W. Edwards Deming

You can not define being exactly on time.

Research shows that the climate of an organization influences an individual's contribution far more than the individual himself.

You should not ask questions without knowledge.

The average American worker has fifty interruptions a day, of which seventy percent have nothing to do with work.

What should be the aim of management? What is their job? Quality is the responsibility of the top people. Its origin is in the boardroom. They are the ones who decide.

Innovation comes from the producer - not from the customer.

The emphasis should be on why we do a job.

American management thinks that they can just copy from Japan. But they don't know what to copy.

Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD. All customer expectations are only what you and your competitor have led him to expect. He knows nothing else.

Declining productivity and quality means your unit production costs stay high but you don't have as much to sell. Your workers don't want to be paid less, so to maintain profits, you increase your prices. That's inflation.

Export anything to a friendly country except American management.

Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.

People don't like to make mistakes.

Lack of knowledge... that is the problem.

I predicted in 1950 that in five years, manufacturers the world over would be screaming for protection. It took only four years.

All anyone asks for is a chance to work with pride.

The prevailing system of management has crushed fun out of the workplace.

When a system is stable, telling the worker about mistakes is only tampering.

'Quality' means what will sell and do a customer some good - at least try to.

In 1945, the world was in a shambles. American companies had no competition. So nobody really thought much about quality. Why should they? The world bought everything America produced. It was a prescription for disaster.

My mother was my biggest role model. She taught me to hate waste. We never wasted anything.

I am forever learning and changing.

In Japan, a company worker's position is secure. He is retrained for another job if his present job is eliminated by productivity improvement.

If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.

It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.