Quotes About Efficiency

When we look at the world, we perceive only what is enough for our plans and actions to work and for us to get by.

Considerations of Aesthetics and Fascination: You should strive for brevity, which is concise and efficient expression, as well as beauty, which is the melodic or poetic aspect of your language (at all the requisite levels of analysis). Finally, you should not be bored, or boring. If you are bored while writing, then, most importantly, you are doing it wrong, and you will bore your reader.

You should strive for brevity, which is concise and efficient expression, as well as beauty, which is the melodic or poetic aspect of your language. [...] That state of mind is partly aesthetic. You have to be trying to produce something of worth, beauty and elegance. Do you plan to settle for ugly and uncouth? Do you want to destroy, instead of build?

If there is a problem to be solved, and many people involve themselves in the solution, then a hierarchy must and will arise, as those who can do, and those who cannot follow as best they can, often learning to be competent in the process. If the problem is real, then the people who are best at solving the problem at hand should rise to the top. That is not power. It is the authority that properly accompanies ability.

A responsible person decides to make a problem his or her problem, and then works diligently—even ambitiously—for its solution, with other people, in the most efficient manner possible (efficient, because there are other problems to solve, and efficiency allows for the conservation of resources that might then be devoted importantly elsewhere).

return. In essence, you want to crystallize the fact that once they say yes they're going to receive a massive number of valuable benefits, and the amount of energy they'll have to expend will be considerably lower. By the way, one company that does this just about as well as a company can possibly do it is Amazon.

A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn't object.

you never miss the plane, you're spending too much time in airports.

One thing the American defense establishment has traditionally understood very well is that countries don't win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost.

the interesting thing about the slime mold is that it makes pretty good decisions.

Often people think of developments in computation as arising when we make our computers more blazingly fast, so they can compute more stuff , bigger data . It's actually just as important to prune away big parts of the data that aren't relevant to the problem at hand! The fastest computation is the one you don't do.

if your government isn't wasteful, you're spending too much time fighting government waste.

countries don't win wars just by being braver than the other side, or freer, or slightly preferred by God. The winners are usually the guys who get 5% fewer of their planes shot down, or use 5% less fuel, or get 5% more nutrition into their infantry at 95% of the cost. That's not the stuff war movies are made of, but it's the stuff wars are made of. And there's math every step of the way. —

The average American thinks there are plenty of non-worthwhile federal programs that are wasting our money and is ready and willing to put them on the chopping block to make ends meet. The problem is, there's no consensus on which programs are the worthless ones.

Wonder does not make one industrious, for to feel astonished is to be disturbed.

Happily, solving problems by intensifying production and increasing complexity does not always yield catastrophic results.

There is nothing more requisite in business than despatch.

Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.

The secret of all power is - save your force. If you want high pressure you must choke off waste.

The pitch we used to convince companies to spend $50 million bucks for one of our planes was that it wasn't simply a means of transportation; oh no - it was 'a productivity tool'. It allowed an executive to make good use of his travel time and a relaxed and refreshed executive could seal the deal much more effectively than his travel-worn counterpart. Yeah, right. You can always justify any obscene luxury on the grounds of productivity...

He'd taken to the BlackBerry right away, even though he complained that his fingers were too thick for the Lilliputian keys.

You can measure the health of relationships, teams, and organizations by measuring the lag time between when problems are identified and when they are resolved.

The Hobbesian state of nature is really just a state of total market failure. Out of this state of nature, we have been able to build up a set of institutions that promote co-operation and therefore improve efficiency. Markets are one institution of this type. But they are extremely limited in their range, since property rights apply only to a tiny fraction of the ingredients we require for successful living.

When a person is worried, working memory is occupied and decreases one's ability to perform effectively and efficiently.