W. Edwards Deming

Change or Perish: Deming’s Stark Choice

Ultimately, Deming’s axiom carries moral weight. Choosing not to change risks customers’ trust, employees’ livelihoods, and communities’ welfare—particularly as safety, climate, and cybersecurity stakes rise. Continuous improvement safeguards more than margins; it protects people. Therefore, survival as a value implies an obligation: to learn, to adapt, and to build systems that make tomorrow safer and more useful than today. In that light, change is optional only if responsibility is, too. [...]

Trust Data: Deming’s Mandate for Measured Decisions

Ultimately, Deming’s line is a call for disciplined judgment, not data worship. Bayesian thinking—updating beliefs as evidence arrives—captures the spirit: models and priors inform experiments, and results revise the plan. As George Box and Norman Draper noted, “All models are wrong, but some are useful” (Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces, 1987). Thus, the wise leader demands data, pairs it with theory, and maintains humility about uncertainty. In that balanced posture, trust is earned: not by faith in numbers, but by a repeatable process that learns. [...]