Ferdinand Mount Quotes

Inspection with the aim of finding the bad ones and throwing them out is too late, ineffective, and costly. Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process.

CEOs hate variance. It's the enemy. Variance in customer service is bad. Variance in quality is bad. CEOs love processes that are standardized, routinized, predictable. Stamping out variance makes a complex job a bit less complex.

It is in Toyota's DNA that mistakes made once will not be repeated.

You elected government officials to make decisions and it's about time they started making good ones.

Good government only happens when the people working in it do their jobs, and do them well.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

Quality is easy to talk but hard to make.

My task as a citizen is to get the government to do more good and less inefficient and wasteful work.

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures.

The long and short of it is, we need more rigor in all kinds of programs.

To me, error analysis is the sweet spot for improvement.

You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

I'm grasping with how you do something on a large scale with multiple operations and not have quality decrease.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

It is much more difficult to measure nonperformance than performance.

Administration is the essence of government, and its quality is a prime condition of civic comfort.

To speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.

Consumer accountability drives quality and efficiency.

The most difficult thing is to make sure the standards remain high in each restaurant.

Even a small reduction in errors and rework can have a significant impact.

Quality will save our company.

Good government is one of the most important factors in economic growth and social well-being.

People think it's so easy to make hamburgers. That consistent quality in so many restaurants, in that many parts of the world, is not an easy thing to do.

The good shots are good enough. It's really about managing those mistakes and making sure we have less of them.

The "patron saint" of Japanese quality control, ironically, is an American named W. Edwards Deming, who was virtually unknown in his own country until his ideas of quality control began to make such a big impact on Japanese companies.