Dr. Deming’s Quotes from the First Edition
(Square Blue Book, 1992)
References: these quotations come from lectures given by Dr. Deming.
Notes taken by R.S. Conger.
Drive out fear.
The Orchestra
An orchestra is an example of a system that most people can understand. In a 140-piece orchestra, everybody supports the other 139. One is not there to play a solo, one is not to play as loud as one can to attract attention. The individual person is there to support the other 139.
The job of the conductor is to optimize their talents and abilities. Each person, each group, is a component of the whole system. That component – any group, anybody – should be judged by its contribution to the system, not for its individual profit or gain.
Optimization is a process of orchestrating the efforts of all components toward achievement of the stated aim.
Optimize
There must be a method to achieve an aim. Management must optimize of the system.
Optimization of a system is the first job of a leader. Recognize that all people are different. Try to fit each one into what one does best, into what each takes joy in doing.
Instead of doing it the way we have always done it, do what is best for the whole system.
The greatest waste in America is failure to use the abilities of people.
Cooperation
In place of competition for high grades, high ratings, to be number one, there should be cooperation on problems of common interest between people, divisions, companies, agencies, governments, countries.
Click here to learn about activities to encourage co0operative learning
www.epps.com United We Solve, a workbook to promote cooperative learning
Math strategies for cooperation: www.math-success.com
The result will in time be better students in science, literature, and the arts, innovation, technology, greater service, expansion of the market, greater material reward for everyone. There will be joy in work and learning.
My theory of management is based on optimization of a system whereby everybody gains – everybody gains…. (repeat with a deep voice for emphasis): EVERYBODY GAINS.
Obligation
A company that is healthy, doing well, has the greatest obligation to improve, thus to contribute to the economic welfare of itself and to the rest of us.
Management has the obligation to focus attention on common causes of variability and wrong average level. Common causes of variability are often as important as specific causes. This is why management must continually accept the responsibility to find common causes, and to eliminate them if economically feasible.
Almost everyone, including managers who ought to know better, adjusts to the result, despite the advice [of experts].
They are only doing their job. Their results are way off to the Milky Way.
Optimization
Organization of a system should be the basis for negotiation. Whoever goes into negotiation to defend rights is already licked. … Through optimization of the system, you gain more than by any other way.
Any group should have as its aim optimization over time of the larger system that the group operates in.
Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation.
The timid and the fainthearted and people who expect quick results are doomed to disappointment.
Productivity
Without a cultural revolution in management, can anyone guarantee that job security for the rank and file would be enough to produce high productivity and product quality?
Paper profits do not make bread. Improvements of quality and productivity do. They make a contribution to better material living for all people, here and everywhere.
Without theory, there is no way to use information that comes to us on the instant.
Knowledge
Knowledge comes from theory.
Wisdom is knowledge used for the common aim.
Without a theory, experience teaches nothing.
The knowledge required depends in large part on theory of variation, interaction of forces, and operational definitions.
Any sample of observations, any experience, must have its frame – its system frame, its theory.
Goals
A goal that lies beyond the means of accomplishment – beyond the capacity of the system – will lead to discouragement, frustration, demoralization.
No capacity can be measured until the system is stabilized, by operationally defined criteria, in communicable terms.
Standards
An operational definition is one that is communicable, translates a concept into a test and a criterion: to have meaning for business or legal purposes and can only be stated in statistical terms. … likewise a standard for safety, reliability or performance.
The requirements of industry are more exacting than the requirements of pure science. The consumer requires month by month ever greater and greater safety, expects better and better performance of manufactured articles.
The manufacturer has the same problems. These problems cannot be understood, cannot ever be stated, nor can the effect of any alleged solution be evaluated without the aid of statistical theory and methods.
Quality
Quality begins at the top … quality of the product and of the services can be no better than the intent of the top management. The only way a company can experience success would be for the top management to be committed to the course of action.
Quality is like good blood. Money cannot buy it. It is not for sale – quality or good blood.
Innovation
Management of a system is action based on prediction.
