Norman Ralph Augustine Quotes

Norman Ralph Augustine delivers sharp, witty takes on business and productivity.

14 quotes

  1. The thickness of the proposal required to win a multimillion-dollar contract is about one millimeter per million dollars. If all the proposals conforming to this standard were piled on top of each other at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, it would probably be a good idea.

  2. The more time you spend talking about what you have been doing, the less time you have to do what you have been talking about. Eventually, you spend more and more time talking about less and less until finally you spend all of your time talking about nothing.

  3. By the time of the United States Tricentennial, there will be more government workers than there are workers.

  4. Law Number XXXIX: Never promise to complete any project within six months of the end of the year, in either direction.

  5. Law Number XIV: After the year 2015, there will be no airplane crashes. There will be no takeoffs either, because electronics will occupy 100 percent of every airplane's weight.

  6. If the Earth could be made to rotate twice as fast, managers would get twice as much done. If the Earth could be made to rotate twenty times as fast, everyone else would get twice as much done since all the managers would fly off.

  7. People working in the private sector should try to save money. There remains the possibility that it may someday be valuable again.

  8. Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

  9. The most unsuccessful three years in the education of cost estimators appears to be fifth-grade arithmetic.

  10. Rank does not intimidate hardware. Neither does the lack of rank.

  11. By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.

  12. All too many consultants, when asked, 'What is 2 and 2?' respond, 'What do you have in mind?'

  13. Law Number XXVIII: It is better to be the reorganizer than the reorganizee.

  14. If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.