W. Edwards Deming (1900–93,) fully William Edwards Deming, was an American engineer, statistician, and educator. One of the foremost advocates of total quality management (TQM) in industrial production, he championed the idea that quality control should be a strategic pursuit led top-down by a corporation’s leadership.
Born in Sioux City, Iowa, Deming attended the Universities of Wyoming and Colorado and received a doctorate in mathematical physics from Yale. He taught physics at various universities, worked as a mathematical physicist at the United States Department of Agriculture 1927–39, and was a statistical adviser for the U.S. Census Bureau 1939–45. After 1946, he was a business consultant.
Deming’s quality-control approaches were established on statistician Walter A. Shewhart’s practice of systematic recording of product defects and analyzing their causes. Deming’s quality-control methods assisted Japan’s economic recovery after World War II and impelled the global success of many Japanese businesses in the later part of the 20th century. In the 1980s, American companies started to embrace Deming’s ideas to compete more effectively in the world market.
In Deming’s honor, the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers established the prominent Deming Prize in 1951—it is presented yearly to Japanese corporations that win an arduous quality-control contest.
Deming’s Out of the Crisis (1982) discussed his 14 key principles for quality management. The New Economics (1993) argued that solutions to most problems spring from collaboration and not competition.
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Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.
—W. Edwards Deming
In God we trust; all others must bring data.
—W. Edwards Deming
Innovation comes from the producer — not from the customer.
—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
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
It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Doing Your Best
The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Procrastination
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Survival, Change
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