Testimonials about Dr. Deming

Shoichiro Toyoda – President and Chairman, Toyota

There is not a day I don’t think about what Dr. Deming meant to us. Deming is the core of our management.

Paula Marshall – CEO, The Bama Companies

Don Berwick – President Emeritus and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and CEO of the Center for Medicare Services

Deming’s theory contradicted so much of what I had been doing literally for a decade. I was engaged in management behaviors that I now regard as abusive, disrespectful, and unlikely to produce anything different.

Bob Browne – Great Plains Coca-Cola Bottling Company

We were measuring people and performance and holding people accountable for goals, and Deming always taught us to manage the process and measure the process. That’s a hard thing to wrap your head around.

Josh Macht – Harvard Business Review

Deming believed that the individual is naturally inclined to do good and meaningful work. Unfortunately, society bends this human nature into an unnatural competition that essentially ruins us.

Donald Peterson – former CEO, Ford Motor Company

Dr. Deming's questions and concepts did a wonderful job of initiating and agitating the thought processes among a wide array of people at Ford Motor Company.

Dan Seger - Ramco Engineers

Five years ago, I thought we just needed to do this faster, this quicker, and it would solve all our problems. Now, I can see that it is totally a cultural issue. The nuts and bolts I worried about were probably 5% of our issues.
The principles of Deming are the technical pieces that are related to the human element. We always struggle with the human element. The winner of the game will be the one who retains talent; we’re doing everything we can to keep our people.
Respect for people and how we do it is the Deming process. We don’t treat people like a number, and it’s become a magnet for getting good people.

Jack Hillerich – CEO, Hillerich and Bradsby, makers of the “Louisville Slugger"

I went to Dr. Deming’s seminar thinking he was going help me learn how to make better baseball bats. I was there for maybe forty minutes and realized we weren’t talking about making better products, we were talking about making better managers, better people and treating our people a whole lot differently than what I’d been doing.
We put trust in the people, then we said how do we make an aluminum bat and make it better. The dollar savings more than tripled. This is a life change for me.
I’d like to shout out, if you don’t take a look at this you’ll miss a great opportunity to enjoy life, enjoy your job and do a lot of good for people.

Doug Hall - Eureka Ranch

Deming is how we went from two guys working in a closet, to having two of the best bourbons in America in just 18 months.
In America, we have got a lot of leaders who think their job is to inspect the work as opposed to inspire the work and educate.
You have to take the time to involve the employees on a much broader base to teach them to be proactive problem solvers.

Steven Haedrich – CEO, New York Label and Box Works

The hardest part was having people break their old way of thinking. People want to be larger than the system, and they’re not going to be.
It saved our company from bankruptcy, and it’s very worth It.
It requires top managers to educate people, to buy into the new philosophy, to get everyone on board, working together to continually improve the systems that they’re operating in every day.

Deena Marchal – Southern Utah University

When it comes to the Deming philosophy, if you have a systems mindset, where everyone has value, everyone can contribute, everyone has great ideas, all of a sudden you start to realize that listening to people becomes one of the greatest things that you can do.
So there is no bottom level or top level. Everyone contributes to the overall system and its success. You become more motivated because you are part of the system. Without you, the system doesn’t operate the same.

Rob Rodin – Marshall Industries

You can’t invent a future with magic bullets or buzzwords. Radical changes start at the heart and spread outward, turning the world upside down and inside out.
Who you are, and what you do must change. But you can’t do it alone.
No one is as smart as everyone. You need the hearts and minds of everyone in your organization.

Keith Sparkjoy – Pluralsight

Deming is all about cooperation. Our system must have an aim, and if everyone is cooperating toward achieving the aim, everyone wins. When pulling in the same direction, nobody could possibly compete with that.
He must’ve imagined a world where the aim was to provide meaningful, long-term work for people, giving them the opportunity to take pride in their work.

Dick Steele – Peaker Services

Financial success is a byproduct of how you operate your company. The main goal from Dr. Deming is you’ve got to learn something and then apply it.
I think the incentive for a manager to learn about the Deming philosophy is the long-term health of their company. The shift in the thinking of most managers is going to be very difficult. Survival is not required.