Quotes About Efficiency

The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That's a dangerous way to build a strategy.

Adopting new technologies can improve the way we solve Jobs to Be Done. But what's important is that you focus on understanding the underlying job, not falling in love with your solution for it.

Processes and values define how resources—many of which can be bought and sold, hired and fired—are combined to create value.

business. One particularly common one is RONA, or Return on Net Assets. In manufacturing businesses, this is calculated by dividing a company's income by its net assets. Hence, a company can be judged as being more profitable either by adding income to the numerator, or by reducing the assets in the denominator. Driving the numerator up is harder, because it entails selling more products. Driving the denominator down is often easier—because you can just opt to outsource.

How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward.

The danger for high-achieving people is that they'll unconsciously allocate their resources to activities that yield the most immediate, tangible accomplishments.

The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward.

Rather, in our distorted fee-for-service world, the work to coordinate and oversee care just isn't as profitable as other activities.

People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. It's

The reason good managers strive for focus in their organizations is that processes and tasks can be readily aligned.

Academe was one of the last strongholds of the professional time-waster.

Handwriting everything, for me, is psychologically useful because it keeps my writing economical. I think there are word processor styles emerging. Something does seem to happen to a writer's style when he works on a word processor. When you hand write a thing the size of Weaveworld (584 pages) you want to make sure every word counts because it's such a huge labour to get it down.

Modern man has the possibility of understanding the mechanism of consciousness, and marching directly towards his objective, with the will flexed to its maximum efficiency.

Other sovereign democratic states have central governments more corrupted other than our own, but most can fall back on unifying elements we lack: common ethnicity, a shared religion, or near-universal consensus on many fundamental political issues. The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it's one of the few things binding us together.

The land she tilled and worked had been Indian land. She knew the white men bragged about the efficiency of the massacres, where they killed women and babies, and strangled their futures in the crib. Stolen babies working stolen land. It was an engine that did not stop, its hungry boiler fed with blood.

Why not remove his desk, bring in a treadmill, hang a carrot from the ceiling and stop all pretense already.

A simple life is not seeing how little we can get by with—that's poverty—but how efficiently we can put first things first. . . . When you're clear about your purpose and your priorities, you can painlessly discard whatever does not support these, whether it's clutter in your cabinets or commitments on your calendar. (148)

progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker.

If you want to stay alive, there is only one way: look fit for work.

shave daily, stand and walk smartly, and you'll look fit for work

wouldn't it be easier to just do a competent job than to spend all your time covering your ass?

She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness.

I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with

When people understand what is expected of them, political jockeying and favoritism are minimized, and people can focus on executing the strategy rapidly.