Sean Quint's Key Ideas from The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality
by W. Edwards Deming

Inspections are costly and unreliable – and they don't improve quality, they merely find a lack of quality.

Build quality into the process from start to finish.

Don't just find what you did wrong – eliminate the "wrongs" altogether.

Use statistical control methods – not physical inspections alone – to prove that the process is working.

Quality relies on consistency – the less variation you have in the input, the less variation you'll have in the output.

Look at suppliers as your partners in quality. Encourage them to spend time improving their own quality – they shouldn't compete for your business based on price alone.

Analyze the total cost to you, not just the initial cost of the product.

Use quality statistics to ensure that suppliers meet your quality standards.

Continuously improve your systems and processes. Deming promoted the Plan-Do-Check-Act approach to process analysis and improvement.

Emphasize training and education so everyone can do their jobs better.

Use kaizen as a model to reduce waste and to improve productivity, effectiveness, and safety.

Train for consistency to help reduce variation.

Build a foundation of common knowledge.

Allow workers to understand their roles in the "big picture."

Encourage staff to learn from one another, and provide a culture and environment for effective teamwork.

Expect your supervisors and managers to understand their workers and the processes they use.

Don't simply supervise – provide support and resources so that each staff member can do his or her best. Be a coach instead of a policeman.

Figure out what each person actually needs to do his or her best.

Emphasize the importance of participative management and transformational leadership.

Find ways to reach full potential, and don't just focus on meeting targets and quotas.

Allow people to perform at their best by ensuring that they're not afraid to express ideas or concerns.

Let everyone know that the goal is to achieve high quality by doing more things right – and that you're not interested in blaming people when mistakes happen.

Make workers feel valued, and encourage them to look for better ways to do things.

Ensure that your leaders are approachable and that they work with teams to act in the company's best interests.

Use open and honest communication to remove fear from the organization.

Build the "internal customer" concept – recognize that each department or function serves other departments that use their output.

Build a shared vision.

Use cross-functional teamwork to build understanding and reduce adversarial relationships.

Focus on collaboration and consensus instead of compromise.

Let people know exactly what you want – don't make them guess. "Excellence in service" is short and memorable, but what does it mean? How is it achieved? The message is clearer in a slogan like "You can do better if you try."

Don't let words and nice-sounding phrases replace effective leadership. Outline your expectations, and then praise people face-to-face for doing good work.

Look at how the process is carried out, not just numerical targets. Deming said that production targets encourage high output and low quality.

Provide support and resources so that production levels and quality are high and achievable.

Measure the process rather than the people behind the process.

Allow everyone to take pride in their work without being rated or compared.

Treat workers the same, and don't make them compete with other workers for monetary or other rewards. Over time, the quality system will naturally raise the level of everyone's work to an equally high level.

Improve the current skills of workers.

Encourage people to learn new skills to prepare for future changes and challenges.

Build skills to make your workforce more adaptable to change, and better able to find and achieve improvements.

Improve your overall organization by having each person take a step toward quality.

Analyze each small step, and understand how it fits into the larger picture.

Use effective change management principles to introduce the new philosophy and ideas in Deming's 14 points.