Posts Tagged ‘sexiest of concepts’
Great Quote Monday — Harold S. Dodge via W. Edwards Deming
W. Edwards Deming: The management guru women wanted and men wanted to be...
Today’s quote– about quality– comes from Harold S. Dodge as delivered by management guru W. Edwards Deming (also a statistician, college professor, author, lecturer, and consultant).
‘Quality’ isn’t the sexiest of concepts, as concepts go. Still, the idea of quality is inextricable from the idea of excellence. And, of course, the phrase ‘striving for excellence’ is just a fancy pants way of saying ‘we aim to stare our competition directly in the eye, except that the competition will be lying on the ground and we’ll be standing over them.’
Hey, when you put it that way, I think I could get behind this ‘quality’ thing.
Dodge’s / Deming’s quote reminds me of the work of Phil Crosby and his ‘quality is free’ and ‘do it right the first time’ concepts. Mr. Crosby was an author, management theorist, and quality management guru whom I had the pleasure of meeting several times. Which is to say, he attended the same church I did when I was growing up and I later dated his daughter for a time. Which is to say, now I’m not saying anything useful whatsoever, just doing some ham-handed name-dropping. [Shakes head] Not efficient at all…
“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.”
- W. Edwards Deming
Out Of The Crisis (1982)
- Matthew Porter
