203 Efficiency Quotes

It is astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it.

Our meetings are held to discuss many problems which would never arise if we held fewer meetings.

One should be in harmony with, not in opposition to, the strength and force of the opposition. This means that one should do nothing that is not natural or spontaneous; the important thing is not to strain in any way.

To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.

Mere parsimony is not economy. Expense, and great expense, may be an essential part in true economy.

The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

There is another ground of hope that must not be omitted. Let men but think over their infinite expenditure of understanding, time, and means on matters and pursuits of far less use and value; whereof, if but a small part were directed to sound and solid studies, there is no difficulty that might not be overcome.

Maybe we can show government how to operate better as a result of better architecture.

My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty... it is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three or more are employed therein.

Government [is] operated by deeply embedded, hopelessly entangled bureaus where nothing is accomplished because the function of the bureau is to intercept every living idea and smother it.

Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

Don't find fault, find a remedy.

It goes without saying that the desire to accomplish the task with more confidence, to avoid wasting time and labour, and to spare our experimental animals as much as possible, made us strictly observe all the precautions taken by surgeons in respect to their patients.

Perhaps, after all, there is something in the theory that only the ultra-busy can find time for everything.

A computer shall not waste your time or require you to do more work than is strictly necessary.

Government works less efficiently when it begins to grow out of control and takes on more and more of the responsibilities that belong to the citizens.

Many hands make light work.

Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Unix is like a toll road on which you have to stop every 50 feet to pay another nickel. But hey! You only feel 5 cents poorer each time.

Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi.

Not that I have anything much against redundancy. But I said that already.

The computer should be doing the hard work. That's what it's paid to do, after all.

I'm afraid my gut level reaction is basically, proceed is cute, but cute doesn't cut it in the emergency room.

When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

You can say a lot in a little time, if you stick to words of one syllable.

The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him.

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

Spare no expense to make everything as economical as possible.

I'd like to work on having every fourth year become a year in which no laws are made, but the old laws are reviewed, updated, or deleted as needed. That way we won't get endless, obsolete laws piling up on the books.

Almost 60-odd years ago in Canada. I was studying agriculture, how to produce better chickens, better cattle, better horses - horses in those days - better fruit, better vegetables. This was in the early years of the Great Depression, and the thoughts crossed my mind that there wasn't a hell of a lot of use producing better crops and better livestock if you couldn't sell them, that the real problem of agriculture was not efficiency in production but the problem of whether you could make money after you produced the stuff. So I shifted from the technical side to, first, the study of agricultural economic issues and then on to economics itself.

A man who uses power to do evil is in theory judged to have been conscious of his acts and to be as fit for punishment as a perpetrator of premeditated murder. But the technocrat is not trained on that level. He understands events within the logic of the system. The greatest good is the greatest logic or the greatest appearance of efficiency or responsibility for the greatest possible part of the structure.

A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy.

If a segment of one's force is located where it is not sufficiently busy with the enemy, ot if the troops are on the march - that is, idle - while the enemy is fighting, then these forces are being managed uneconomically. In this sense they are being wasted, which is even worse than using them inappropriately.

And we can always supply them with a program that makes identical files into links to a single file.

I already have too much problem with people thinking the efficiency of a perl construct is related to its length. On the other hand, I'm perfectly capable of changing my mind next week... :-)

All our confidence in our ability to act collectively is being undermined, with the subtext message Whatever it is, the private sector can do it better. Never mind that there's no evidence for this. Never mind, for instance, that the private US health-care system is 40 percent more expensive per capita than the Canadian public system, even though the Canadian system provides full coverage for all Canadians and the American system leaves some forty-three million without any coverage at all. This isn't because Canadians are smarter than Americans - it's because we have a public system and they don't.

Executives who get there and stay suggest solutions when they present the problems.

The American bureaucracy ... was set up for very slow speeds of the printed word and railways. At electric speeds, nothing in the USA makes sense. (1970)

It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land:all those slow cars get in the way. There's public transit - the T - but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water, nothing stops you and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.

We must select a smaller number of standard designs .. and conduct our mass building programs using only these designs over the course of, say, five years .. and if no better designs turn up, then continue in the same way for the next five years.

The non-profits spend far less for results than governments spend for failure.

At least once every five years every form should be put on trial for its life.

What is the point of spending such huge sums to bring a 200-lb.-body downtown when all you want of it is its eight-and-a-half pound brain?

When you are solving a problem, don't worry. Now, after you have solved the problem, then that's the time to worry.

And I wanted to say to the mayor of New York all our concern, our admiration for what has been done after this drama, with such an efficiency, very full of clever and heart. I told him that in the French press, when they mention the mayor of New York, they say 'mayor hero' (ph), which is a French expression equivalent to 'Rudy the Rock'.

In a capitalist economy such as ours, markets correct. Remember that word: 'correct'. Businesses, out of necessity, correct their mistakes. Can I give you an example of something that does not correct its mistakes very often, if ever? Bureaucracies.

After materials are carried into the factory, nothing but products should be carried out from it.

The general idea, of course, in any first-class laundry is to see that no shirt or collar ever comes back twice.

'A man who was always taking two irons out of the fire and putting three in'

War means fighting. The business of the soldier is to fight. Armies are not called out to dig trenches, to throw up breastworks, to live in camps, but to find the enemy and strike him; to invade his country, and do him all possible damage in the shortest possible time. This will involve great destruction of life and property while it lasts; but such a war will of necessity be of brief continuance, and so would be an economy of life and property in the end. To move swiftly, strike vigorously, and secure all the fruits of victory is the secret of successful war.

'Tis slight, not strength, that gives the greatest lift.

