W. Edwards Deming Quotes

Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.

Nowadays, business is all about productivity - and our folks produce.

The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output, and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not merely to find and record failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure: to help people to do a better job with less effort.

Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.

Ask yourself always: how can this be done better?

You cannot increase the quality or quantity of your achievement or performance except to the degree in which you increase your ability to use your time effectively.

If it could save a person's life, could you find a way to save ten seconds off the boot time? If there were five million people using the Mac, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year.

Work mixed with management becomes not only easier but more profitable. The time is past when anyone can boast about 'hard work' without having a corresponding result to show for it.

You are no longer paid just for the hours that you put in, but for what you put into those hours.

If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere.

It's all about new techniques -- simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster, but not worse.

The carpenter is not the best who makes more chips than all the rest.

Too few accomplish twice as much as too many.

We must firmly grasp management. Just making things isn't enough. We need to raise the quality.

The enterprise, by definition, must be capable of producing more or better than all the resources that comprise it.

If you don't put out a shirt for eight months, that doesn't mean it took you eight months to make the shirt.

Never confuse activity with results.

Six Sigma is a quality program that, when all is said and done, improves your customers' experience, lowers your costs, and builds better leaders.

I am not at all in favor of hard work for its own sake; many people who work very hard indeed produce terrible things, and should most certainly not be encouraged.

We don't get paid for being busy, we get paid for being right.

One of the best uses of your time is to increase your competence in your key result areas.

What is done well is done quickly enough.

I do appreciate that the most important thing as manager is to get good results.

To write much, and to write rapidly, are empty boasts. The world desires to know what you have done, and not how you did it.

The crows may crow, but the hens deliver the goods.