W. Edwards Deming Quotes

Data really powers everything that we do.

The ultimate purpose of collecting the data is to provide a basis for action or a recommendation.

Data are becoming the new raw material of business.

The only useful function of a statistician is to make predictions, and thus to provide a basis for action.

The impulse to collect data preceded the ability to make sense of it. People facing a complicated problem measure whatever they can easily measure. But the measurements by themselves don’t lead to understanding.

I say I write extrapolations. I look at data points and ask what the world could look like.

There's definitely a huge opportunity for businesses to transform their operations and decision making by using data.

To the extent that you can find ways where you're making predictions, there's no substitute for testing yourself on real-world situations that you don't know the answer to in advance.

The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.

There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.

Data helps solve problems.

Good data is hard to find. Hard data is good to find.

The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.

A great many decisions just can’t be made with confidence because the data just doesn’t exist …. [however] just because we don’t have the information doesn’t mean that we can’t get it.

We need to know what are the best jobs for which we can train young people so that the jobs will be available in growing numbers, are not dead end jobs, the jobs will not be obsoleted by automation, and there are no artificial ethnic or racial barriers to employment. Your Bureau of Labor Statistics has been working on this for 8 weeks now, and you come with your staff and say that you do not have sufficient data to make this judgment. Well if there were sufficient data, we could apply it and make the decisions without you. The reason we need your expertise is that your intuition and experience should enable you to make a better guess with the insufficient information than we would make who have no experience.

The answers to today's most important scientific, business, and social problems lie in data.

Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.

Data drives success. That is how we began our success with eSpeed. It was always based on the data.

The 'data' (given) of research are not so much given as taken out of a constantly elusive matrix of happenings. We should speak of capta rather than data.

It is difficult finding intelligence that is actionable in a lot of these places, but we have to keep trying.

If you're going to decide to run a data-driven campaign, decision-making has to follow it.

But actually theory is very practical. Gravity is a theory, for example. It allows you to predict that if you step off a cliff you will fall; you don't have to collect data on that.

Finding patterns is easy in any kind of data-rich environment; that's what mediocre gamblers do. The key is in determining whether the patterns represent signal or noise

I tell people to start implementing when they are pretty sure there aren't more important stories out there. An iteration's worth of data is worth months of speculation.