It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten for each factor of ten degradation accomplished.
Soloist are inspiring in Opera and perhaps even in small entreprenurial ventures, but there is no place for them in large corporations.
There are many highly successful businesses in the United States. There are also many highly paid executives. The policy is not to intermingle the two.
Law Number XX: In any given year, Congress will appropriate the amount of funding approved the prior year plus three-fourths of whatever change the administration requests, minus 4-percent tax.
All too many consultants, when asked, ‘What is 2 and 2?’ respond, ‘What do you have in mind?’
Only by providing leading-edge human capital and knowledge capital can American continue to maintain a high standard of living, including providing national security for its citizens.
It costs a lot to build bad products.
Law Number XV: The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems.
Law Number L: The average regulation has a life span one-fifth as long as a chimpanzee’s and one-tenth as long as a human’s, but four times as long as the official’s who created it.
Law Number V: One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the output. Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output.
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.
Law Number XLIV: Aircraft flight in the 21st century will always be in a westerly direction, preferably supersonic, crossing time zones to provide the additional hours needed to fix the broken electronics.
By the time of the United States Tricentennial, there will be more government workers than there are workers.
If you can afford to advertise, you don’t need to.
Hardware works best when it matters the least.
Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.
If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was.
One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.
A hungry dog hunts best. A hungrier dog hunts even better.
There are no lazy veteran lion hunters.