Quotes About Efficiency

In 1961, before the container was in international use, ocean freight costs alone accounted for 12 percent of the value of U.S. exports and 10 percent of the value of U.S. imports.

The container is at the core of a highly automated system for moving goods from anywhere, to anywhere, with a minimum of cost and complication on the way. The container made shipping cheap, and by doing so changed the shape of the world economy.

He responded with a tale about how, after spending hours in late 1937 queuing at a Jersey City pier to unload his truck, he realized that it would be quicker simply to hoist the entire truck body on board. From this incident, we are meant to believe, came his decision eighteen years later to buy a war-surplus tanker and equip it to carry 33-foot-long containers.

More than anyplace else, California seems determined to prove that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is a lie.

Researchers have found there is simply no correlation between hurry or Type-A behavior and productivity.

The procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely, and important tasks, however, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

a reigning logic of efficiency insists that money spent on the public good is somehow a form of indulgence. There

It didn't take much to work out the technical hitches since we didn't have corrupt contractors and the government procurement process to deal with.

Al Gore's 'reinventing government.' They cut a bunch of government employees, but they all seemed to come out of DOD and intel.

Taking a little undertime today?

It's the way of the world, man. There are the worker bees, and the manager bees. The worker bees take care of the work, the manager bees take care of themselves." •

The thing that drew her to guns was their precision, lethality, and simplicity.

A battalion was apparently a mid-level unit, in size, and his particular battalion had apparently been deeply enmeshed in combat in Iraq. Dannon had gotten good efficiency marks, but Lucas wasn't sure how exactly to evaluate them. In his own bureaucracy, good efficiency marks were subject to interpretation by insiders, and could damn with praise a little too faint.

up by three metal desks, each with a computer

There has never been a military in the entire history of the human race that has gone to war equipped with more than the least that it needs to fight its enemy. War is expensive. It costs money and it costs lives and no civilization has an infinite amount of either. So when you fight, you conserve. You use and equip only as much as you have to, never more.

I have always found that there's an inverse relationship between the number of people in a room and the amount of useful work that can be done.

Occam's razor theory of combat: The simplest way of kicking someone's ass was usually the correct one.

You have to eliminate the low-hanging targets first, on the off chance you were dealing with morons.

But I have always found that there's an inverse relationship between the number of people in a room and the amount of useful work that can be done.

One of Harvey's guiding lights in terms of strategies was simplicity; all things being equal, Harvey preferred the course of action that let him get into the middle of things and then just buckle down.

This was a person who operated best and most efficiently when she was truly and genuinely pissed off; wishing for her to mellow out was like wishing an alpha predator would switch to grains. It was missing the point.

Harvey called it his Occam's razor theory of combat: The simplest way of kicking someone's ass was usually the correct one.

There's that old saying: Fast, cheap, and good, you get to pick two. The two you just picked are fast and good. Cheap has just left the building.

it was designed to operate with minimal assistance from humans, who were without exception the moving part most likely to fail.