Great Throughts Treasury

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

"The customer is the most important part of the production line."

"The most effective way to improve quality or value is to reduce the variation in the processes whereby products are manufactured or services delivered."

"The most important figures for management of any organization are unknown and unknowable."

"The emphasis should be on why we do a job."

"The job can't be finished only improved to please the customer."

"The prevailing style of management must undergo transformation. A system cannot understand itself. The transformation requires a view from outside. The aim of this chapter is to provide an outside view—a lens—that I call a system of profound knowledge. It provides a map of theory by which to understand the organizations that we work in. The first step is transformation of the individual. This transformation is discontinuous. It comes from understanding of the system of profound knowledge. The individual, transformed, will perceive new meaning to his life, to events, to numbers, to interactions between people. Once the individual understands the system of profound knowledge, he will apply its principles in every kind of relationship with other people. He will have a basis for judgment of his own decisions and for transformation of the organizations that he belongs to."

"The result of long-term relationships is better and better quality, and lower and lower costs."

"The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they we taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management."

"The principle that where there is fear, there will be wrong figures."

"There is a penalty for ignorance. We are paying through the nose."

"The various segments of the system of profound knowledge proposed here cannot be separated. They interact with each other. Thus, knowledge of psychology is incomplete without knowledge of variation."

"There must be consistency in direction."

"To successfully respond to the myriad of changes that shake the world, transformation into a new style of management is required. The route to take is what I call profound knowledge - knowledge for leadership of transformation."

"The worker is not the problem. The problem is at the top! Management!"

"We are here to make another world."

"We cannot rely on mass inspection to improve quality, though there are times when 100 percent inspection is necessary. As Harold S. Dodge said many years ago, 'You cannot inspect quality into a product.' The quality is there or it isn't by the time it's inspected."

"They realized that the gains that you get by statistical methods are gains that you get without new machinery, without new people. Anybody can produce quality if he lowers his production rate. That is not what I am talking about. Statistical thinking and statistical methods are to Japanese production workers, foremen, and all the way through the company, a second language. In statistical control you have a reproducible product hour after hour, day after day. And see how comforting that is to management, they now know what they can produce, they know what their costs are going to be."

"We should be guided by theory, not by numbers."

"We do not know what quality is."

"We want best efforts guided by theory."

"We must understand variation."

"What is a system? A system is a network of interdependent components that work together to try to accomplish the aim of the system. A system must have an aim. Without an aim, there is no system. The aim of the system must be clear to everyone in the system. The aim must include plans for the future. The aim is a value judgment. (We are of course talking here about a man-made system.)"

"We should work on our process, not the outcome of our processes."

"What we need to do is learn to work in the system, by which I mean that everybody, every team, every platform, every division, every component is there not for individual competitive profit or recognition, but for contribution to the system as a whole on a win-win basis."

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

"What is the variation trying to tell us about a process, about the people in the process?"

"Where there is a lack of quality there is a failure to understand variation. Everything varies. Statistics help us to predict how much of which things are going to vary. It is a company's responsibility to know whether problems in excessive variation are in the design of its system or in the behavior of the people. Both can be improved."

"Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures."

"Without theory, there are no questions."

"You cannot inspect quality into the product; it is already there."

"You cannot define being exactly on time."

"You cannot hear what you do not understand."

"You should not ask questions without knowledge."