Leadership Quote by W. Edwards Deming

Deming’s line lands like a clean cut through corporate comfort food: stop pretending numbers are the same thing as performance. “Eliminate numerical quotas” isn’t an anti-metrics tantrum; it’s an attack on the lazy managerial habit of converting complicated work into a single target and then punishing people for not hitting it. The add-on, “including Management by Objectives,” is the real provocation. MBO was sold as modern, rational leadership; Deming treats it as quota-thinking in a nicer suit.

The intent is surgical: remove systems that force workers and managers to optimize for the scoreboard instead of the game. Quotas turn the workplace into a breeding ground for corner-cutting, sandbagging, gaming, and internal competition. They also create an alibi for leadership. If the number is missed, blame the employee; if the number is hit, declare the system healthy. Either way, management avoids the harder task Deming insisted on: redesigning processes so quality and productivity emerge reliably.

The subtext is almost moral. Deming implies that most “underperformance” is manufactured upstream by the organization itself: poor training, broken workflows, bad inputs, contradictory incentives. A quota doesn’t fix any of that; it just pressures people to hide it.

Context matters: postwar industrial America, enamored with measurement, dashboards, and “accountability,” while Japanese manufacturing embraced statistical process control and continuous improvement. Deming’s critique anticipates today’s KPI culture: when targets become the job, the job gets sacrificed to targets.