Innovation comes from the producer—not from the customer.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Customers
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Survival, Change
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
In God we trust; all others must bring data.
—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 not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Doing Your Best
Competition should not be for a share of the market-but to expand the market.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Sharing
Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.
—W. Edwards Deming
The job can’t be finished only improved to please the customer.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Quality, Customers
Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Profit, Business
The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Procrastination
Quality is everyone’s responsibility.
—W. Edwards Deming
Topics: Quality
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Thomas Wolfe American Novelist
Henry Steele Commager American Historian
Carol Dweck American Psychologist
Joseph Juran American Quality Scholar
Ludwig von Mises Austrian Economist
Frank Moore Colby American Writer, Editor
James Harvey Robinson American Historian
Lionel Trilling American Critic
Ashley Montagu British-American Anthropologist
Hyman G. Rickover American Admiral