Slack Quotes

“Quality takes time and reduces quantity, so it makes you, in a sense, less efficient. The efficiency-optimized organization recognizes quality as its enemy. That's why many corporate Quality Programs are really Quality Reduction Programs in disguise.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“People under time pressure don’t think faster.”    —Tim Lister Think rate is fixed. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can’t pick up the pace of thinking.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“When companies can’t invent, it’s usually because their people are too damn busy.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Any vigorous competition will entail at least two elements: offense and defense. Offense is the effort you put into scoring against your opponents, and defense is the effort you apply to stop them from scoring against you. Those who suggest that "a little healthy competition can't hurt" are thinking only of the offense part....

The offense component of internal competition is problematic, but the defense component is always injurious. When peer managers play defense against each other (try to stop each other from scoring), they are engaging in anticooperation.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“I’ve written about the giving of trust as though it were a simple formula for building loyalty. But it isn’t simple at all. The talent that is an essential ingredient of leadership tells the leader whom to trust and how much to trust and when to trust. The rule is (as with children) that trust be given slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness. But not too much in advance. You have to have an unerring sense of how much the person is ready for. Setting people up for failure doesn’t make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you’re risk-averse, you won’t do it. And that’s a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“In addition to being flat-out hard to do, building effectiveness into an organization often comes into direct conflict with increasing efficiency. This is an unfortunate side effect of optimization, first noted by the geneticist R. A. Fisher, and now referred to as Fisher’s fundamental theorem: “The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change.” Fisher’s example was the giraffe. It is highly adapted to food found up among the tree branches, but so unadaptable to a new situation that it can not even pick up a peanut from the ground at the zoo. The more optimized an organism (organization) is, the more likely that the slack necessary to help it become more effective has been eliminated.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“And the management team is not really a team. A team is a group of people who have joint responsibility for—and joint ownership of—one or more work products. People who own nothing in common may be called a team, but they aren’t. This is not to say that companies never form real management teams, only that they do so rarely. Most of what are called management teams are a mockery of the team concept.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Continuing stasis is a consequence of the first flawed assumption at the heart of MBO: the ingenuous belief that success of the overall organization can be viewed as a simple arithmetic combination of lower-level objectives. The assumption is almost impossible to implement unless nearly everything is in steady state.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Authoritarian management is obsessed with time. It is destructive of slack and inclined to goad people into outperforming their peers. And it makes learning impossible.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“a manager who is 40 percent used up making operations happen is not viewed as 60 percent reclaimable expense. Rather, he/she is viewed as someone doing leadership 60 percent of the time. If there is an incentive to change this formula, it suggests looking for ways to decrease the time spent running operations to free up more capacity for leading the transformation.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“In the most highly stressed projects, people at all levels talk about the schedule being “aggressive, ” or even “highly aggressive.” In my experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes. “Aggressive schedule,” I’ve come to suspect, is a kind of code phrase—understood implicitly by all involved—for a schedule that is absurd, that has no chance at all of being met.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“If the essential task of middle managers is reinvention, when is that task to be carried out? The answer is, during time that is not used up directing day-to-day business. The fact that managers have time on their hands (i.e., their operations tasks take up less than eight hours per day) gives them time for reinvention. The extra time is not waste, but slack. Without it they could function in only their operational roles. Reinvention would be impossible because the people who could make it happen are just too busy to take the time.

