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Performance of management should be measured by potential to stay in business, to protect investment, to ensure future dividends and jobs through improvement of product and service for the future, not by the quarterly dividend.
Loss of market, and resulting unemployment, are not foreordained. They are not inevitable. They are man-made.
As William E. Conway said, measurements of productivity are like accident statistics. They tell you that there is a problem, but they don’t do anything about accidents.
Dependence on protection by tariffs and laws to “buy American” only encourages incompetence.
“Why is it that productivity increases as quality improves?” Less rework.
The consumer is the most important part of the production line. Quality should be aimed at the needs of the consumer, present and future.
The wealth of a nation depends on its people, management, and government, more than on its natural resources. The problem is where to find good management.
Measures of productivity are like statistics on accidents: they tell you all about the number of accidents in the home, on the road, and at the work place, but they do not tell you how to reduce the frequency of accidents.
Best efforts are essential. Unfortunately, best efforts, people charging this way and that way without guidance of principles, can do a lot of damage. Think of the chaos that would come if everyone did his best, not knowing what to do.
The next quarterly dividend is not as important as existence of the company 10, 20, or 30 years from now.
One requirement for innovation is faith that there will be a future. Innovation, the foundation of the future, cannot thrive unless the top management have declared unshakable commitment to quality and productivity.
Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process. Inspection, scrap, downgrading, and rework are not corrective action on the process.
Inspection does not improve quality, nor guarantee quality. Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product.
Price has no meaning without a measure of the quality being purchased.
No manufacturer that I know of possesses enough knowledge and manpower to work effectively with more than one vendor for any item.
the best solution to improvement of incoming materials is to make a partner of every vendor, and to work together with him on a long-term relationship of loyalty and trust.
Putting out fires is not improvement of the process.
The great advantage of the Kanban system (delivery just in time) is the discipline behind it—processes in control; quality, quantity, and regularity predictable.
The greatest waste in America is failure to use the abilities of people.
Management must work on sources of improvement, the intent of quality of product and of service, and on the translation of the intent into design and actual product.
Leaders must know the work that they supervise. They must be empowered and directed to inform upper management concerning conditions that need correction
A common denominator of fear in any form, anywhere, is loss from impaired performance and padded figures
A quota is a fortress against improvement of quality and productivity. I have yet to see a quota that includes any trace of a system by which to help anyone to do a better job. A quota is totally incompatible with never-ending improvement.
If you have a stable system, then there is no use to specify a goal. You will get whatever the system will deliver. A goal beyond the capability of the system will not be reached. If you have not a stable system, then there is again no point in setting a goal. There is no way to know what the system will produce: it has no capability.
The possibility of pride of workmanship means more to the production worker than gymnasiums, tennis courts, and recreation areas. Give the work force a chance to work with pride, and the 3 percent that apparently don’t care will erode itself by peer pressure.
What an organization needs is not just good people; it needs people that are improving with education.
Practically all of our major corporations were started by technical men—inventors, mechanics, engineers, and chemists, who had a sincere interest in quality of products. Now these companies are largely run by men interested in profit, not product. Their pride is in the P & L statement or stock report.
How can you catch up with someone that is all the time gaining speed?
Does every employee know that he has a customer?
the customer is not in a good position to prescribe product or service that will help him in the future. The producer is in far better position than the consumer to invent new design and new service.
The purpose of studies in consumer preference is to adjust the product to the public, rather than, as in advertising, to adjust the public to the product.
The difficulty in defining quality is to translate future needs of the user into measurable characteristics, so that a product can be designed and turned out to give satisfaction at a price that the user will pay.
In my experience, I have seen a teacher hold a hundred fifty students spellbound, teaching what is wrong. His students rated him as a great teacher.
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.
no one should be blamed or penalized for performance that he cannot govern.
An operational definition puts communicable meaning into a concept. Adjectives like good, reliable, uniform, round, tired, safe, unsafe, unemployed have no communicable meaning until they are expressed in operational terms of sampling, test, and criterion.
Practice is more exacting than pure science; more exacting than teaching
The problem in commerce is never whether anything is exactly round, but how far in what way it departs from roundness.
Principles of the theory of knowledge, often regarded as inconsequential or as pastime in pure science, as well as in textbooks on administration and management, become lively and gravely serious to the man that is faced with the problems of industry.
A regulation is justifiable if it offers more advantage than the economic waste that it entails.
In a permanent and well-organized system, checks and penalties are such that in the long run it is in no one’s interest to break a regulation.
A fault in the interpretation of observations, seen everywhere, is to suppose that every event (defect, mistake, accident) is attributable to someone (usually the one nearest at hand), or is related to some special event. The fact is that most troubles with service and production lie in the system.
Experience without theory teaches nothing. In fact, experience cannot even be recorded unless there is some theory, however crude, that leads to a hypothesis and a system by which to catalog observations.5 Sometimes only a hunch, right or wrong, is sufficient theory to lead to useful observation.
Rules have to be made in advance, for use in the future. Any rule, as a practical matter, must be constructed in the absence of full information about the future.
teaching of beginners should be done by a master, not by a hack.
A hack of a statistician should be studying, not teaching.
