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A 'problem' is the distance between where you are now and where you could be—no matter how good you are now.
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Strive for excellence: If you aim for maintaining your current quality standards, you will lose customers and business to your fierce competitors.
Paul Tang, Quality and Project Manager
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Unfortunately, no Gantt chart survives contact with reality.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes, and Charles Sull
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… my advice to all students is to question everything! You never know where a ‘silly question’ may lead you.
Derek Abbott, School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, University of Adelaide
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With the customer as a reference point, priorities become easier to set.
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I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
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How many ‘fixes’ backfire because the assumptions on which the fix was based turn out to be false?
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Success is on the far side of failure.
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Human beings are more alike than one would think at first.
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To say we’ve always done it that way opens the door for competitors to do it better.
Mark Arnson, Quality Engineer, Milwaukee Composites
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Problems breed problems, and the lack of a disciplined method of openly attacking them breeds more problems.
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Leadership is more than just leading; it is providing opportunities for others to grow and to contribute more to the overall achievements of the organization.
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Quality is a value and a method and both must be routine.
Karen L. Hansen, Director, Quality Assurance & Compliance, Allied Community Resources
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Quality screams its presence or absence within the first minutes of a consumer’s experience with a product or a service. It may not be visible, but it is tangible.
Shoba Mittal, Director of Quality, Allegheny County Dept. of Human Services
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The free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.
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Man lives by bread alone, when there is no bread.
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The team concept conveys the message that PQI [= Productivity and Quality Improvement] is everybody’s business.
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In the best institutions, promises are kept no matter what the cost in agony and overtime.
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Failure increases knowledge; therefore, I would rather try and fail than not try at all.
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We can only be as good as our customers’ satisfaction. Practice quality!
Rich Graham, Quality Supervisor, Roofing Systems, Johns Manville
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We’ve always done it that way on its own is never a good reason for taking some action or performing some process work.
Mark Arnson, Quality Engineer, Milwaukee Composites
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The best way to understand your customer is to become your customer and walk a mile in his shoes.
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This has been the first product recall in the company’s 100-year history…’ The past cannot always predict the future. Zero defects (ZD) is the only solution.
Paul Tang, Quality and Project Manager
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Small improvements are believable and therefore achievable.
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The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.
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For every problem there is a solution: simple, neat, and wrong.
Mobil Oil Company (advertising)
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Developing complex quality systems without honestly assessing the resources to monitor and comply will destroy the workforce that is expected to accomplish the task.
Phil Preston, Aerospace & ?Automotive Operations, Maintenance and Quality Management (retired)
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What is our business?' is not determined by the producer but by the customer.
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Today’s problems come from yesterday’s ‘solutions.’
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Think quality and do quality to be quality.
Karen L. Hansen, Director, Quality Assurance & Compliance, Allied Community Resources
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High-quality companies treat their human resource as a resource, not a commodity.
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An old error is always more popular than a new truth.
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Service is not a competitive edge, it is the competitive edge.
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Everyone in an organization should be integrated in pursuing the dual goals of zero breakdowns and zero defects.
Ramesh Lohia and Jack T. Parker, Consultants, iSixSigmaKaizen
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For every complex question there is a simple answer, and it is wrong.
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If you don’t generate excitement, you don’t generate much.
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If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.
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A leader is a dealer in hope.
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There are some remedies worse than the disease.
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The message of the kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company.
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Once you adopt and communicate a quality policy, stick with it, live it, and protect it. You get only one chance!
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No one desires what is unknown.
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There is no learning without mistakes.
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Team up means: Together Everyone Achieves Most Ultimate Power.
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Mistakes live in the neighborhood of truth and therefore delude us.
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Learn from yesterday to build a better tomorrow by doing well today.
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Consumers, by seeking quality and value, set the standards of acceptability for products and services by voting with their marketplace dollars.
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mission of the quality department is to hold back the forces of production until the customer has been prepared.
