The thought is recognisably Deming’s, but these exact words have never been traced to anything he wrote or is recorded as saying. Mark Graban, who went looking, reports the line “doesn’t appear in Out of the Crisis or The New Economics” and that the Deming Institute has not been able to confirm it as a direct quote ↗; Deming’s own collaborator Clare Crawford-Mason remembered him saying something different — “Survival is optional. No one has to change.”
“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory” commonly credited to W. Edwards Deming (1900–1993), but no documented source has been found. The line appears in neither "Out of the Crisis" nor "The New Economics," and the Deming Institute's citation-bearing quote database does not carry it. Deming's collaborator Clare Crawford-Mason remembered his words as "Survival is optional. No one has to change." — quotle.info
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? We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.
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Provenance
Where it is supposed to come from
Circulating wording
“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
Searched, not found in
Out of the Crisis; The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education
Nearest sourced line
“Learning is not compulsory; it’s voluntary… But to survive, we must learn.”
First-hand recollection
Clare Crawford-Mason: “Survival is optional. No one has to change.”
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
There is no fuller passage to show. No book, paper, letter or seminar transcript containing this sentence has been located, so what stands below is the record of the search rather than an original context.
Not in the two major books. Mark Graban looked and found the line “doesn’t appear in Out of the Crisis or The New Economics”, and reports the Deming Institute has not been able to confirm it as a direct quote — Lean Blog, 19 February 2013 ↗.
Not in his writings either. John Willis, researching a book on Deming, went looking for the citation and concluded there is none: “He did not make that exact quote; there is no evidence” — Profound Deming ↗.
Absent from the Institute’s own collection. Every entry in The W. Edwards Deming Institute quote database ↗ carries a citation — a book and page, or a seminar with its city and date. This sentence is not among them.
A different wording from someone who was there. Clare Crawford-Mason, the NBC senior producer who met Deming in 1979 and put him on national television, recalls the line as “Survival is optional. No one has to change” — Lean Blog Interviews, episode 167 ↗.
No rights status can honestly be asserted, because no source work has been identified. The sentence has not been tied to any book, article, letter or transcript, so there is no first-publication date to reason from. Deming’s actual published books remain in copyright, held by his estate and their publishers — but this line is not in them, which is precisely the point.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
A quote with no citation behind it
This is not a case of one writer’s words being handed to another. Nobody else claims the sentence; the problem is that nobody can show where Deming said it. It travels in email signatures and slide decks with his name attached and no source at all — and the people who know his work best have looked.
✕
The exact wordingW. Edwards Deming No source
Mark Graban searched and reported the line “doesn’t appear in Out of the Crisis or The New Economics”, Deming’s two major books, adding that the Deming Institute has not been able to confirm it as a direct quote — Lean Blog, 19 February 2013 ↗.
✕
Deming’s books and papersW. Edwards Deming Not there
John Willis, who hunted for the citation while writing his own book on Deming, states flatly: “He did not make that exact quote; there is no evidence,” and that it is in none of Deming’s books or writings — Profound Deming ↗.
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How the line gets usedManagers quoting Deming at employees Inverted
Graban’s objection is not only the missing source but the use: the line is wielded to shut down objections to top-down change, when Deming argued that most problems belong to the system and that leaders must drive out fear — Lean Blog ↗.
✓The closest thing to a first-hand record comes from Clare Crawford-Mason, the NBC senior producer who met Deming in 1979 and made him famous: what she remembers him saying is “Survival is optional. No one has to change.” — Lean Blog Interviews, episode 167 ↗. That is a recollection rather than a transcript, so it settles the sense of the thing without settling the sentence.
Context
Why this line sticks to Deming
Deming was in his eightieth year and largely unknown to American managers when NBC broadcast the white paper If Japan Can… Why Can’t We? on 24 June 1980. Its senior producer, Clare Crawford-Mason, had met him the year before; the not-quite-fifteen minutes she gave him — her own figure, “less than 15 minutes of a 90-minute report including commercials” — turned a statistician into the presiding conscience of American management, and filled his four-day seminars for the rest of his life.
Fame on that scale attracts orphan sentences. Deming taught in aphorisms from a lectern, most of what he said in those rooms was never transcribed, and the gap between his blunt seminar voice and his published prose is exactly where an unsourced line can settle unchallenged. The irony is that this particular one is usually deployed against the people Deming spent his career defending — as a warning to employees who question a change, when his whole argument was that the system, and therefore management, is what has to transform.
Survival is optional. No one has to change.
The documented cousin of this quote
Deming did say something close, and it is sourced. Wikiquote records “Learning is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. But to survive, we must learn,” citing Deming: The Way We Knew Him (1995) — and notes it is often shortened in circulation to “Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.” That shortened form is itself a step away from the sourced sentence, and “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory” is a further step again.
Worth noting what Wikiquote does not do: its Deming page keeps a Misattributed section — it is where “In God we trust. All others must bring data” is filed — and this line appears in neither that section nor the sourced ones. It is not that the quote has been judged and cleared; it is that it has never had a citation to judge.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1900–1993 · American statistician and management consultant
W. Edwards Deming was an American statistician who spent the summer of 1950 teaching statistical process control to Japanese engineers and managers, work Japan honoured with the Order of the Sacred Treasure in 1960, and by naming its national quality award, the Deming Prize, after him. He was almost unknown at home until NBC’s white paper If Japan Can… Why Can’t We? put him on American television in 1980, after which his four-day seminars and his books — Out of the Crisis and The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education — made him the presiding figure of the quality movement. His argument was that most failure is built into the system and is management’s to fix, not the workforce’s to be blamed for.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
How to cite this
No documented source located in W. Edwards Deming’s published works. Attribution examined in Mark Graban, “Did Deming Really Say ‘Survival Is Not Mandatory’?” Lean Blog, February 19, 2013; and John Willis, “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory,” Profound Deming. Deming’s collaborator Clare Crawford-Mason recalls the line as “Survival is optional. No one has to change” (Lean Blog Interviews podcast, episode 167).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/it-is-not-necessary-to-change-survival-is-not-mandatory/