Top 200 W. Edwards Deming Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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.”

— W. Edwards Deming

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

— W. Edwards Deming

153. “The individual has been crushed by our style of management today.”

— W. Edwards Deming

154. “The aim proposed here for any organization is for everybody to gain – stockholders, employees, suppliers, customers, community, the environment – over the long term.”

— W. Edwards Deming

155. “Retroactive management emphasizes the bottom line.”

— W. Edwards Deming

156. “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

157. “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 obligations cannot be delegated. Support is not enough; action is required.”

— W. Edwards Deming

158. “It does not happen all at once. There is no instant pudding.”

— W. Edwards Deming

159. “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.”

— W. Edwards Deming

160. “Any two people have different ideas of what is important.”

— W. Edwards Deming

161. “The aim of education should be to preserve and nurture the yearning for learning that a child is born with.”

— W. Edwards Deming

162. “Judging people does not help them.”

— W. Edwards Deming

163. “People learn in different ways: reading, listening, pictures, watching.”

— W. Edwards Deming

164. “Knowledge needs to be a verb.”

— W. Edwards Deming

165. “The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.”

— W. Edwards Deming

166. “It’s management’s job to know.”

— W. Edwards Deming

167. “It only takes a little innovation.”

— W. Edwards Deming

168. “He that would run his company on visible figures alone will in time have neither company nor figures.”

— W. Edwards Deming

169. “You must not run your Organization as a functional hierarchy. You must understand it as a System.”

— W. Edwards Deming

170. “The greatest losses are unknown and unknowable.”

— W. Edwards Deming

171. “A system can not understand itself.”

— W. Edwards Deming

172. “It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of a specific activity or method. It must always relate to a better life for everyone.”

— W. Edwards Deming

173. “Hold everybody accountable? Ridiculous!”

— W. Edwards Deming

174. “People care more for themselves when they contribute to the system.”

— W. Edwards Deming

175. “Experience by itself teaches nothing.”

— W. Edwards Deming

176. “Managing by results only makes things worse.”

— W. Edwards Deming

177. “What makes a scientist great is the care that he takes in telling you what is wrong with his results, so that you will not misuse them.”

— W. Edwards Deming

178. “We should be guided by theory, not by numbers.”

— W. Edwards Deming

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

— W. Edwards Deming

180. “Profit in business comes from repeat customers.”

— W. Edwards Deming

181. “Anybody can achieve gains in quality by slowing down production. That is not what we are talking about.”

— W. Edwards Deming

182. “The principles and methods for improvement are the same for service as for manufacturing. The actual application differs, of course, from one product to another, and from one type of service to another.”

— W. Edwards Deming

183. “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.”

— W. Edwards Deming

184. “You can not hear what you do not understand.”

— W. Edwards Deming

185. “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.”

— W. Edwards Deming

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

— W. Edwards Deming

187. “The aim should be to work on the method of management.”

— W. Edwards Deming

188. “The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system can not understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside.”

— W. Edwards Deming

189. “When a system is stable, telling the worker about mistakes is only tampering.”

— W. Edwards Deming

190. “I think that people here expect miracles. American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan-but they don’t know what to copy!”

— W. Edwards Deming

191. “No requirement of industry is so much neglected as operational definitions.”

— W. Edwards Deming

192. “People copy examples and then they wonder what is the trouble. They look at examples and without theory they learn nothing.”

— W. Edwards Deming

193. “If someone can make a contribution to the company he feels important.”

— W. Edwards Deming

194. “The customer invents nothing. New products and new services come from the producer.”

— W. Edwards Deming

195. “You do not find knowledge in a dictionary, only information.”

— W. Edwards Deming

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

— W. Edwards Deming

197. “The problem is that most courses teach what is wrong.”

— W. Edwards Deming

198. “A manager of people knows that in this stable state it is distracting to tell the worker about a mistake.”

— W. Edwards Deming

199. “Learn the basics of analytics and people will love you. If you don’t have time to learn, hire someone.”

— W. Edwards Deming

200. “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.”

— W. Edwards Deming