W. Edwards Deming

William Edwards Deming was the statistician who taught postwar industry to manage by measurement, and Wikiquote describes him as an American statistician, college professor, author, lecturer and consultant known for his work in quality management. That makes him the natural magnet for any crisp aphorism about evidence beating opinion — his name settles the argument the line is trying to win. But his actual position was subtler than the slogan: in Out of the Crisis he endorsed Lloyd Nelson’s point that the most important figures for management are unknown or unknowable, and in The New Economics he called it “a costly myth” to suppose that what you cannot measure you cannot manage.