, founder of the “quality movement” first in Japan and then in the United States. What was the greatest pleasure he took in his work? “Learning!” the ninety-two-year-old Deming thundered, and steered the conversation to what his interviewer could tell him.

But in 1947, an American working in Japan turned that thinking on its head. His name was W. Edwards Deming, and he was a statistician who was known for his expertise in quality control. At the request of the U.S. Army, he had traveled to Asia to assist with planning the 1951 Japanese census. Once he arrived, he became deeply involved with the country’s reconstruction effort and ended up teaching hundreds of Japanese engineers, managers, and scholars his theories about improving productivity. Among those who came to hear his ideas was Akio Morita, the co-founder of Sony Corp.—one of many Japanese companies that would apply his ideas and reap their rewards. Around this time, Toyota also instituted radical new ways of thinking about production that jibed with Deming’s philosophies.

In God we trust; all others must bring data.” —W. Edwards Deming Measurement drives the execution process. It is the anchor of reality. Can

W. Edwards Deming, the chief instigator of the Total Quality Management movement that revolutionized manufacturing, told a story about a company that used a variety of flammable products in its production process. Unsurprisingly, fires frequently broke out in its plants. But the president of the company didn’t think he had a situation problem; he thought he had a person problem. He sent a letter to every one of the company’s 10,500 employees, pleading with them to set fewer fires. Ahem. (What

Leadership Roles in the Decision Making Process The main component in the development of good decision makers falls on the individual and individual efforts. Yes, but the climate for this development comes from the top, in leadership. To achieve the results sought after, if we truly want to call ourselves professionals and prepare for the challenges we face in the future, leaders must LEAD. It is the Leader’s role, to create and nurture the appropriate environment that emboldens decision makers.  Leader development is two way, it falls on the individual, but the organization’s leaders must set the conditions to encourage it.   The aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures in men, but to remove the cause of failure. ~W. Edwards Deming14               “Leadership can be described as a process by which a person influences others to accomplish an objective, and directs his or her organization in a way that makes it more cohesive and coherent.”15 This is the definition we should subscribe too. However, all too often I have had both frontline personnel and mangers tell me that this cannot be done. This type of training and developing initiative driven personnel will cause more problems for departments and agencies in dealing with liability issues and complaints because control is lost. I wholeheartedly disagree with his sentiment. The opposite is indeed the effect you get. This is not a free reign type of leadership. Matter of fact if done appropriately it will take more effort and time on your part as a leader, because you will be involved. Your training program will be enhanced and the learning that takes place unifies your agencies and all the individuals in it. How? Through the system described above which develops “mutual trust” throughout the organization because the focus is now on results. The “how to” is left to the individuals and the instructors. But a culture must exist to encourage what the Army calls outcome based training.16

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best. W. EDWARDS DEMING

W. Edwards Deming—that arguably, over 90 percent of problems are due to bad systems, not bad people. However, Greenleaf correctly points out that people are the programmers.

Quality genius Dr. W. Edwards Deming observed that the most important things often cannot be measured, e.g., love or beauty.

It is telling that one of the visitors from the United States whom the Japanese held in the highest regard was a statistician named W. Edwards Deming.

In the years following World War II, the Kaizen methodology continued to evolve thanks to the work of both Japanese and American managers—three of which are listed here: The Iowa-born statistician Dr. William Edwards Deming made many consulting trips to Japan during reconstruction efforts and was so influential in turning around Japanese industry that he was awarded the Second Order Medal of the Sacred Treasure by Emperor Hirohito in 1960. (We’ll be referring to Deming’s work many times throughout this book.) The business consultant Masaaki Imai published a management guidebook entitled “Kaizen: The Key to Japan’s Competitive Success.” He also founded the Kaizen Institute Consulting Group (KICG) with the aim of introducing Kaizen techniques to Western companies. Dr. Jeffrey Liker (Professor Emeritus of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan) would bring Kaizen into the mainstream when he published his book of “manufacturing ideals” called “The Toyota Way.” The book showcased many Kaizen-related principles and described the philosophy and values that dictate the modus operandi of the Toyota Motor Corporation.