Quotes About Efficiency

What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.

disregard the old maxim which says, "Do not get others to do that which you can do yourself." My motto, on the other hand, is, "Do not do that which others can do as well.

Do not do that which others can do as well.

Haste turns usually upon a matter of ten minutes too late, and may be avoided by a habit of being ten minutes too early.

Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.

Technology innovation is not going to slow down. The work to manage it needs to speed up

The production philosophy pioneered by Toyota calls for a focus on those activities that create value for the customer and the systematic eradication of everything else.

Bezos is like a chess master playing countless games simultaneously, with the boards organized in such a way that he can efficiently tend to each match.

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 a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.

Lower prices led to more customer visits. More customers increased the volume of sales and attracted more commission-paying third-party sellers to the site. That allowed Amazon to get more out of fixed costs like the fulfillment centers and the servers needed to run the website. This greater efficiency then enabled it to lower prices further. Feed any part of this flywheel, they reasoned, and it should accelerate the loop.

IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress.

Wilke subscribed to the principles laid out in a seminal book about constraints in manufacturing, Eliyahu M. Goldratt's The Goal, published in 1984. The book, cloaked in the guise of an entertaining novel, instructs manufacturers to focus on maximizing the efficiency of their biggest bottlenecks.

Bezos liked to say that "good intentions don't work, but mechanisms do.

If somebody else can sell it cheaper than us, we should let them and figure out how they are able to do it.

Bezos even wondered aloud whether Amazon could hire college students on every block in Manhattan and get them to store popular products in their apartments and deliver them on bicycles.

The notion that he can accomplish a huge amount with a larger time frame, if he is steady about it, is fundamentally his philosophy.

from his company. After the stock market crash in 2000, Amazon went through two rounds of layoffs. But Bezos didn't want to stop recruiting altogether; he just wanted to be more efficient. So he framed the kind

In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress. One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.

We try not to spend money on things that don't matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

Autonomous working units are good. Things to manage working units are bad.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement,

During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn't take that well. "The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority," he answered bluntly. "That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can't excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you.

George instead reorganized Alexa around the Amazonian ideal of fast-moving "two pizza" teams, each devoted to a specific Alexa domain, like music, weather, lighting, thermostats, video devices, and so on. Each team was run by a so-called "single-threaded leader" who had ultimate control and absolute accountability over their success or failure. (The phrase comes from computer science terminology; a single-threaded program executes one command at a time.)

Alexa execs, like leaders elsewhere in Amazon, became frequent recipients of the CEO's escalation emails, in which he forwarded a customer complaint accompanied by a single question mark and then expected a response within twenty-four hours.