Even companies that didn't fire their change centers have hurt themselves by encouraging their middle managers to stay extremely busy. In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“When stress is the problem, slack is the solution.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“It’s easy (and fair) to blame lousy management on lousy managers. But it’s not enough. It’s also necessary to blame the people who allow themselves to be managed so badly.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“It’s a rare company I visit these days that doesn’t have a Dilbert cartoon posted somewhere. I guess the message of these cartoons is “Our company is in some ways like Dilbert’s company, ” or, even worse, “My boss is in some ways like Dilbert’s boss.” When I encounter these cartoons, I always want to find the person who posted them and ask, “Yes, but are you like Dilbert?” Are you keeping your head down? Are you accepting senseless direction when it’s offered? Are you letting the bureaucracy dominate at the expense of the real goals? If so, I’d like to tell that person, then you’re part of the problem. At the risk of being a total killjoy, I propose that you look at the next Dilbert cartoon that falls under your eye in a totally different way. I propose that you ask yourself about Dilbert’s role in whatever corporate nonsense is the butt of the joke. Ask yourself, How should Dilbert have responded? (The real Dilbert, of course, never responds at all.) How could Dilbert have made this funny situation distinctly nonfunny? What could he have done to put an end to such absurdities? There is always an obvious answer. Sometimes the action is one that would get Dilbert fired. It’s easy (and fair) to blame lousy management on lousy managers. But it’s not enough. It’s also necessary to blame the people who allow themselves to be managed so badly. At least partly at fault for every bad management move is some gutless Dilbert who allows it to happen.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“In a healthy organization, a certain amount of failure is okay. At Microsoft, for example, there has long been an almost official policy of “sink, then swim.” People are loaded down with so much responsibility that they sink (fail). Then they have a chance to rest up, to analyze and modify their own performance. Finally, they are loaded again with a comparable amount of responsibility, but this time they succeed. If they don’t sink the first time, that just shows they weren’t challenged enough. They can be sure that the next time out they will be challenged a lot more aggressively. To the extent that this policy is applied company-wide, Microsoft seems to be run as an Outward Bound adventure. Finding your weaknesses by failing is not just incidental; it is designed into the corporate philosophy.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“When a schedule is not met, those inclined to pass out blame are quick to point at the lowest-level workers; they reason that performance is the domain entirely of those who perform the work. They ask plaintively, “Why can’t these guys ever meet their schedules?” The answer that the schedule might have been wrong in the first place only befuddles them. It’s as though they believe there is no such thing as a bad schedule, only bad performances that resulted in missing the scheduled date. There is such a thing as a bad schedule. A bad schedule is one that sets a date that is subsequently missed. That’s it. That’s the beginning and the end of how a schedule should be judged. If the date is missed, the schedule was wrong. It doesn’t matter why the date was missed. The purpose of the schedule was planning, not goal-setting. Work that is not performed according to a plan invalidates the plan. The missed schedule indicts the planners, not the workers.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do the work.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“It’s possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That’s what happens when you drive out slack.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Managers who inspire extraordinary loyalty from their people tend to be highly charismatic, humorous, good-looking, and tall. So, by all means, strive to be those things. If you don't feel able to improve any of those factors very much, you might consider holding on to your people by designing a little slack into their lives.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Very successful companies have never struck me as particularly busy; in fact, they are, as a group, rather laid-back. Energy is evident in the workplace, but it's not the energy tinged with fear that comes from being slightly behind on everything.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“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

“WE GREW UP in an age where stasis was a possibility and a desired state. Change was something you went through to reach a new and better stasis. We may have found such change temporarily unsettling or even unpleasant, but we knew that eventually it would be over and done with. We knew we could soon settle back to enjoy a longish period of reaping the benefits of the change. During that period, disruptive change would only be a memory. Well, those times are over. The difference between the early nineties and today is the difference between Lenin’s concept of revolution (destroy the old state and replace it with a new and better one) and Trotsky’s concept of continuing revolution (destroy the old state and also destroy each successive state that replaces it). In our new economy, stasis is nothing more than an object of nostalgia. We might look back at it fondly, as we look back at the pre-nuclear age, but we can never go there again. In times of stasis, risk is an unwelcome visitor. But today risk is a constant. Nobody is ever going to succeed again without constantly taking on risks. And yet, surprisingly, risk avoidance is everywhere.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Plan for Success is a staple of management philosophy, particularly in our high-tech industries. It leads us to pour desired outcomes into concrete, and make commitments based on achieving those outcomes. Plan for Success is the intellectual equivalent of: Make big bucks by winning fifteen consecutive hands of blackjack without taking any money off the table till the end. It works when it works, but leaves you in the lurch when it doesn’t (which is most of the time).”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The rule is (as with children) that trust be given slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness. But not too much in advance. You have to have an unerring sense of how much the person is ready for. Setting people up for failure doesn’t make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you’re risk-averse, you won’t do it. And that’s a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly. When this happens, standard process is the cause of lost mobility. It is, however, not the root cause. The root cause is fear.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Each time you add automation, you choose some particularly mechanical component of the work (that’s what makes it a good candidate for automation). When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the paradox of automation: It makes the work harder, not easier. After all, it was the easy stuff that got absorbed into the machine, so what’s left is, almost by definition, fuzzier, less mechanical, and more complex. Whatever standard is now introduced to govern the work will dictate (often in elaborate detail) how the few remaining mechanical aspects are to be performed.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency