Statistics, management

W. Edwards Deming

1900 – 1993

Most of what goes wrong belongs to the system rather than to the people inside it — which moves the first question of any inquiry away from who and towards what conditions made this likely.

Read alongside: Sense · Shape

Start with

Out of the Crisis (1982)

Where they resist the book

Deming wants variation reduced. Much of what this book values — noticing, deviating, judging in the moment — reads from that angle as variation.