Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.
Does the customer invent new product or service? The customer generates nothing. No customer asked for electric lights. There was gas and gas mantles, which gave good light.
You can not achieve an aim unless you have a method.
Failure of management to plan for the future and to foresee problems has brought about waste of manpower, of materials, of the machine-time, of all which raise the manufacturer’s cost and price that the purchaser must pay.
It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth.
It is important that an aim never be defined in terms of a specific activity or method. It must always relate to a better life for everyone.
To manage one must lead. To lead, one must understand the work that he and his people are responsible for.
The principles and methods for improvement are the same for service as for manufacturing. The actual application differs, of course, from one product to another, and from one type of service to another.
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.
Survival is optional. No one has to change.
Many people in management are being paid to produce waste.
Information is not knowledge. Let’s not confuse the two.
It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to – that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated. Support is not enough; action is required.
The customer is the most important part of the production line.
Without theory, there are no questions.
A system must be managed. It will not manage itself. Left to themselves in the Western world, components become selfish, competitive. We cannot afford the destructive effect of competition.
No requirement of industry is so much neglected as operational definitions.
You must not run your Organization as a functional hierarchy. You must understand it as a System.
Don’t expect smart people to listen to you without proof.
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.