Nimex10

“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

“To play the violin it is necessary to possess certain habits, skills, knowledge, and talents, to be in the mood to play, and (as the old joke goes) to have a violin. But violin playing is neither the habits, skills, knowledge and so on, nor the mood, nor . . . the violin.”
― Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

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

“It is your duty to learn, but reality/nature doesn’t have the duty to teach you… even if it does teach you, it doest so for its own good not yours… & that’s not including risk evaluation, value assessment, expected returns…meaning nature doesn't teach us these important aspects we face in our everyday decision making." Nimex10”
― Nimex10