The Essential Deming: Leadership Principles from the Father of Quality

6There Is No Substitute for Knowledge

(Information Is Not Knowledge)

In a speech at Dowling College in May 1990, Deming said that you “cannot force knowledge on anybody. They have to ask for it.”

Everywhere he went, Deming saw tables of data, computer printouts, and information of all types, but little knowledge. People didn’t know how to get knowledge, he said. Deming would point at tables of data and say, “Tons of figures—no knowledge.”

Students in school at all levels memorize information rather than learn how to think. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Deming wrote and spoke about the need to improve education. He wrote many memoranda to deans and colleagues at schools where he taught. “Typed and printed at my expense” appeared at the top of ...