Production quotes

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Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

Idea Selection and Production

“External forces are very important in determining which new ideas will be selected from among the many available; but they cannot explain their production.”
  • Source: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience“, chapter “The Rules of the Games of the Mind”, page 126. Original content published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 1990. Kindle edition published by Harper Collins in 2008. ISBN: 978-0061876721.

Edward_Emil_David

Competitive Rush

"Computing has one property, unique I think, that seriously aggravates the uncertainties associated with software efforts. In computing, the research, development, and production phases are often telescoped into one process. In the competitive rush to make available the latest techniques, such as on-line consoles served by time-shared computers, we strive to take great forward leaps across gulfs of unknown width and depth."

Tom_DeMarco and Tim_Lister

Cheeseburgers

"Development is inherently different from production. But managers of development and allied efforts often allow their thinking to be shaped by a management philosophy derived entirely from a production environment.
Imagine for the moment that you’re the manager of the local fast food franchise. It makes perfect sense for you to take any or all of the following efficient production measures:
- Squeeze out error. Make the machine (the human machine) run as smoothly as possible.
- Take a hard line about people goofing off on the job.
- Treat workers as interchangeable pieces of the machine.
- Optimize the steady state. (Don’t even think about how the operation got up to speed, or what it would take to close it down.)
- Standardize procedure. Do everything by the book.
- Eliminate experimentation—that’s what the folks at headquarters are paid for.
These would be reasonable approaches if you were in the fast food business (or any production environment), but you’re not. The 'make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger' mentality can be fatal in your development area. It can only serve to damp your people’s spirits and focus their attention away from the real problems at hand. This style of management will be directly at odds with the work.
To manage thinking workers effectively, you need to take measures nearly opposite those listed above."
  • Source: Book: Entitled: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Edition: 3rd. Written by: Tom DeMarco; Tim Lister. Date published: 1987; 1999; 2013. Publisher: Addison-Wesley. Country: USA; GBR; CAN; DEU; FRA; ESP; ZAF; AUS; JPN; SGP; MEX. Language: en. ISBN: ISBN-13: 978-0-321-93411-6 (alk paper); 0-321-93411-3 (alk paper). Chapter: 2 (Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger).

Kicking Ass

"Management is a complex enough thing to defy simple definition, but that nuance was lost on one senior manager we encountered at a professional society meeting in London. He summed up his entire view of the subject with this statement: 'Management is kicking ass.' This equates to the view that managers provide all the thinking and the people underneath them just carry out their bidding. Again, that might be workable for cheeseburger production, but not for any effort for which people do the work with their heads rather than their hands. Everyone in such an environment has got to have the brain in gear. You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful. Even if kicking people in the backside did boost their short-term productivity, it might not be useful in the long run. There is nothing more discouraging to any worker than the sense that his own motivation is inadequate and has to be 'supplemented' by that of the boss. The saddest thing about this management approach is that it’s almost always superfluous. You seldom need to take Draconian measures to keep your people working; most of them love their work. You may even have to take steps sometimes to make them work less, and thus get more meaningful work done."
  • Source: Book: Entitled: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. Edition: 3rd. Written by: Tom DeMarco; Tim Lister. Date published: 1987; 1999; 2013. Publisher: Addison-Wesley. Country: USA; GBR; CAN; DEU; FRA; ESP; ZAF; AUS; JPN; SGP; MEX. Language: en. ISBN: ISBN-13: 978-0-321-93411-6 (alk paper); 0-321-93411-3 (alk paper). Chapter: 2 (Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger).

W_Edwards_Deming

Handicapped by the System

"The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management."
  • Source: W. Edwards Deming (1982) Out Of The Crisis. The MIT Press. (2e ed. 1986) p. 134.

Quality and Inspection

"Quality comes not from inspection, but from improvement of the production process."
  • Source: W. Edwards Deming (1982) Out Of The Crisis. The MIT Press. (2e ed. 1986) p. 29.

Edsger_Wybe_Dijkstra

Lines of Code

“My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as 'lines produced' but as 'lines spent': the current conventional wisdom is so foolish as to book that count on the wrong side of the ledger.”

