Quotes from Tom DeMarco

Any so-called training experience that lacks the slow-down characteristic is an exercise in nonlearning.

The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.

Quality takes time and reduces quantity, so it makes you, in a sense, less efficient. The efficiency-optimized organization recognizes quality as its enemy. That's why many corporate Quality Programs are really Quality Reduction Programs in disguise.

Learning is limited by an organization's ability to keep its people.

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

Although your staff may be exposed to the message "work longer and harder" while they're at the office, they're getting a very different message at home. The message at home is, "Life is passing you by. Your laundry is piling up in the closet, your babies are uncuddled, your spouse is starting to look elsewhere. There is only one time around on this merry-go-round called life, only one shot at the brass ring. And if you use your life up on C++ . . .

The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.

Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.

People under time pressure don't think faster."    Ã¢â'¬â€Tim Lister Think rate is fixed. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can't pick up the pace of thinking.

People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.

When companies can't invent, it's usually because their people are too damn busy.

we don't work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn't get done on time.

Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The benefit is observed dollar savings and revenue from the work performed, and cost is the total cost, including replacement of any workers used up by the effort.

Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers.

Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.

Whether you call it a "team" or an "ensemble" or a "harmonious work group" is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.

What seemed to be happening was that the change itself wasn't as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty.

The most obvious defensive management ploys are prescriptive Methodologies ("My people are too dumb to build systems without them" ) and technical interference by the manager. Both are doomed to fail in the long run.

In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor

in the best organizations, the short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters more is being best. And that's a long-term concept.

Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.

Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.

On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.