“What is the variation trying to tell us about a process, about the people in the process?”
The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)
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W. Edwards Deming 33
American professor, author, and consultant 1900–1993Related quotes
Source: Management Science (1968), Chapter 2, Chance, Risk and Malice, p. 58

Source: Lateral Thinking : Creativity Step by Step (1970), p. 5; Preface.
Context: Lateral thinking... is the process of using information to bring about creativity and insight restructuring. Lateral thinking can be learned, practised and used. It is possible to acquire skill in it just as it is possible to acquire skill in mathematics.

Source: Trevor Noah Was Low Key In Black Panther https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC6V4gLAat4, June 2018

As quoted in "The Seed of Apple's Innovation" in BusinessWeek (12 October 2004)
2000-04
Context: The system is that there is no system. That doesn't mean we don't have process. Apple is a very disciplined company, and we have great processes. But that's not what it's about. Process makes you more efficient.
But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we've been thinking about a problem. It's ad hoc meetings of six people called by someone who thinks he has figured out the coolest new thing ever and who wants to know what other people think of his idea.
And it comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don't get on the wrong track or try to do too much. We're always thinking about new markets we could enter, but it's only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.

Parrots, the Universe and Everything (2001)
Context: For us, there is no longer a fundamental mystery about Life. It is all the process of extraordinary eruptions of information, and it is information which gives us this fantastically rich, complex world in which we live; but at the same time that we've discovered that we are destroying it at a rate that has no precedent in history, unless you go back to the point when we are hit by an asteroid!

Seth Lloyd, cited in: Michael Schmiechen (2009) Newton's Principia Revisited. p. 885