Gordon_Glegg

User Specifications

“If you are concerned in making the production of some article quicker, better or cheaper, you will naturally study how it is being done at the moment. It may seem paradoxical but the man least likely to help you is the operator in charge of the machine. The more 'down-to-earth' and 'practical' he considers himself the more 'unpractical' and 'up-in-the-air' he is likely to be from your point of view. He is too near the machine to know why it works. He only knows how it works.”
  • Source: Glegg, G. L. (1969). The Design of Design. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-0-511-79996-9. Chapter 1, page 12.

Kenneth_W_Kolence

Large Systems

“The basic problem is that certain classes of systems are placing demands on us which are beyond our capabilities and our theories and methods of design and production at this time ... It is large systems that are encountering great difficulties. We should not expect the production of such systems to be easy.”

Large System Evolution

“Large systems must evolve, and cannot be produced all at one time. You must have an initial small core system that works really well.”

Pierre-Simon_Laplace

System of Nature

“The present state of the system of nature is evidently a consequence of what it was in the preceding moment, and if we conceive of an intelligence that at a given instant comprehends all the relations of the entities of this universe, it could state the respective position, motions, and general affects of all these entities at any time in the past or future. Physical astronomy, the branch of knowledge that does the greatest honor to the human mind, gives us an idea, albeit imperfect, of what such an intelligence would be. The simplicity of the law by which the celestial bodies move, and the relations of their masses and distances, permit analysis to follow their motions up to a certain point; and in order to determine the state of the system of these great bodies in past or future centuries, it suffices for the mathematician that their position and their velocity be given by observation for any moment in time. Man owes that advantage to the power of the instrument he employs, and to the small number of relations that it embraces in its calculations. But ignorance of the different causes involved in the production of events, as well as their complexity, taken together with the imperfection of analysis, prevents our reaching the same certainty about the vast majority of phenomena. Thus there are things that are uncertain for us, things more or less probable, and we seek to compensate for the impossibility of knowing them by determining their different degrees of likelihood. So it was that we owe to the weakness of the human mind one of the most delicate and ingenious of mathematical theories, the science of chance or probability.”
  • Source: Pierre-Simon Laplace, 'Recherches, 1º, sur l'Intégration des Équations Différentielles aux Différences Finies, et sur leur Usage dans la Théorie des Hasards' (1773, published 1776). In Oeuvres complètes de Laplace, 14 Vols. (1843-1912), Vol. 8, 144-5, trans. Charles Coulston Gillispie, Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827: A Life in Exact Science (1997), 26.

Thomas_Robert_Malthus

Population and Subsistence

“I think I may fairly make two postulata. First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state... Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio... This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind... The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years... Consequently, if the premises are just, the argument is conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind.”
  • Source: Thomas Robert Malthus. The essay: “An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Goodwin, M. Condorcet and Other Writers”. Originally published: 1798. Edition: First. Publisher: J. Johnson. Location: London, England. Chapter: 1. Retrieved From: <https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population>. Retrieval Date: 2024-04-03.
  • Notes: The dire predictions of Malthus have not yet been fulfilled. This is primarily due to errors in his initial assumptions (which are properly identified), not in errors in his logic. The first assumption (or postulatum) is that food production increases arithmetically (linearly). But historically, food production has increased geometrically (exponentially) due to advances in mechanical technologies and biotechnologies. The second assumption assumes passion and birth rates are directly correlated. However, technological advances in birth control, cultural advances in women's rights, and rising prosperity (which lowers birth rates) have falsified this assumption. Additional questionable assumptions are also made which are not initially specified.

Karl_Marx

Product of Mental Labor is Science

“The product of mental labor — science — always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.”
  • Source: Addenda, "Relative and Absolute Surplus Value" in Economic Manuscripts (1861-63)

David_E_Nye

Farm Production Too Much

“The fundamental problem was that farmers produced too much, driving down prices. New technologies, such as tractors, trucks, harvesting equipment, and electrical machinery, made it possible for each farmer to raise more.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Chapter 3, page 45.

Postmodernism and Cyberspace

“Postmodernism is the inverted face of a production and consumption system in transition; the hallmark of that transition is the creation of an entirely new realm: cyberspace.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Chapter 10, page 175.

