
“Without standards, there can be no improvement.”
Gemba Kaizen: A Commonsense Approach to a Continuous Improvement Strategy, Second Edition (ed. McGraw Hill Professional, 2012), ISBN 9780071790352
“Without standards, there can be no improvement.”
“One must standardize, and thus stabilize the process, before continuous improvement can be made.”
In an article published in the Sunday Times
Sunday Times
Source: Quality Control: Principles, Practice, and Administration. 1951, p. 1
Source: The Natural System of Political Economy (1837), p. 44
Academy of Achievement interview (1991)
Context: Reason alone will not serve. Intuition alone can be improved by reason, but reason alone without intuition can easily lead the wrong way. They both are necessary. The way I like to put it is that when I have an intuition about something, I send it over to the reason department. Then after I've checked it out in the reason department, I send it back to the intuition department to make sure that it's still all right. That's how my mind works, and that's how I work. That's why I think that there is both an art and a science to what we do. The art of science is as important as so-called technical science. You need both. It's this combination that must be recognized and acknowledged and valued.
Designing the Future (2007)