W. Edwards Deming Quotes
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People don't like to make mistakes.
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American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan. But they don't know what to copy.
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In 1945, the world was in a shambles. American companies had no competition. So nobody really thought much about quality. Why should they? The world bought everything America produced. It was a prescription for disaster.
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I am forever learning and changing.
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Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.
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You should not ask questions without knowledge.
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A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves in the Western world, components become selfish, competitive, independent profit centres, and thus destroy the system. . . . The secret is cooperation between components toward the aim of the organization. We can not afford the destructive effect of competition.
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The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain - stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment - over the long term.
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The biggest cost of poor quality is when your customer buys it from someone else because they didn't like yours.
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The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management.
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What is the variation trying to tell us about a process, about the people in the process?
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The big problems are where people don't realise they have one in the first place.
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Defects are not free. Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them.
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The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!
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In Japan, a company worker's position is secure. He is retrained for another job if his present job is eliminated by productivity improvement.
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Declining productivity and quality means your unit production costs stay high but you don't have as much to sell. Your workers don't want to be paid less, so to maintain profits, you increase your prices. That's inflation.
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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.
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...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.
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Knowledge is theory. We should be thankful if action of management is based on theory. Knowledge has temporal spread. Information is not knowledge. The world is drowning in information but is slow in acquisition of knowledge. There is no substitute for knowledge.
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Loss of market begets unemployment. Emphasis has been on short-term profit, to the undernourishment of plans that might generate new product and service that would keep the company alive and provide jobs and more jobs. It is no longer socially acceptable performance to lose market and to dump hourly workers on to the heap of unemployed.
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The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action.
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We are here to make another world.
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The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system can not understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside.
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Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.