Phil Crosby Quotes

Quality is free. It's not a gift, but it's free. The 'unquality' things are what cost money.

In a true zero-defects approach, there are no unimportant items.

Quality has to be caused, not controlled.

The cost of quality is the expense of doing things wrong.

Quality is the result of a carefully constructed cultural environment. It has to be the fabric of the organization, not part of the fabric.

When you're out of quality, you're out of business.

If we deliver on time, but the product has defects, we have not delivered on time.

People are conditioned to believe that error is inevitable.... However, we do not accept the same standard when it comes to our personal life. If we did, we would resign ourselves to being shortchanged now and then when we cash our paychecks. We would expect hospital nurses to drop a certain percentage of all newborn babies. We would expect to go home to the wrong house periodically. As individuals we do not tolerate these things. Thus we have a double standard, one for ourselves, one for the company.

Making a wrong decision is understandable. Refusing to search continually for learning is not.

Problems breed problems, and the lack of a disciplined method of openly attacking them breeds more problems.

Quality is such an attractive banner that sometimes we think we can get away with just waving it, without doing the hard work necessary to achieve it.

Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.

We must define quality as conformance to specifications if we are to manage it.

Improving quality requires a culture change, not just a new diet.

It is always cheaper to do the job right the first time.

Quality management is needed because nothing is simple anymore, if indeed it ever was.

It isn't what you find, it's what you do about what you find.

Many managers feel, somewhat cynically, that people are being paid to do their jobs and that's that. This attitude reflects an insensitivity to people that is a trademark of many hockey-style managers.

Eliminating what is not wanted or needed is profitable in itself.

Quality means conformance to requirements, not elegance.

If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.

You don't have to be noisy to be effective.

The customer deserves to receive exactly what we have promised to produce - a clean room, a hot cup of coffee, a nonporous casing, a trip to the moon on goassamer wings.

If you don't know what the defect level is, how do you know when to get mad?

Very few of the great leaders ever get through their careers without failing, sometimes dramatically.

Successful people breed success.

When in doubt, delete it.

Being convinced one knows the whole story is the surest way to fail.

A rule to live by: I won't use anything I can't explain in five minutes.

It is not possible to know what you need to learn.

Most things don't work like they are supposed to work.

Selecting the right person for the right job is the largest part of coaching.

You are going to be measured anyway by some means, fair or foul. Usually the one doing the measuring has nothing specific in mind; so he does it by the seat of his pants. Careers are destroyed in this manner.

The great discoveries are usually obvious.