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For any business decision, there are only two choices: action or inaction. The best option is to take action.
Ramesh Lohia and Jack T. Parker, Consultants, iSixSigmaKaizen
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The most difficult problem to solve is employee indifference: people closing their eyes and choosing to do nothing.
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All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
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The customers do not feel the average. They feel the variation.
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Total quality management depends on people more than anything else, and people lead or are led–they are not managed.
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If the the problem is vague and unobservable, the same will be true for the solution.
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Nothing happens unless first a dream.
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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
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The first job in decision making is to find the real problem and define it.
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Quality improvement is a do-it-yourself effort.
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The secret to preparing for success is no secret at all.
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I am a great believer in luck. The harder I work, the more of it I seem to have.
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It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
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Quality is an attitude, producing a stable outcome meeting or exceeding criteria, that begins at the birth of the process.
Larry Roberts, Quality Control Manager, CMC Howell Metal
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Once in a while you come up with something for which there is no solution. Then you make a judgment and accept the situation, and life goes on. Count on one or two per career.
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My first message is: Listen, listen, listen to the people who do the work.
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There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
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To desire to have things done quickly prevents their being done thoroughly.
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A leader teaches with patience. A manager without patience is no leader.
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If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
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You need the ability to fail. You cannot innovate unless you are willing to accept mistakes.
Charles Knight (Emerson Electric)
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A fact in itself is nothing. It is valuable only for the idea attached to it, or for the proof which it furnishes.
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He is always right who suspects that he makes mistakes.
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People learn most rapidly when they have a genuine sense of responsibility for their actions.
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He who stops being better stops being good.
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If change is to occur, it must come about through hard work within the organization itself.
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The ability to deal with people is as purchaseable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability than any other under the sun.
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Preaching quality won’t help.
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The best way to predict the future is to create it.
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Corporations need to become people factories—places that develop people—not human warehouses that only produce window watchers.
A. William Wiggenhorn (Motorola University)
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It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.
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Bad quality acts like a boomerang. It will eventually come back and hit you.
Paul Tang, Quality and Project Manager
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The three building blocks of business are hardware, software and ‘humanware.’ TQC starts with humanware.
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[Great TQM leaders are] in the habit of asking ‘Why?’ (not 'Who?’) when things go wrong.
Chang, Labovitz, and Rosansky
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Quality needs to be constantly improved, but it is just as necessary to make sure that quality never deteriorates.
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The fact that the captain of the ship can clearly see the port is of no use if the crew continues to paddle in different directions.
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Not being able to see any problem is itself a problem.
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People do not just buy things, they also buy expectations.
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As for for self-actualization, even Mozart had to wait until he was three or four.
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Every day when you go to work, think what better you can do today for your customer.
Ankush Kumar, Siegwerk India Pvt Ltd.
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If only one or two hours of a forty-hour week use the team approach, the approach is likely to have limited impact.
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A mistake is an event, the full benefit of which has not yet been turned to your advantage.
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The market is never saturated with a good product but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
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Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the many sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
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All roads that lead to success have to pass through Hardwork Boulevard at some point.
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Quality is not a sprint; it is a long-distance event.
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There are as many different approaches to starting SPC as there are companies trying to do it.
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Coordination and productive use of differences should be achieved by group decision making processes used skillfully throughout the company.
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Empowerment is all about letting go so that others can get going.
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Between knowledge of what really exists and ignorance of what does not exist lies the domain of opinion. It is more obscure than knowledge, but clearer than ignorance.
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To change is to risk something. That makes us insecure. Not to change is the bigger risk, but it seldom feels that way.
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Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
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Error 1 = opportunity 1.
Error 1 repeated = opportunity missed.
Brian Mailhot, Continuous Improvement Specialist
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Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.
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It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem.
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The spirit of the thing lives in the details.
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Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.
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First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.