As in his public affairs, so in his private life the American rarely prepares himself for the future. He is wholly unwilling to have anything transmitted to him by water that he can get by rail. It irks him to wait the slow process of freighting when there is an express car coming to his town, and if somebody will soon discover how to deliver by aeroplane, that is the way he will obtain what he wants. He never wants it until he wants it, and when he wants it, he wants it at once. The farmer does not look over his machinery in the winter time to ascertain what it needs in the way of repair; but waits until a week or ten days before he needs it and then telegraphs for the repair parts to be sent by express.

Adding a column of figures is a repetitive thought process, and it was long ago properly relegated to the machine. True, the machine is sometimes controlled by the keyboard, and thought of a sort enters in reading the figures and poking the corresponding keys, but even this is avoidable.

There is another form of selection best illustrated by the automatic telephone exchange. You dial a number and the machine selects and connects just one of a million possible stations. It does not run over them all. It pays attention only to a class given by a first digit, and so on; and thus proceeds rapidly and almost unerringly to the selected station.

To be able to key one sheet of a million before an operator in a second or two, with the possibility of then adding notes thereto, is suggestive in many ways. It might even be of use in libraries, but that is another story. At any rate, there are now some interesting combinations possible. One might, for example, speak to a microphone, in the manner described in connection with the speech-controlled typewriter, and thus make his selections. It would certainly beat the usual file clerk.

There is, of course, provision for consultation of the record by the usual scheme of indexing. If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions.

It is an essential part of our social tragedy that people, like farmers, the industrial workers, the medical profession, etc., influence the social process not only by their work, but also - and even predominantly - by political ideologies. For political activity hampers objective, rational activity; it splits professional organizations into warring ideological groups; it disorganizes the industrial workers: it restricts the work of the physician and harms the patients, etc. In brief, political activity prevents precisely what it pretends to achieve: peace, work, security, international cooperation, objective expression of opinion, freedom of belief, etc.

All executive power - from the reign of ancient kings to the rule of modern dictators - has the outward appearance of efficiency.

General procedure: Read and learn all you can about problem. Look at problem from a point of zero preconception. Devise variations and alternative solutions. Check back to see if your solution has workable advantage over solutions previously arrived at . . . To carry the method a step further than solution of purely technical problem where purpose is implicit in the artifact: devising more efficient gun, tool, boat, signal system, medical or interrogation procedure.

He's a big clog in their machine.

There is time enough for everything, in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once; but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.

In my orchestra, I hate slackness, idle talk and lost time. I always hated this and still hate it. But I can achieve much more when I am quiet and not shouting.

If ye are seeking Rob Roy, he's ken'd to be better than half a hunder men strong when he's at the fewest.

The superfluous does not deserve to be enhanced.

The synthesis of my life was the act of gaining time.

There are immutable Islamic principles which order relations between people, but there is no Islamic economic, social or political structure which cannot be changed... Nothing which can make the world a better place can be rejected out of hand as non-Islamic; ... In order to be Islamic, a solution must fulfill two conditions: it must be maximally efficient and maximally humane. ibid., p. 31

Haste maketh waste.

Quantity is quality

#else /* !STDSTDIO */ /* The big, slow, and stupid way */

He knows how to form a group into the shape he wants it to have. He knows how to get people to work together. And he does it by the most minimal means possible

I'm Grant Foster for public television - Where a hundred people work so thirty can watch.

Think slow, act fast.

But what about speed?

Fast bind, fast find.

Be sincere, be brief, be seated.

It's pretty hard to be efficient without being obnoxious.

Dispatch is the soul of business.

'Too many of us dissipate our energy by being 'for all good causes,' attending meetings and passing resolutions, organizing and presenting petitions - all this effort to change others, when if we really got down to it we could use this energy to change ourselves: We become tired radicals because we use our weakest weapon: the ballot box, where we are always outnumbered, and refuse to use our strongest weapon: spiritual power.'

In the early days, I was writing scripts for virtually all the books, and it was very hard to keep all the artists busy; poor little frail me, doing story after story. So I'd be writing a story for Kirby, and Steve Ditko would walk in and say, 'Hey, I need some work now.' And I'd say, 'I can't give it to you now, Steve, I'm finishing Kirby's.' But we couldn't afford to keep Steve waiting, because time is money, so I'd have to say, 'Look Steve, I can't write a script for you now, but here's the plot for the next Spider-Man. Go home and draw anything you want, as long as it's something like this, and I'll put the copy in later.' So I was able to finish Jack's story. Steve in the meantime was drawing another story.....Okay, it started out as a lazy's man's device...but we realized this was absolutely the best way to do a comic.....Don't have the writer say, 'Panel one will be a long shot of Spider-Man walking down the street.' The artist may see it differently; maybe he feels it should be a shot of Spider-Man swinging on his web, or climbing upside-down on the ceiling or something.

Resolutions expressing Parliamentary approval of every Treaty before ratification would be a very cumbersome form of procedure and would burden the House with a lot of unnecessary business. The absence of disapproval may be accepted as sanction, and publicity and opportunity for discussion and criticism are the really material and valuable elements which henceforth will be introduced.

Tutti gli organi del partito funzionano: devono funzionare percio anche gli organi genitali.

In the tragic days of Mussolini, the trains in Italy ran on time as never before and I am told in their way, their horrible way, that the Nazi concentration-camp system in Germany was a model of horrible efficiency. The really basic thing in government is policy. Bad administration, to be sure, can destroy good policy, but good administration can never save bad policy.

I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

Win with ability, not with numbers.

When the enemy is driven back, we have failed, and when he is cut off, encircled and dispersed, we have succeeded.

Every central government worships uniformity: uniformity relieves it from inquiry into an infinity of details.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

If it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.