Quotes About Efficiency

When you try to measure performance, particularly the performance of knowledge workers, you're positively courting dysfunction.

Trying to force a system to work beyond its capacity invariably causes turbulence and slows things down.

The purpose of process standards is to act as a baseline for continuous improvement.

The essence of 5S is to follow what has been agreed on. It begins with discarding what we don't need in the gemba (seiri) and then arranging all the necessary items in the gemba in an orderly manner (seiton). Then a clean environment must be sustained so that we can readily identify abnormalities (seiso), and these three steps must be maintained on a continuous basis (shitsuke).

People within a company can be divided into two groups: those who earn money and those who don't. Only those frontline people who develop, produce, and sell products are earning money for the company. The ideal company would have only one person who does not earn money—the president—leaving the rest of the employees directly involved in revenue-generating activity.

Quality begins when everybody in the organization commits to never sending rejects or imperfect information to the next process.

We think that most apparently knowledge-intensive organisations can be pretty stupid.

Taxpayers deserve a government that harnesses technology to better serve the people.

The ultimate mark of skillful running is the ability to run with minimal mental effort.

Aim not to get more stuff done. Aim to have less stuff to do. Be a work minimalist. Minimalism is about doing more with less. So much of working life seems to be about doing less with more. Activity isn't always the same as achievement.

Aim to have less stuff to do.

She looks at me and smiles in that brisk efficient way. A modern professional smile. the kind of smile that never existed before, say, the telephone.

A fragmented task takes more time than a blocked-time task.

Remember that codes are more than a filing system. Every project needs a systematic way to store coded field data and a way to retrieve them easily during analysis.

First-line indents and space between paragraphs have the same relationship as belts and suspenders. You only need one to get the job done. Using both is a mistake.

We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a week.

Time is either used wisely or wasted foolishly.

How much would you be willing to spend to create a highly efficient, cohesive, and enthusiastic team that cared about your business, if you knew that every dollar you spent would come back to you threefold or sixfold or tenfold?

Nobody will do their best work until they have lots of white space on their calendars.

it doesn't necessarily take genius to spend resources . . . it does, though, to work within the resource constraints you're given.

To maximize the effectiveness of any excavator, it had to be serviced efficiently by spoil removal trains. Thus, for Stevens, the railway, the Panama Railroad, was the key to success on the Isthmus, something never fully appreciated by the French.

So I'm reading a book on my new iPad, but can't the iPad read it for me? Do I have to do everything?

Poetry is an art of economy.

The less specific a prescription the more substance it takes to move the organism, the less efficient the herb or formula, and the more likely we are to force the organism to change, rather than gently stimulating it to renewed self-governance.