Norman Ralph Augustine Quotes

Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The other third is covered with auditors from headquarters.

Simply stated, it is sagacious to eschew obfuscation.

Hardware works best when it matters the least.

Rank does not intimidate hardware. Neither does the lack of rank.

People do not win people fights. Lawyers do.

Motivation will almost always beat mere talent.

The early bird gets the worm. The early worm... gets eaten.

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases.

One of the most feared expressions in modern times is 'The computer is down.'

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

The more time you spend talking about what you have been doing, the less time you have to do what you have been talking about. Eventually, you spend more and more time talking about less and less until finally you spend all of your time talking about nothing.

One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but the unexpected should have been expected.

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.

Too often technology is perceived as the problem rather than the solution; as something to be avoided rather than embraced. This is about as logical as my daughter's observing, while our family was driving through an unfamiliar city, "Trying to read a map while driving causes all the traffic lights to turn green."

If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was.

For every scientific (or engineering) action, there is an equal and opposite social reaction.

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 stock market experts were so expert, they would be buying stock, not selling advice.

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.

Decreased business base increases overhead. So does increased business base.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A billion saved is a billion earned.

If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.

Soloist are inspiring in Opera and perhaps even in small entreprenurial ventures, but there is no place for them in large corporations.

A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.

There are no lazy veteran lion hunters.

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.

A hungry dog hunts best. A hungrier dog hunts even better.

Fools rush in where incumbents fear to tread.

Law Number XV: The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems.

All too many consultants, when asked, 'What is 2 and 2?' respond, 'What do you have in mind?'

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.

The optimum committee has no members.

It costs a lot to build bad products

We believe in the wisdom once expressed by the hockey star Wayne Gretzky, who explained his success by saying, 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.'

A recent government publication on the marketing of cabbage contains, according to one report, 26,941 words. It is noteworthy in this regard that the Gettysburg Address contains a mere 279 words while the Lord's Prayer comprises but 67.

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 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.

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's easy to get a loan unless you need it.

Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.

The most unsuccessful three years in the education of cost estimators appears to be fifth-grade arithmetic.

The process of competitively selecting contractors to perform work is based on a system of rewards and penalties, all distributed randomly.

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.

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.

Most projects start out slowly - and then sort of taper off.