The moral is that it is necessary to innovate, to predict the needs of a customer, to give more.
But where does innovation come from?
No customer asked for electric lights, telegraph or telephone.
No customer asked for the automobile. “We have horses!”
No customer asked for pneumatic tires. Tires are made of rubber. It is silly to thin of riding on air. People thought Harvey Firestone had lost his mind…
No customer ever asked for integrated circuits, pocket radio or the facsimile.
Competition
Economists have led us down the wrong road. They have taught us adversarial competition as the solution. Trade wards and competition result in the same thing. In system terms, the public loses.
Unforeseeable, the heaviest losses are unknowable…. and they are the very ones that must be managed.
The chances of successfully improving our position in the future, under the present system of management, is nonexistent.
Three Questions
Where do you want to be five years from now?
How are you going to get there?
By what method?
Work
Anyone with a job is entitled to pride of workmanship. [World 254]
Other quotations
Wisdom sounds foolish to fools.
Dionysius to Cadmus in Euripides’ The Bacchae [Out 486]
Is it the bell that rings,
is it the hammer that rings,
or is it the meeting of the two that rings?
Japanese poem [Out 177]
Another compilation of quotes
"Quality is everyone's responsibility."
"A system can not understand itself."
"All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride."
"A system must be managed. It will not manage itself."
"Innovation comes from the producer - not from the customer."
"If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing."
"The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!"
"Defects are not free. Somebody makes them, and gets paid for making them."
"It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best."
"If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing."
"The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work."
"Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them."
"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."
"Foremost is the principle that the purpose of consumer research is to understand the customer's needs and wishes, and thus design product and service that will provide better living for him in the future. A second principle is that no one can guess the future loss of business from a dissatisfied customer..."
"What is a system? A system is a network of interdepen-dent 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. 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. (We are of course talking here about a man-made system.)/“
Found on http://www.wisdom-of-the-wise.com/W-Edwards-Deming.htm
Acknowledgements
The words and ideas appearing in this book are the property of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. The copyright for the format of this book sits with Sundial Press (and we give it to you to use as part of Creative Commons). Permission to reprint these words was obtained from Dr. Deming, MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study, Cecelia Kilian and Mary Walton.
Sources
Deming, W. Edwards (1982, 1986). Out of the Crisis. MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study. [Out]
Deming, W. Edwards (1993). The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education. MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study. [New]
Kilian, Cecelia S. (1992). The World of W. Edwards Deming. SPC Press. [World]
Walton, Mary (1986). The Deming Management Method. Putnam Publishing. [Method]
All uncited quotations in this book were made by Dr. Deming in classroom situations.
If you have a favorite Deming quote that doesn’t appear in this book, please send it to the editors at TheEbookman.com with your postal address. Your suggestion will be considered for inclusion in a future edition (and for an update of the scribd.com file). If the quote is used, you will receive a free copy of the next edition.
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Endnotes
In 1992 Richard Stockton Conger, a political science student at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, compiled a collection of quotations by looking through his notes from lectures by Deming. His 48-page book measured 11 cm by 11 cm and it had a blue cover. The current editors in 1994 obtained permission letters and reissued the book in a smaller format (smaller than a 3” by 5” card) of 72 pages, calling it “the Little Blue Book.” In 2010 the document was placed on scribd.com with the purpose of sharing the work with people who are concerned about improving the quality of management, services and products.
You are invited to share this document, post it wherever you like, as long as you don’t remove any of the current quotes and make it clear if you add quotes. Please respect the spirit of Creative Commons and copyleft: You can add to the work and redistribute it as long as you don’t benefit from it directly by selling it and as long as the original book’s contents are presented.
By taking time to copy and distribute this file, you honor the spirits of all who helped to bring you this collection.
About the editors of the Second Edition: We admire Deming's work and through this quote book we hope to share our passion and respect for his thoughts. We learned more by using these quotes and we hope your thinking will evolve, too. Write to us with your comments and suggestions for improving the next edition of this book.