Nimex10

“In chess, you only win because your opponent made the last mistake.”
― Garry Kasparov

“Good intentions don't work, mechanisms do!"
That's because people already have good intentions when the problems cropped up in the first place.
"If you don't change the underlying conditions that created a problem, you should expect the problem to reoccur!"

E.g. of Good intentions:
- We must try harder!
- Next time, try to remember to improve the process to solve the problem or the mistake...”
― Colin Bryar, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon

“You're efficient when you do something with minimum waste. & you're effective when you're doing the right something."

"...the degree of freedom required to effect change. Slack is the natural enemy of efficiency & vise versa."

"...slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interest of long term health."

"Imagine one of those puzzle games consisting of 8 numbered tiles in a box, with one empty space, so you can slide them around one at a time. The objective is to shuffle the tiles into numerical order. That empty space is the equivalent of slack. If you remove it, the game is technically more efficient, but something is lost. Without the open space, there is no further possibility of moving tiles at all. The layout is optimal as it is, but if time proves otherwise, there is no way to change it."

"Having a little bit of wiggle room allows us to respond to changing circumstances, to experiment, & to do things that might not work."

→ time, money, people on job, or even expectations
→ Not having slack is taxing. Scarcity weighs on our minds and uses up energy that could go toward doing the task at hand better. It amplifies the impact of failures & unintended consequences.
→ Slack allows us to handle the inevitable shocks & surprise of life.
→ Slack is the time when reinvention happens. It is time when you are not 100% busy doing the operational business of your firm. Slack is the time when you are 0% busy. Slack at all levels is necessary to make the organization work effectively & to grow. It is the lubricant of change. Good companies excel in creative use of slack. & bad ones only obsess about removing it.
→ Only when we are 0% busy can we step back & look at the bigger picture of what we're doing. Slack allows room for that...to think ahead.
→ We are more productive when we don't try to be productive all the time.
→ Being comfortable with sometimes being 0% busy means we think about whether we're doing the right thing → Effectiveness
→ "The secret to top performance is to always be a little underemployed; you waste years by not being able to waste hours. Those seemingly wasted hours are necessary to figure out if you're headed in the right direction.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Any life, & any life's work, is a hidden journey, a secret code, deciphered in fits & starts. The details only given truth by the whole, & the whole dependent on the details."

"...having the powerful characteristics of captaincy or leadership of any form is almost always an outward sign of a person inhabiting their physical body & the deeper elements of their own nature.”
― David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity