Quotes About Efficiency

smaller ones using sledgehammers

I did it over lunch. I'm not that fast, but the computers I use are, and the databases they have access to are truly immense. Can the FBI borrow you for like the rest of your life? interjected Blum.

3. We believe that people spend their own money more prudently than they spend other people's money. So goods and services produced in the competitive marketplace are likely to be produced more efficiently and with more regard for real consumer demand than goods produced by government, and thus we should try to keep as many aspects of life as possible outside the control of government.

Redundancy is blessed, but efficiency is divine.

Some species are so disdainful of brains that they treat them as an expendable luxury. There are species of sea slugs that have mini-brains when they are young. They use them as they voyage through the seas looking for a perch from which they can sieve food. But once they've found their perch they no longer need such an expensive piece of equipment, so they eat their brains. Some have joked, cruelly, that this is a bit like tenured academics.

Just as you're pushing for more efficiency throughout the organization via process change, you can also keep your organization increasingly slender and nimble as you grow by maintaining a leadership corps that is relatively small and stable but that punches far above its weight.

Finding and Fixing the "Hidden Factory" 1.?Map out your existing process step by step from beginning to end. 2.?Map common workarounds in case of problems. 3.?Optimize your process and involve end users. 4.?Confirm that the new processes are more efficient and improve results for end users.

more leaders equals more bureaucracy. Leaders don't just lead—they create work for other people, in the form of meetings, sign-offs, projects, procedures, priorities, and so on, especially if they're good leaders. Others in the organization then spend more of their time responding to these leaders and less time leading or managing their own team members. Each leader has their own staff—adding yet more cost and complexity to the organization.

While reading a book about the construction of the Panama Canal, I came across an anecdote about the project's chief engineer, whose math teacher used to say, "If you have five minutes to solve a problem, use the first three to figure out how you're going to do it.

Producing laws is not an easier job than producing cars and food, so if the government is incompetent to produce cars or food, why do you expect it to do a good job producing the legal system within which you are then going to produce the cars and the food?

Every moment waited is a moment wasted, and each wasted moment degrades your clarity of purpose.

Little jobs require little men, and it's the little jobs that keep a kingdom running.

Quindi passeremo direttamente al massacro. - Che modo abile di esprimersi, Narasan.

An inverse relationship exists between efficiency in asset pricing and appropriate degree of active management. Passive management strategies suit highly efficient markets, such as U.S. Treasury bonds, where market returns drive results and active management adds little or nothing. Active management strategies fit inefficient markets, such as private equity, where market returns contribute very little to ultimate results and investment selection provides the fundamental source of return.

Chapter 8, Obvious Sources of Mutual-Fund Failure, concludes that, in the highly efficient securities markets, mutual-fund managers lose by the amount that it costs to play the game.

El 30 % del tiempo de las gerencias se pierde por mal manejo de conflictos (Thomas y Schmidt, 1976).

Most real-world computer programs, however, are significantly asynchronous. This means that they often have to stop computing while waiting for data to arrive or for some event to occur.

Insects all business all the time.

this was a couple years before the sudden advance of someone in the luggage industry realizing that suitcases could be fitted with little wheels and telescoping handles so they could be pulled, which was just the sort of abrupt ingenious advance that makes entrepreneurial capitalism such an exciting system—it gives people incentive to make things more efficient).

Good-Looking Men in Small Clever Rooms That Utilize Every Centimeter of Available Space With Mind-Boggling Efficiency.

Mathematical thinking is abstract, but it's also thoroughly private-sector and results-oriented.

Every element in a design should be expressed to the extent necessary, but not beyond the extent necessary. Excess is noise.

The 80/20 rule asserts that approximately 80 percent of the effects generated by any large system are caused by 20 percent of the variables in that system.

80 percent of a product's usage involves 20 percent of its features.