People working in the private sector should try to save money. There remains the possibility that it may someday be valuable again.
— Norman Ralph Augustine
A billion saved is a billion earned.
Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.
The early bird gets the worm. The early worm... gets eaten.
It's easy to get a loan unless you need it.
A hungry dog hunts best. A hungrier dog hunts even better.
It costs a lot to build bad products.
The optimum committee has no members.
Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.
There are no lazy veteran lion hunters.
The best way to make a silk purse from a sow's ear is to begin with a silk sow. The same is true of money.
If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was.
Fools rush in where incumbents fear to tread.
Bulls do not win bull fights. People do.
By the time of the United States Tricentennial, there will be more government workers than there are workers.
One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.
The more one produces, the less one gets.
By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.
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.
One of the most feared expressions in modern times is 'The computer is down.'
People do not win people fights. Lawyers do.
All too many consultants, when asked, 'What is 2 and 2?' respond, 'What do you have in mind?'
If today was half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was.
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.
Rank does not intimidate hardware. Neither does the lack of rank.
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.
Any task can be completed in only one-third more time than is currently estimated.
Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.
Hardware works best when it matters the least.
Most projects start out slowly - and then sort of taper off.
A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.
Decreased business base increases overhead. So does increased business base.
One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried.
If a sufficient number of management layers are superimposed on top of each other, it can be assured that disaster is not left to chance.
Motivation will almost always beat mere talent.
Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The other third is covered with auditors from headquarters.
The weaker the data available upon which to base one's conclusion, the greater the precision which should be quoted in order to give the data authenticity.
If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.
If stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice.
Although most products will soon be too costly to purchase, there will be a thriving market in the sale of books on how to fix them.