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The road to continuous improvement is and must be an appropriately tailored, optimized, and personal one.
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When the customer says, ‘That ain’t it,’ then that, in fact, ain’t it.
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If I wasn’t making mistakes, I wasn’t making decisions.
General Johnson (Johnson & Johnson)
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It is time to stop perpetuating the myth of simplicity. The system of organization invented by mankind generates complex problems that cannot be solved by simple solutions.
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Management’s job is not to promote satisfaction with the way things are but to create dissatisfaction with the way things are and could be.
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An environment which calls for perfection is not likely to be easy. But aiming for it is always a goad to progress.
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It is the first of all problems for a man to find what kind of work he is to do in this universe.
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Chance is a word devoid of sense; nothing can exist without a cause.
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The carpenter’s rule is ‘measure twice, cut once.’
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Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.
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Don’t make Quality happy; make quality happen!
Jatinder Verma, QA Supervisor, Linamar Corporation
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Quality and frustration have one core thing in common: They are both based on someone’s expectations!
Kenneth Estep, Cisco Systems, Inc.
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No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.
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Leadership fails when it concentrates on sheer survival.
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A problem well-defined is a problem half-solved.
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TQM does not and will not bring results overnight. The essence of TQM is a change of culture.
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You’ve got to be willing to fail.
James Bruke (Johnson & Johnson)
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Whatever is worth doing is worth evaluating.
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Quality is to understand (thoroughly), communicate (adequately–from the front end of the process to the back), and achieve (consistently) customers’ requirements.
Wasi Asghar, Suminter India Organics
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Quality without production or service does not exist, and production or service without quality has no value.
Wasi Asghar, Suminter India Organics
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Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.
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The most common source of mistakes in management decisions is the emphasis on finding the right answer rather than the right question.
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The leader must have infectious optimism.
Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery
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Leaders don’t invent motivation in their followers, they unlock it.
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Every action performed with a blind eye toward quality is an attack on the success of the individual and on the success of the organization as a whole.
Larry Roberts, Quality Control Manager, CMC Howell Metal
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Some men see things as they are, and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were, and say, 'Why not?’
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He that will not apply new remedies, must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
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Quality is when customer satisfaction goes far north and when scrap and rework rates go way south.
Quality and Project Manager
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Not everything that counts can be counted; not everything that can be counted counts.
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In world-class organizations, working to improve quality is not an extracurricular activity. It is a minimum requirement
Chang, Labovitz, and Rosansky
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It may be said that those who succeed in problem-solving in quality control are those who succeed in making a useful cause-and-effect diagram.
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Quality is not a task done to products, services, processes, or people; it is what we collaboratively embrace, commit to, and present as an entire organization.
Amy E. Smith, Reliability Technician, Bayer Healthcare
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The only thing that counts as a mistake is doing it twice.
Larry Roberts, Quality Control Manager, CMC Howell Metal
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How many people work for Quality in your organization?
Paul Tang, Quality and Project Manager
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Manage from the left [side of the brain]; lead from the right.
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The mind is slow to unlearn what it has been long in learning.
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If there is one consistent lesson from those who have led this effort [toward continuous improvement], it is that there is no universal strategy for success.
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If you have to remind people that you are the leader, then you are not.
Jorge Zegarra, director, COS Training Resource Center
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Wisdom denotes the pursuit of the best ends by the best means.
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The concept of managing the moments of truth is the very essence of service management.
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Effective SPC is 10% statistics and 90% management action.
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Effective solutions to any problem circumvent blame and begin with you.
Amy E. Smith, Reliability Technician, Bayer Healthcare
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Life may not always be fair or as you expect. You came with a birth certificate, not a guarantee.
Larry Roberts, Quality Control Manager, CMC Howell Metal
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Avoiding admitting quality issues is not a clever business option!
Paul Tang, Quality and Project Manager
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Running a company by profit alone is like driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror. It tells you where you’ve been, not where you are going.
