Life & Wisdom Quote by Phil Crosby

Crosby’s line is a small manifesto for the quality movement: profit doesn’t only come from adding features, headcount, or hustle; it can come from subtraction. The phrasing is deliberately unromantic. “Eliminating what is not wanted or needed” sounds like housekeeping, not heroism, and that’s the point. Crosby, best known for “quality is free,” spent his career attacking the comforting myth that defects, rework, and bureaucratic drag are simply the cost of doing business. He reframes waste as a revenue leak you can seal, not a tax you must accept.

The subtext is a rebuke to managerial vanity. Organizations love to measure what they produce, less so what they should stop producing. “Not wanted” nods to the market: features customers ignore, reports nobody reads, meetings attended out of fear. “Not needed” targets internal self-deception: controls added to compensate for broken processes, layers of approval that exist to distribute blame, pet projects kept alive by prestige. Crosby isn’t arguing for austerity for its own sake; he’s arguing that removing dead weight creates value twice: you save the direct costs and you restore attention to the work that actually matters.

Context matters because Crosby came of age in mid-century American industry, where quality was often treated as inspection at the end of the line. His provocation is to move quality upstream: prevent errors, simplify systems, stop doing the pointless thing. It’s a business aphorism that doubles as cultural critique of a world that confuses “more” with “better.”