Phil Crosby Quotations

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

You have to lead people gently toward what they already know is right.

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

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

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

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

Slowness to change usually means fear of the new.

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

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

Change should be a friend. It should happen by plan, not by accident.

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

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

No one can remember more than three points.

The audience only pays attention as long as you know where you are going.

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

The great discoveries are usually obvious.

When in doubt, delete it.

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

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.

Successful people breed success.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Quality has to be caused, not controlled.