Norman R. Augustine - Augustine's Laws (1986)

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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.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XXXVI: 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.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XLI: The more one produces, the less one gets.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number VII: Decreased business base increases overhead. So does increased business base.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XXI: It's easy to get a loan unless you need it.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number IX: Acronyms and abbreviations should be used to the maximum extent possible to make trivial ideas profound... Q.E.D.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XXX: By the time the people asking the questions are ready for the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the questions.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XI: 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.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XXIV: The only thing more costly than stretching the schedule of an established project is accelerating it, which is itself the most costly action known to man.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XLV: One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XLII: Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XVI: In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XXXII: Hiring consultants to conduct studies can be an excellent means of turning problems into gold, your problems into their gold.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XXXVIII: The early bird gets the worm. The early worm... gets eaten.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number LII: People working in the private sector should try to save money. There remains the possibility that it may someday be valuable again.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XL: Most projects start out slowly, and then sort of taper off.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XXXVII: Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right to expect so much.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XVIII: 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.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XIX: 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.

Norman R. Augustine
Law Number XXXV: 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.

Norman R. Augustine
One cannot legislate problems out of existence. It has been tried.

Norman R. Augustine