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If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.
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Failure to detect an error does not relieve people or teams from the responsibility for the quality of their work.
Mark Arnson, Quality Engineer, Milwaukee Composites
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Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
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There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.
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Quality depends not just on you or me; it depends on us.
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The reason we don’t have time to fix it today is that we didn’t take the time to do it right yesterday.
Diljit S. Matharu, Quality Leader, Creation Technologies
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The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.
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Quality is understanding, accepting and meeting the needs and expectations of customers.
W. David Hall, ProSolve Consulting Ltd.
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Quality improvement at a revolutionary pace is now becoming simply good management.
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Poor quality is like a disease. Identifying and treating it early is better than facing the consequences later.
Rafiq Darji, Construction and Materials Engineer, US Department of Transportation
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Truth is more important than the facts.
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Slow and steady wins the race.
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The first faults are theirs that commit them; the second faults are theirs that permit them.
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When you are drowning, a log can look like a yacht! Don’t let waiting for the preferred quality level prevent incremental improvement.
Ronald L Post, Principal Quality Engineer, Westinghouse Electric Co.
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Quality comes not from inspection but from improvement of the process.
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What gets measured gets done.
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There can be no freedom without the freedom to fail.
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Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.
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Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.
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The journey toward excellence is a never-ending road. Some people, because they see no end to their road, never take the first step.
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The more complex the task, the better it serves as preparation for a more complicated task the next time. One puzzle leads to another.
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Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life.
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He who runs his company on visible figures alone will soon have neither company nor visible figures to work with.
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That which we persist in doing becomes easier - not that the nature of the task has changed, but our ability to do has increased.
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Benchmarking means out-maneuvering your competitors.
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Until you implement a decision, it is not really a decision at all.
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Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probable reason so few engage in it.
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Some say, ‘You only get what you measure.’ I say, 'And that’s all you get!’
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When it comes to measuring the height of performance, quality is the quadrant of qualification.
Nguyen Van Thien, Senior Officer, IT Projects
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All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.
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Slogans, posters on the wall, appearances in company videos and at occasional in-house quality award ceremonies are always impersonal and inadequate.
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If management thinks people don’t care, it’s likely that people won’t care.
F. James McDonald (General Motors Corporation)
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Commitment is measured in terms of visible and tangible things, not in terms of rhetoric.
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Quality, like anything else worth doing, doesn’t just happen. It’s not like tomorrow; you can’t just wait and it will come to you.
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The Only Easy Day Was Yesterday.
Navy SEALs (Sea, Air & Land)
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Everyone in the company is the CEO’s customer.
Fred Smith (Federal Express)
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The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.
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The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.
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To manage quality you must measure it.
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The genius of the leadership function is articulating a vision of the future that is at once simple, easily understood, clearly desirable, and energizing.
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Life is a continual problem-solving process.
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Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
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Fear always represents objects in their worst light.
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Quality control and standardization are extremely closely linked.
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Quality depends on good data. It also depends on executive leadership in using that data.
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Chaotic action is preferable to orderly inaction.
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Effective delegation is perhaps the best indicator of effective management simply because it is so basic to both personal and organizational growth.
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What we know prevents us from seeing what is and what can be.
Micah Woodard, Behavioral Health Director, Western Oregon Service Unit
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There is one basic cause of all effects.
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The new idea either finds a champion or dies.
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The knowledge of an effect depends on and involves the knowledge of a cause.
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What we get, and all we ever get, from the outside is information; how we choose to act on this information is up to us.
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All problems become smaller if, instead of indulging them, you confront them. Touch a thistle timidly and it pricks you; grasp it boldly and its spine crumbles.
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It has been said that figures rule the world. Maybe. But I am not sure that figures show us whether it is being ruled well or badly.
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It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
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If we can really understand the problem, the answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem.
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Unfortunately, problems do not come to the administrator carefully wrapped in bundles with the value elements and the factual elements neatly sorted.
