Quotes About Efficiency

Plenty of other books say how to see as much of the city as possible," his boss had told him. "You should say how to see as little.")

mass production. Instead of making things only when people needed them, like holes in the wall did, Rusty factories had churned out vast quantities of stuff—the whole world in a giant competition to use up resources as quickly as possible.

All new markets are inefficient at first

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations

What is school for? If you're not asking that, you're wasting time and money.

Stick with the Dips that are likely to pan out, and quit the Cul-de-Sacs to focus your resources

The linchpin has figured out that we get only a certain number of brain cycles to spend each day. Spending even one on a situation out of our control has a significant opportunity cost.

You and your organization have the power to change everything. To create remarkable products and services. To over deliver. To be the best in the world. How dare you squander that resource by spreading it too thin. How dare you settle for mediocre just because you're busy coping with too many things on your agenda, racing against the clock to get it all done.

Then a deadline arrives and you have to cut it short. Is shipping that important? I think it is. I think the discipline of shipping is essential in the long-term path to becoming indispensable.

We'd like to believe that efficient, useful, cost-effective products and services are the way to succeed. That hard work is its own reward. Most marketers carry around a worldview that describes themselves as innovators, not storytellers.

You really can't try to do everything, especially if you intend to be the best in the world.

The industrialist (your boss, perhaps) demands that everything be proven, efficient, and risk free. The artist seeks none of these. The value of art is in your willingness to stare down the risk and to embrace the void of possible failure.

Organize your project, your life, and your organization around the minimum. What's the smallest market you can survive on?

Every day you stay is a bad strategic decision for your career because every day you get better at something that isn't that useful—and you are another day behind others who are learning something more useful.

Stick with the Dips that are likely to pan out, and quit the Cul-de-Sacs to focus your resources. That's it.

Deadlines? Surely you know someone who is late all the time. Someone who can't deliver anything of value unless they've stalled so much they've created an urgency, an emergency that requires mind-blowing effort and adrenaline to deliver. This is not efficient or reliable behavior, and yet they persist. The reason is simple: they can't push through the common fear of completion unless they can create a greater fear of total failure.

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner. Before

Organizing around the average, then, is too expensive. Organizing around average means that the organization has exchanged the high productivity of exceptional performance for the ease and security of an endless parade of average performers. The

Bloggers around the world are discovering that it's cheaper and faster and more effective to build their own media channels than it is to waste time arguing with the old ones.

we start formal organizations when it's cheaper than leading a tribe instead. Having employees, for example, gives you a tight interaction of communication and output that used to be difficult to accomplish from a less formal tribe.

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner. Before you enter a new market, consider what would happen if you managed to get through the Dip and win in the market you're already in.

Sorry that this e-booklet is so short. Actually, if I hadn't spent so much time on it, it would be longer.

FileMaker Pro

The organization gets extremely efficient at producing a certain output a certain way . . . and then competition or change or technology arrives and the old rules aren't particularly useful, the old efficiencies not so profitable.