Leadership Quote by W. Edwards Deming

Deming’s line lands like a polite insult: growth is a cheat code. In an expanding market, even mediocre leadership can look like genius because demand is doing the heavy lifting. Sales rise, mistakes get masked by volume, and the organization mistakes tailwinds for talent. It’s a ruthless little deglorification of the “great manager” myth, aimed at cultures that reward confidence and quarterly optics over method and learning.

The specific intent is diagnostic. Deming isn’t celebrating expansion; he’s warning that it corrupts measurement. When the pie is getting bigger, every slice can grow even if the kitchen is chaotic. Promotions and praise get handed out on the basis of outcomes that weren’t really earned, which then hardens into bad theory: “Our strategy worked,” “Our people are exceptional,” “Our processes are fine.” The subtext is his lifelong critique of management by results without understanding variation. Good times are statistically noisy; they tempt leaders to overfit stories to numbers and then lock in policies that fail the moment conditions tighten.

Context matters: Deming’s reputation was forged in quality control and systems thinking, especially in postwar manufacturing, where “management” too often meant inspection, slogans, and blame. In that world, a booming market can keep the factory humming while defects, delays, and waste quietly compound. His real target is complacency. The market will eventually stop expanding. The managers who were carried by growth will be exposed; the ones who built capable systems will survive the weather change.