Slack Quotes

“quality is most of all a function of its usefulness. The Corporate Quality Program Real quality has little to do with defects,”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful management, allergic to failure. It tries to avoid all chance of failure by having key decisions made by a guru class (those who set the standards) and carried out mechanically by the regular folk. As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. 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

“But Buyer Corp. still has a role to play in successful completion of the contract: Buyer will almost certainly have to specify requirements for the Somethingorother to make sure it will receive exactly what it wants; it may have responsibility for acceptance-testing the delivered result consistent with the requirement.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Angry managers are losers, hapless incompetents who are in way over their heads and haven’t got the faintest idea how to lead. In the long run, they will come tumbling down under the weight of their own fury. In the short run, however, they tend to cluster. That means that a few organizations end up with way more than their share. I mention this because from the inside of this kind of culture, it may not be at all obvious that the level of abuse you see around you isn’t common everywhere. It isn’t. If you’ve stumbled into such a situation, get out. Life is too short.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Management is hard, and not because there is so much work to do (an overworked manager is almost certainly doing work he/she shouldn’t be doing). Management is hard because the skills are inherently difficult to master. Your mastery of them will affect your organization more than anything going on under you.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“When managers are overworked, they’re doing something other than management; the more they allow themselves to be overworked, the less real management gets done.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The purpose of the schedule was planning, not goal-setting. Work that is not performed according to a plan invalidates the plan.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“I’ve called this idea an article of faith. Like religious articles of faith, it is a premise that the believer is obliged to accept without question. In fact, there may even be an element of sin associated with doubt. To a nonbeliever, the premise looks dubious at best, but the faithful must believe. Project managers are taught from their earliest years that striving toward even the most impossible schedule can do no harm.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The best managers use pressure only rarely and never over extended periods.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“people aren’t inclined to work on tasks in the wrong order, since they derive satisfaction from accomplishment, and a motivation toward meaningful accomplishment tends to steer them onto the critical path. A little pressure might decrease wasted time slightly and cause an equally slight improvement in focusing on the critical path.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don’t waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management. They are more likely to be frustrated by wasted time than enjoy it.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don’t waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Since they can’t alter the rate of mental discriminations (basic elements of knowledge work) per second, their potential to respond to pressure is severely limited. All they can do is Eliminate wasted time Defer tasks that are not on the critical path Stay late”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“I am much more concerned, though, when smaller companies invest outside their own product areas. I see this as bankruptcy of inventiveness. It is particularly evident when companies find themselves with extra leverage due to run-up of their stock price. Their willingness to spend this found capital outside their own backyard is a signal that they have no real vision, no idea of how to grow in the arena that they know best.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The right way to think about domain knowledge is as a corporate capital asset, as dollars of investment in the head of each knowledge worker, put there by organizational investment in that employee. When that person leaves, the asset is gone. If you did a rigorous accounting of this human capital, you would be obliged to declare an extraordinary loss each time one of your people quit.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Whether this person is a designer, product manager, programmer, writer, consultant, or whatever, he/she comes with (1) a set of skills and (2) some explicit knowledge of the area in which skills are to be deployed. The skills alone aren’t enough. Domain knowledge is also required. The more important that domain knowledge is, the less fungible the people are. That means you can’t divide them up into pieces, but it also means that you can’t easily replace them with other people when they leave.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“That means that everybody needs to have some capacity to devote to change. This is time that people dedicate to rethinking how their piece of the whole works, and how it ought to work. Once the change is under way, more time is required to practice new ways and to master new skills. That’s the cost. The benefit is vitality and a firm grip on the future. Slack is the way you invest in change. Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Ability to change has to be an organic part of the organization. Change has to be going on all the time, everywhere. It needs to be everybody’s business.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“I offer the following model for control-sharing. If control is in some sense like salary, then control-sharing ought to be (or at least seem to be) proportional to salary. If you have ten people working for you and you make 25 percent more than each of them, then you get 125 “control points,” and they get 100 each. If control is exercised in those proportions—or seems to be—then Eve and all her colleagues will feel that their opportunities for growth are maximized. The trick is how to assure your own requirements of the organization with just those 125 control points. That is not a trivial task. (But then, whoever said that management was easy?)”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“When communication happens only over the hierarchy lines, that’s a priori evidence that the managers are trying to hold on to all control. This is not only inefficient but an insult to the people underneath.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“But people never really “do as they’re told.” The difference between for-profit and volunteer organizations is that in the for-profit world people do get paid and so they are willing to give up some control to the boss, to accept at least some direction. But they don’t give up all control. You couldn’t pay them enough for that.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“You can no more expect her to work without meaningful challenge than you could expect her to work without salary. The nearly equal status of challenge and pay is unique to knowledge workers. They are different from the blue-collar workers that our fathers managed a generation ago. The easy, dumb error of managing knowledge workers is to forget that they are different and assume that basic rules developed on factory floors a century ago apply to them.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“each switch imposes a direct penalty of a bit more than twenty minutes of lost concentration.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“Vision is the sine qua non of constructive change.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“We have become so obsessed with getting rid of people who are burdened with the characterization overhead that we have ended up with organizations where many high-priced knowledge workers and managers are spending as much as a quarter of their time being their own overhead.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“The missed schedule indicts the planners, not the workers. Even if the workers are utterly incompetent, a plan that takes careful note of their inadequacies can help to minimize the damage. A plan that takes no account of realities is not just useless but dangerous.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative.”
― 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

“work performance is not an abstraction: You can’t say that Ted is a high-performance worker in general, only that he has proved himself good at doing some one particular thing. Fragmentation”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

“How people feel can be more a factor in the success of a change than what they think. Anxiety of any kind can only complicate the task of change introduction. That’s why the period of sudden decline of corporate fortunes is exactly the worst moment to introduce a change. People are uneasy about their jobs, worried about lasting corporate health, perhaps shocked by the vitality of the competition. In retrospect, a far better time to introduce the change would have been back in the period of healthy growth. Growth always carries with it a certain necessity for change. You may have to hire more people, expand to larger quarters, diversify or centralize, all to accommodate your own burgeoning success. But growth feels good; it feels like winning. It even feels good enough to reduce the amount of change resistance.”
― Tom DeMarco, Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency