Quotes About Efficiency

A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 A.M. and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 P.M. to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished even before lunch.

A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 p.m. to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.

W]hen one looks at females in nature, one sees industry, progenitiveness and efficiency; when one looks at males, one sees the most elaborate forms of wastefulness.

Riddle: Early to bed and early to rise does what?

You know the definition of the perfectly designed machine.... The perfectly designed machine is one in which all its working parts wear out simultaneously. I am that machine.

There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

Frederick Taylor

Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace.

In the past the man has been first. In the future the System must be first.

Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerably amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and convince his employer that he is going at a good price.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book—what everyone else does not say in a whole book.

Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgeable may be obvious to newcomers. The simplest solutions are the best. Repeating

As part of his ongoing quest for a better allocation of his own time, he decreed that he would no longer have one-on-one meetings with his subordinates. These meetings tended to be filled with trivial updates and political distractions, rather than problem solving and brainstorming. Even today, Bezos rarely meets alone with an individual colleague.

Roseman also put it: "Autonomous working units are good. Things to manage working units are bad.

You can work long, hard, and smart, but at Amazon.com you can pick only two out of three.

You can work long, you can work hard, you can work smart, but at Amazon you can't choose two out of three.

Up until that point, I had seen Jeff only at one speed, the go-go speed of grow at all costs. I had not seen him drive toward profitability and efficiency," says Scott Cook, the Intuit founder and an Amazon board member during that time. "Most execs, particularly first-time CEOs who get good at one thing, can only dance what they know how to dance. "Frankly, I didn't think he could do it.

Each group was required to propose its own "fitness function"—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by the average order size those e-mails generated.

Don't waste any time during the day. What you do right now becomes the seeds for raising up the next crop of wise people. Putting everyone at ease by doing your job well is how you transform yourself and everybody else.

The amount of coal required to propel a single 10,000-ton ship across the ocean was far less than the amount required to drive two 5,000-ton ships across the same distance.

If you're always on time, it implies that you never have anything better you should be doing.

If you're always on time, it implies that you never have anything better you should be doing.

The entire point of life is to find ways to get others to do your work for you. Don't you know anything about basic economics?

Don't be silly," she said. "Why would elevators be more advanced than stairs? Obviously, stairs take more effort to climb, are harder to construct, and are far more healthy to use. Therefore, they took longer to develop. Don't you realize how stupid you sound when you claim otherwise?