“Quality is the responsibility of the top people. Its origin is in the boardroom. They are the ones who decide.”

The big problems are where people don’t realise they have one in the first place.

Whenever there is fear, you will get wrong figures.

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

No one knows the cost of a defective product – don’t tell me you do.

You can not define being exactly on time.

Customer expectations? Nonsense. No customer ever asked for the electric light, the pneumatic tire, the VCR, or the CD.

People don’t like to make mistakes.

Quality is everyone’s responsibility.

Customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.

In 1945, the world was in a shambles. American companies had no competition.

My mother was my biggest role model. She taught me to hate waste. We never wasted anything.

The prevailing system of management has crushed fun out of the workplace.

Quality’ means what will sell and do a customer some good – at least try to.

Eliminate numerical quotas, including Management by Objectives.

It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best.

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing.

Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.

They don’t come off. I walk into a lot of very high-level boardrooms now, and I present to distinguished conferences, but these bracelets remind me of the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met.