Quotes About Efficiency

The minutes of white-collar workers' lives were tapped out by typewriters and adding machines. They had the cheerfulness of robots, having lost the capacity to feel anything except boredom.

In my column series 'The Main Thing ' I often talk about how Internet technology can improve the way people communicate - both within a business and between a business and its customers and partners.

Our team is good at getting dressed real quick, because we're the type of team that wears their uniforms all day.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

Motorists who want to save money on gas will demand and buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. We should not limit their freedom with more government regulations.

Well, numerous studies have shown that on average nonvirtualized enterprise servers are only running at about 5% to 10% utilization.

Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: Put second things first and we lose both first things and second things.

No time is wasted time

In a self-organized team, individuals take accountability for managing their own workload, shift work among themselves based on need and best fit, and take responsibility for team effectiveness. Team members have considerable leeway in how they deliver results, they are self-disciplined in their accountability for those results, and they work within a flexible framework.

There are three particularly important issues involved in delivering customer value: focusing on innovation rather than efficiency and optimization, concentrating on execution, and lean thinking.

Innovation delivers products that we can barely imagine. Efficiency and optimization are appropriate drivers for a production project, whereas innovation and creativity should drive an exploration-type project. A production mindset can restrict our vision to what appears doable. An exploration mindset helps us explore what seems impossible.

When project leaders focus on delivery, they add value to projects. When they focus on planning and control, they tend to add overhead.

If you want to be fast and agile, keep things simple. Speed isn't the result of simplicity, but simplicity enables speed.

Large portions of the productivity gains from agile methods come not from doing things better, but from not doing them at all.

Newtonian versus quantum, predictability versus flexibility, optimization versus adaptation, efficiency versus innovation—all these dichotomies reflect a fundamentally different way of making sense about the world and how to manage effectively within it.

Effective project leaders focus on people, product, and process—in that order. Without the right people, nothing gets built. Without a laser focus on product value, extraneous activities creep in. Without a minimum process framework, there can be inefficiency and possibly a little chaos.

Agile Project Management focuses on selecting the right skills for project team members and molding them into productive teams.

We focused instead on helping them to manage their energy more effectively in the service of whatever mission they were on.

During those 41/2 hours of focused morning work, Peter was able to write nearly twice as much as had sitting at his desk for up to ten hours a day in previous years.

We are machine-centered in our thinking—focused on the optimization of technology and equipment—rather than human-centered—focused on the optimization of human alertness and performance.

Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.

Energy, Not Time, Is Our Most Precious Resource

The most important organizational resource is energy.

America is the only country in the world in which employees work more hours per week than the Japanese.