Alan_Perlis

Useful Software Systems

“We recognize that a practical problem of considerable difficulty and importance has arisen: The successful design, production and maintenance of useful software systems. The importance is obvious and the more so since we see only greater growth in demands and requirements in the future. The consequences of poor performance, poor design, instability and mismatching of promise and performance are not going to be limited to the computing fraternity, or even their nearest neighbors, but will affect considerable sections of our society whose ability to forgive is inversely proportional to their ignorance of the difficulties we face. The source of difficulty is distributed through the whole problem, easy to identify, and yet its cure is hard to pinpoint so that systematic improvement can be gotten.”

Karl_Popper

No Conclusive Disproof

“No conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced; for it is always possible to say that the experimental results are not reliable.”
  • Source: Popper, K. R. (2005). The Logic of Scientific Discovery | 1935 (1935/Epub ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Chap. 2

Herbert_Simon

Markets and Coordination

“Markets aim to coordinate the decisions and behavior of multitudes of economic actors to guarantee that the quantity of brussels sprouts shipped to market bears some reasonable relation to the quantity that consumers will buy and eat, and that the price at which brussels sprouts can be sold bears a reasonable relation to the cost of producing them. Any society that is not a subsistence economy, but has substantial specialization and division of labor, needs mechanisms to perform this coordinative function. Markets are only one, however, among the spectrum of mechanisms of coordination on which any society relies. [central planning, bargaining and negotiation, business, government, education, balloting procedures]”

Patrick_Vlaskovits

Faster Horse

“However, even if Ford didn’t verbalize his thoughts on customers’ ostensible inability to communicate their unmet needs for innovative products — history indicates that Henry Ford most certainly did think along those lines... Henry Ford froze the design of the Model T... Ford had no compelling reason to innovate in any other sphere other than cost and price reduction... But everything changed with the onset of the innovations introduced by General Motors in the 1920s, which took the direct opposite of Henry Ford’s tack of “Any color … so long as it is black” and is best summed up by Alfred Sloan’s consumer-research driven “A Car for Every Purse and Purpose”... In 1921, the Ford Motor Company sold about 2/3 of all the cars built in the U.S. By 1926, this share had fallen to approximately 1/3. And in 1927, when Ford belatedly responded (at tremendous financial cost and internal strife) to changes in the market’s tastes and competitive innovation by shutting down production temporarily to re-tool his factories and bring the Model A to the market, that percentage fell to about 15%... Yes, some customers in certain types of businesses are quite capable of verbalizing precisely what sort of innovative product one could build and sell them. And of course, customers in other types of businesses are wholly incapable of verbalizing, with any sort of fidelity whatsoever, what they need and why they need it. An innovator should have understanding of one’s customers and their problems via empirical, observational, anecdotal methods or even intuition. They should also feel free to ignore customers’ inputs. Because by now it should be clear that Ford’s adherence to his vision of the mass-market car and how to materialize that vision was instrumental in both his early success in growing Ford Motor Company as well as his later failure to respond in a timely and effective manner to rapid innovation in the marketplace.”'

Shoshana_Zuboff

Technology Leadership

“The questions that we face today are finally about leadership. Will there be leaders who are able to recognize the historical moment and the choices it presents? Will they find ways to create the organizational conditions in which new visions, new concepts, and a new language of workplace relations can emerge? Will they be able to create organizational innovations that can exploit the unique capacities of the new technology and thus mobilize their organization's productive potential to meet the heightened rigors of global competition? Will there be leaders who understand the crucial role that human beings from each organizational stratum can play in adding value to the production of goods and services? If not, we will be stranded in a new world with old solutions. We will suffer through the unintended consequences of change, because we have failed to understand this technology and how it differs from what came before.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 12. ISBN:0465032125.

Divergence of Interests

“Taylor had believed that the transcendent logic of science, together with easier work and better, more fairly determined wages, could integrate the worker into the organization and inspire a zest for production. Instead, the forms of work organization that emerged with scientific management tended to amplify the divergence of interests between management and workers.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 45. ISBN:0465032125.

Time Study Expert

“The time-study expert became the new focus of workers' antagonisms. Informal production quotas persisted and, in many cases, took on an overtly anti-management spirit. The union contract became the most important means for institutionalizing workers' instincts for self-preservation, as rationalization routed out the ordinary graces with which the workday had been laced. Concern over wages and hours, work rules, and working conditions began to replace the craftworker's culturally embedded practices of effort regulation. Overall, the purification of effort meant a heightened standard of labor discipline, and as such it widened the gulf between those who gave of their bodies in the service of production and those who did not.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 46. ISBN:0465032125.