Quotes About Efficiency

I keep my overhead as low as I can.

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

I tell my engineers that they should not overload me with information.

You know, you don't need a leader to sort of administer something that's going very well. In fact, in one sense, an overly ambitious person in that circumstance can probably screw it up.

I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight.

If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by the daily decisions you have to make, it's time to automate something.

Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn't be doing.

quality is most of all a function of its usefulness. The Corporate Quality Program Real quality has little to do with defects

each switch imposes a direct penalty of a bit more than twenty minutes of lost concentration.

when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others

The top quartile, those who did the exercise most rapidly and effectively, work in space that is substantially different from that of the bottom quartile. The top performers' space is quieter, more private, better protected from interruption, and there is more of it. What

A disturbing possibility is that overtime is not so much a means to increase the quantity of work time as to improve its average quality.

The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash.

The bald fact is that many companies provide developers with a workplace that is so crowded, noisy, and interruptive as to fill their days with frustration. That alone could explain reduced efficiency as well as a tendency for good people to migrate elsewhere.

People under time pressure don't work better - they just work faster.

There are a million ways to loose a workday, but not even a single way to get one back.

When you automate a previously all-human system, it becomes entirely deterministic.

Since they can't alter the rate of mental discriminations (basic elements of knowledge work) per second, their potential to respond to pressure is severely limited. All they can do is Eliminate wasted time Defer tasks that are not on the critical path Stay late

In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don't waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management.

work performance is not an abstraction: You can't say that Ted is a high-performance worker in general, only that he has proved himself good at doing some one particular thing. Fragmentation

In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don't waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management. They are more likely to be frustrated by wasted time than enjoy it.

Slackless organizations tend to be authoritarian. When efficiency is the principal goal, decision making can't be distributed. It has to be in the hands of one person (or a few), with everyone else taking direction without question and acting quickly to carry out orders. This is a fine formula for getting a lot done, but a dismal way to encourage reinvention and learning.

Worker density (say, workers per thousand square feet) is inversely proportional to dedicated space per person.

The meeting wasn't really necessary to convey status; there are many less wasteful ways to do that. The need that was being served was not the boss's need for information, but for reassurance.