Quotes About Efficiency

Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.

What we did was so simple, and we kept it simple. It

The problem is not the statistical odds; the problem is that people are squandering their time and resources on the wrong things.

We hire five, work them like ten, and pay them like eight.

Do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done. Peter F. Drucker

If you must have more than one priority, then keep it to a maximum of three—any more than three priorities is an admission that you don't really have any priorities.

the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline—a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.

The most constrained resource in your company is your time.

Kenneth Atchity, president of Atchity Entertainment International, observed that there is a vital difference between managing time and managing work: work is infinite; time is finite. Work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. To be productive, therefore, you must manage your time, not your work. The key question to ask yourself is not "What am I going to do?" but "How am I going to spend my time?

Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated. Waiting

Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a precondition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the "general truths" behind the machine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity.

she had discovered within herself the unlikely gift for functioning with equilibrium and efficiency inside a full-blown, unending nightmare. [A Red Cross worker during WWII in Italy]

My captain will help you be very quick. Within three sticks." The unit of time was the time it took for a standard stick of incense to smolder away, approximately one hour for one stick.

The British. We have proved beyond all doubt we're to be trusted, we can govern, and, by and large, our bureaucracy's incorruptible.

Among his innovations was the Liberty ship, a cargo vessel that could be mass-produced virtually like an oceangoing Model T. Using a breakthrough welding technique, submerged arc welding, that could stitch steel plate with molten rivets up to twenty times faster than existing methods, Kaiser's shipbuilders produced a Liberty ship in an average of only forty-two days.

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases.

The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body.

A "file" was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.

The basic idea of email has remained essentially unchanged since the first networked message was sent in 1971. And while email is great for one-on-one, formal correspondence, there are far better tools for collaboration.

Are your people uncomfortable during meetings and tired at the end? If not, they're probably not mixing it up enough and getting to the bottom of important issues.

I'm normally running three to 10 meetings at a time. I just pile them all up. I have no schedule and everybody just kind of meets at the same time. It sometimes makes people who are really important in their minds very uncomfortable because they're used to getting an automatic three hours alone.

I like to pace myself at about two minutes of music a day. With 'Waterworld' it was closer to five minutes a day, which is uncomfortable and slightly terrifying.

It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of ten degradation accomplished.

Don't underestimate the value of a great hair dryer.