[The following is quoted from the December 1993 edition of
_Public_Sector_Quality_Report_, p. 5.]

                            "Quality Quotes"
                                     
                             W. Edwards Deming
                                 1900-1993
                                     
  "Everybody here has a customer. And if he doesn't know who it
is and what constitutes the needs of the customer...then he does
not understand his job."

  "Your study of the consumer--what he finds right and what he
finds wrong--and your innovation are all bound up together. It
will affect design and redesign of your product or service."

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

  "Price has no meaning without a measure of the quality being
purchased."

  "People are entitled to joy in their work and a sense of
ownership."

  "Purchasing should be a team effort, and one of the most
important people on the team should be the chosen supplier--if
you have a choice-- picked on the basis of his record of
improvement...

  "Putting out fires is not improvement. Finding a point out of
control, finding the special cause and removing it, is only
putting the process back to where it was in the first place. It
is not improvement of the process. You are in a hotel. You hear
someone yell fire. He runs for the fire extinguisher and pulls
the alarm to call the fire department. We all get out.
Extinguishing the fire does not improve the hotel. That is not
improvement of quality. That is putting out fires."

  "There is no excuse to offer for putting people on a job that
they know not how to do. Most so-called 'goofing off'--somebody
seems to be lazy, doesn't seem to care--that person is almost
always in the wrong job, or has very poor management."

  "Education in simple but powerful statistical techniques is
required of all people in management..."

  "People work in the system. Management creates the system."


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