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A useful motto during the start-up phase is, ‘Think big - start small'.
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All of life is education and everybody is a teacher and everybody is forever a pupil.
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Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.
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[Quality control] will not usually succeed if it consists merely of a handful of engineers studying statistics in a corner of a factory.
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Curious that we spend more time congratulating people who have succeeded than encouraging people who have not.
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Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
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Both processes and results are important for a well-functioning system. Processes without results are useless, and results without processes are unsustainable.
Govind Ramu, Sun Power Corporation
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Where is quality made? Quality is made in the boardroom.
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Rewarding those who successfully fight quality fires but do not eliminate the root causes encourages arson.
Phill Scott, Director, Quality Assurance, Chemring Energetic Devices
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Well begun is half done.
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Quality enables average organizations to become great, and great organizations to become extraordinary.
Shingai Gerald Mabambe, Quality Assurance Manager, B. Braun Australia & New Zealand
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Since variation exists, the organization must culturally address potential failures.
Marty Slabey, QBO Corporation
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Achieving quality is difficult. If it weren’t, more people would do it, and they don’t, so it is.
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The economic losses from fear are appalling. To assure better quality and productivity, it is necessary that people feel secure.
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Continuous improvement is nothing but the development of ever better methods
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The only way to get people to adopt constant improvement as a way of life in doing daily business is by empowering them.
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As with many other things, there is a surprising amount of prejudice against quality control, but the proof of the pudding is still in the eating.
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If you do not expect much, you will not get much.
Phil Hagan, Quality Supervisor, The Timken Company
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Teaching quality principles is like publishing a book for a diverse audience: you need to translate it to the individual reader.
Brian J. Lewis, Quality Engineering Manager, Green Industrial Supply, Inc.
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Mediocrity is the result when fear of failure permeates an organization.
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The most demanding (and usually most frustrating) customers tend to be the ones that make your company better. Don’t curse them, thank them!
Brian Mailhot, Continuous Improvement Specialist
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It is our experience that, 90 percent of the time, what passes for commitment is compliance.
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No great discovery was ever made without a bold guess.
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The easy way out usually leads back in.
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Ignorance never settles a question.
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Quality is when the customer returns and the product does not.
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Overreliance on experience, intuition, and gut feeling is a surefire way of increasing waste.
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The Voice of the Customer guides world-class leaders’ every action and decision.
Chang, Labovitz, and Rosansky
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You can’t sell from an empty wagon.
Charles Tandy (Tandy Corp.)
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Only through the collective efforts of their individual members do companies change; companies are incapable of changing themselves.
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The problem is not to get people to do what they are told, but to do what they are not told or even what they can’t be told.
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Quality is free; however, the management systems that proliferate it are not.
Jay Watson, Process Excellence Development Director, Ports America
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All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.
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No dream comes true until you wake up and go to work.
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You can blame Murphy’s Law but zero defects (ZD) is the only acceptable solution!
Paul Tang, Quality and Project Manager
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The worst thing a person can do is to ignore or cover up a problem.
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Don’t tell me you’ve found a problem; tell me you’ve found a process improvement.
Walter “Pete” Rohrig, Lockheed Martin Aero Sr. QAE
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The only stability possible is stability in motion.
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There is no such thing as a perfect method. Methods ALWAYS can be improved upon.
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The quality control function doesn’t make other departments look bad or good. It just shines a light on what they are doing.
James Harrington, QC, SEMCO, LLC
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Invention is only the beginning. Product reengineering and cloning are driving the product technology advantage out and the process technology advantage in.
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If you do not get it right the first time, what will you change to do better the second or third time?
Ronald L Post, Principal Quality Engineer, Westinghouse Electric Co.
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It is in general more profitable to reckon up our defects than to boast of our attainments.
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Partial understanding of and involvement in quality can produce only partial success or total failure.
