W. Edwards Deming Quotes

Companies in Europe should stop trying to do the U.S. version of a European idea.

Whatever works should be copied.

The Chinese are quite entrepreneurial. Remember when Lenovo bought IBM's PC division. It was said that China didn't need a brand name, China didn't need to buy Lenovo to get into the PC business, I remember reading a one-liner somewhere which struck me as quite possibly true, it said the one thing that the Chinese had not been able to copy or figure out was the way, in terms of systems, that Americans - it probably would be true for Europeans as well - that Americans install and live by their management systems, while China is still quite half-assed. Perhaps that is a true statement.

Some of us have great original ideas and some of us depend on adaptations.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Most of us don't invent ideas. We take the best ideas from someone else.

There's no harm being a copycat. If someone else is doing a good job, copy. It's free.

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

Whenever you do something, people try to re-do it and do a better version, especially if they're in another country.

Globalization has changed us into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital - the world's best talents and greatest ideas.

The Japanese sit up all night thinking of ways to screw the Americans and the Europeans.

In China, the government is involved in business in many different ways. They're involved in media and business. When you go to China, you have to rethink how you're doing everything. You have to become Chinese.

I'm just curious how it'd look like if someone tried to remake my work. But I really believe that it's hard to remake of any of my work.

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!

Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

A good way to have good ideas is by being unoriginal.

If you want to learn something, just steal it.

You can't reinvent the wheel. You've got to just take the best from all the other shows and try to make it work, because there's the "live show Gods" that dictate if there are going to be any surprises, if there's a very commercial film that's a Best Picture. There are a lot of things that are out of my control, but I do my best.

Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success.

You cannot innovate by copying.

Our originality shows itself most strikingly not in what we wholly originate but in what we do with that which we borrow from others.

Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody.

If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.

Man is an idiot. He doesn't know how to do anything without copying, without imitating, without plagiarizing, without aping. It might even have been that man invented generation by coitus after seeing the grasshopper copulate.

Derivative writers seem versatile because they imitate many others, past and present. Artistic originality has only itself to copy.