Edwards 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.

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

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

In God we trust; all others must bring data.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Divided responsibility means that nobody is responsible.

A bad system will beat a good person every time

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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).

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

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

Blame the process, not the people.

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

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).

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job.

The superintendent is afraid to make a decision. If he does nothing, he has nothing to explain to his superiors. No explanation is required if a man in management for doing nothing.

Employee involvement, employee participation, and quality of work life, these groups predictably disintegrate within a few months from frustration, finding themselves unwilling parties to a cruel hoax, unable to accomplish anything, for the simple reason that no one in management will take action on suggestions for improvement.

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 suggestions are only preliminary. A statistician on the job will of course modify and revise them to suit his own inclinations and local conditions.

The job of management is to replace work standards by knowledgeable and intelligent leadership.

How can he, when, after stopping his machine to adjust it because it was making only defective product, the foreman comes and along and orders him in two words, "Run it". In other words, "Make defective product.

You can't build quality by inspection, but when the quality is not there, the inspection may be the only answer.

Loss of market, and resulting unemployment, are not foreordained. They are not inevitable. They are man-made.

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

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.

Two items from two different suppliers met the specifications, yet they were sufficiently different for one to be usable, the other usable only with costly rework, a heavy loss to the plant. The explanation was that one supplier understood what the blocks were to be used for , the other did not - he mere satisfied the specifications.

She asked a vendor if it would not be a good idea to inform the customer that his order will come late. No, he would get mad. Well, what happens when you deliver order late? He gets mad. Then why didn't you tell him in advance, so that he could prepare? He would get mad twice.

A supervisor comes in and is gone in five weeks. Another one comes in. He likewise knows nothing about this job and has no intention to learn much about it, as he too will move on any day.

An annual report that claims value-added, as a benefit to a community or to a society, is rare.

(On idea of merit rating) Everyone propels himself forward or tries to, for his own good, on his own life preserver. The organization is the loser. Merit rating rewards people that do well in the system. It does not reward attempts to improve the system. Don't rock the boat.

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.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

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

What good comes of making a suggestion to foreman? He just smiles and walks away.

At the successive sessions, people may tear up what they did in the previous session and make a fresh start with clearer ideas. This is a sign of advancement.

(On promotion on performance) The problem lies in the difficulty to define a meaningful measure of performance.

Salaried employees took over production during a strike of hourly employees. The manager of a department reported that he found machines out of order, some sadly so, some badly in need of maintenence, one a candidate for outright replacement. Production doubled up when he tuned up the machines. Were it not for the strike, he should never have known about the sad state of the machines, and production would have continued at half the capability of the process. "Well, Hal," I said, "you know whose fault it was, don't you?" Yes, he knows. It won't happen again. From now on, there will be a system by which employees may report trouble with machines or with materials and by which these reports will receive attention.

The problem lies in the difficulty to define a meaningful measure of performance.

94% of problems in business are systems-driven and only 6% are people-driven. —Attributed to W. Edwards Deming

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

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