Sublime
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This seemingly simpleminded calculation, relating the staffing mix requirements of the work to the staffing levels existing in the firm, is in fact of extreme importance.
David H. Maister • Managing The Professional Service Firm
Taylor’s approach was more scientific in nature, giving rise to the term “scientific management.” In layperson’s terms, where Ford treated people like cogs in a machine, Taylor approached workers as if they were machines themselves—machines that could be optimized for maximum efficiency, given the right physical and psychological conditions.
John Willis • Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge: How Deming Helped Win a War, Altered the Face of Industry, and Holds the Key to Our Future
A lot of his time was spent figuring out ways to make the restaurant run more efficiently, more smoothly, faster and cheaper.
Anthony Bourdain • Kitchen Confidential
Theory X and Theory Y that Douglas McGregor developed in the 1960s when he was a professor at MIT. He stated that managers hold one of two sets of beliefs concerning employees: some think employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work whenever possible (Theory X); others think workers can be ambitious, self-motivated, and exercise self-control (
... See moreFrederic Laloux • Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
In every other art and manufacture, the effects of the division of labour are similar to what they are in this very trifling one, though, in many of them, the labour can neither be so much subdivided, nor reduced to so great a simplicity of operation. The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a propor
... See moreAdam Smith • An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
What percentage of your professional work time is spent doing things that a more junior person could do, if we got organized and trained the junior to handle it with quality?
David H. Maister • Managing The Professional Service Firm
Then-CEO Eric Schmidt shared a simple but extremely effective framework to resolve these tensions: 70-20-10. Google would devote 70 percent of its resources to the core business, 20 percent to emerging products, and 10 percent to research and development for future products.
Claire Hughes Johnson • Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building
The company’s competitive advantage, it appears, was mostly Carnegie—his relentless pressure, his hounding to reduce costs, his instinct to steal any deal to keep his plants full, his insistence on always plowing back earnings into ever-bigger plants, the latest equipment, the best technologies.
Charles R. Morris • The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
The company came up with the “80-20 rule“: every person working at AES, from cleaning staff to engineer, was expected to spend on average 80 percent of their time on their primary role and make themselves available for the other 20 percent in one or more of the many task forces that existed around the company.