"Making a wrong decision is understandable. Refusing to search continually for learning is not"
About this Quote
Crosby draws a bright line between fallibility and negligence, and the bluntness is the point. “Making a wrong decision is understandable” grants the reader a kind of amnesty: in real organizations, decisions get made with partial information, political noise, and deadlines that don’t care about nuance. Mistakes, he implies, aren’t moral failures so much as the cost of moving.
Then he snaps the trap shut: “Refusing to search continually for learning is not.” The subtext is managerial and disciplinary. You don’t get judged for being wrong; you get judged for staying wrong. Crosby isn’t praising curiosity as a lifestyle accessory. He’s defending learning as a professional obligation, a duty that sits upstream of quality. That’s classic Crosby: the quality guru who sold “zero defects” not as perfectionism, but as a system that prevents rework, blame games, and expensive surprises.
The word “refusing” matters. It frames stagnation as active, almost willful. In workplace terms, that calls out a familiar pathology: leaders who protect their ego by treating feedback as insubordination, teams that repeat the same postmortem without changing the process, companies that confuse experience with expertise. “Continually” raises the stakes again. One training, one book, one offsite doesn’t count; learning has to be procedural, built into how decisions are made.
Contextually, this is mid-to-late 20th-century management thinking aimed at industrial and corporate America, but it lands cleanly in today’s culture of rapid iteration. Crosby’s ethic is simple: errors are human; unexamined errors are a choice.
Then he snaps the trap shut: “Refusing to search continually for learning is not.” The subtext is managerial and disciplinary. You don’t get judged for being wrong; you get judged for staying wrong. Crosby isn’t praising curiosity as a lifestyle accessory. He’s defending learning as a professional obligation, a duty that sits upstream of quality. That’s classic Crosby: the quality guru who sold “zero defects” not as perfectionism, but as a system that prevents rework, blame games, and expensive surprises.
The word “refusing” matters. It frames stagnation as active, almost willful. In workplace terms, that calls out a familiar pathology: leaders who protect their ego by treating feedback as insubordination, teams that repeat the same postmortem without changing the process, companies that confuse experience with expertise. “Continually” raises the stakes again. One training, one book, one offsite doesn’t count; learning has to be procedural, built into how decisions are made.
Contextually, this is mid-to-late 20th-century management thinking aimed at industrial and corporate America, but it lands cleanly in today’s culture of rapid iteration. Crosby’s ethic is simple: errors are human; unexamined errors are a choice.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning from Mistakes |
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