Science Quote by W. Edwards Deming

Deming’s line reads like a calm rebuttal to the default corporate impulse: shop suppliers like commodities, squeeze them hard, then act surprised when quality wobbles and costs creep back in somewhere else. The specific intent is managerial, almost polemical. He’s arguing that durable relationships aren’t “soft” values; they’re an industrial strategy. Stay together long enough and you stop paying the hidden taxes of churn: requalification, inspection, disputes, inconsistent materials, and the constant overhead of mistrust.

The subtext is that cost and quality aren’t opposing sliders. In Deming’s world, they’re coupled through variation. Long-term partnerships let organizations reduce variation because both sides can invest in shared standards, stable processes, and honest feedback loops. A vendor who expects to be replaced next quarter has every incentive to optimize for today’s price, not tomorrow’s performance. A vendor who expects to be there next year can justify better tooling, training, and process control. The relationship becomes a platform for learning.

Context matters: Deming’s influence in postwar Japan and later in U.S. industry was rooted in a critique of short-termism and scoreboard management. “Lower costs” here isn’t a pep-talk about frugality; it’s a systems claim: once the system stabilizes, waste drains out. The line also quietly indicts adversarial procurement culture. It’s not romantic about loyalty; it’s pragmatic about interdependence. Trust, in Deming’s framing, is an engineering input.