Quotes About Efficiency

Burning dinner is not incompetence but war.

The increase in coal production and the efficiency in coal movement are all administrative things that can add a lot to the economic growth.

When times are tough, we tend to outperform as margins increase.

It's important to have IT knowledge; it's important to increase every government agency's IT capability.

You don't make a system more effective by increasing the number of regulators.

America is incredibly professional and corporate.

I feel an independent accountability commission should audit all government services.

SAY NO AND WALK AWAY Staying focused is essential for getting projects done. Saying no is essential for staying focused. At the outset, will the project have the people and funds, including contingencies, needed to succeed? If not, walk away. Does an action contribute to achieving the goal in the box on the right? If not, skip it. Say no to monuments. No to untested technology. No to lawsuits. And so on. This can be difficult, particularly if your organization embraces a bias for action.

The value of experienced teams cannot be overstated, yet it is routinely disregarded.

BAA understood, as so many others do not, that "lowest bid" does not necessarily mean "lowest cost," so rather than follow the common practice of hiring the lowest bidders, BAA stuck with companies it had worked with for years and that had proven their ability to deliver what BAA needed.

There are five project types that are not fat-tailed. That means they may come in somewhat late or over budget but it's very unlikely that they will go disastrously wrong. The fortunate five? They are solar power, wind power, fossil thermal power (power plants that generate electricity by burning fossil fuels), electricity transmission, and roads. In fact, the best-performing project types in my entire database, by a comfortable margin, are wind and solar power.

And that translates into slow and complex. Nuclear power plants, for one, are the products of a staggering number of bespoke parts and systems that must all work, and work together, for the plant as a whole to work.

Small is good. For one thing, small projects can be simple.

It's relatively easy to build something small and simple.

Heuristics are fast and frugal rules of thumb used to simplify complex decisions. The word has its origin in the ancient Greek word Eureka!, the cry of joy and satisfaction when one finds or discovers something.

GET YOUR TEAM RIGHT This is the only heuristic cited by every project leader I've ever met.

Humans don't excel at performing repetitive manual work.

During this first term [as Burlington mayor in 1981] I discovered that the city was wasting substantial sums of money on its insurance policies. Companies, year after year, were getting the city's business at substantially higher than market rates. I instituted a radical socialist concept, 'competitive' bidding, which saved the city tens of thousands of dollars.

The Scrum idea of a separated Scrum Master is good for Scrum, but not appropriate for most projects. Good development requires not just talkers but doers.

Note to self: finding a cool quote and writing it in your journal is not a substitute for Getting. It. Done.

My idea of superwoman is someone who scrubs her own floors.

Now, as always, the most automated appliance in a household is the mother.

Life's too short to hang out with people who aren't resourceful.

Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren't working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out ways for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.