“We had the great depression, we had two world wars, we had the flu epidemic. We had oil shock. We had all these terrible things happen. But something about the American system unleashed more and of a potential to human beings over that hundred years so that we had a seven for one improvement in - there's never been any - I mean, you have centuries where if you've got a 1 percent improvement, then it's something. So we've got a great system. And we've got more productive capacity now than we ever have.” IfsWorldYearsHumansMeanTwoWarHappensHuman BeingsCenturyTerriblePercentHundredCapacitySevenOilImprovementThings HappenWar Of The WorldsShockProductiveTerrible ThingsFluEpidemicsGreat DepressionTwo WorldsUnleashed Author:Howard Warren Buffett
“I curse Microsoft at least once a day. I only curse Apple every other day. As I see it, that's a 100 percent improvement.” PercentImprovementCurseApplesMicrosoft Author:Sam Kass
“Well over half of the time you spend working on a project (on the order of 70 percent) is spent thinking, and no tool, no matter how advanced, can think for you. Consequently, even if a tool did everything except the thinking for you - if it wrote 100 percent of the code, wrote 100 percent of the documentation, did 100 percent of the testing, burned the CD-ROMs, put them in boxes, and mailed them to your customers - the best you could hope for would be a 30 percent improvement in productivity. In order to do better than that, you have to change the way you think.” IfsThinkingWayWellsMatterWould BeOrderHalfProjectsPercentToolsBoxesCustomersProductivityImprovementCodeBurnedTestingCdsDocumentation Author:Fred Brooks
“The brain processes meaning before detail. Providing the gist, the core concept, first was like giving a thirsty person a tall glass of water. And the brain likes hierarchy. Starting with general concepts naturally leads to explaining information in a hierarchical fashion. You have to do the general idea first. And then you will see that 40 percent improvement in understanding.” GivingFirstsPersonsIdeasProcessUnderstandingWaterBrainFashionInformationPercentConceptsStartingGlassesDetailsImprovementCoreLikesTallProvidingHierarchyExplainingThirstyGist Author:John Medina
“One percent improvement in 1,000 things is better than 1,000% improvement in one thing.” One ThingPercentImprovement Author:Tom Peters
“Now we've got that [children's death rate] down to about 5 percent, so we've more than cut it in half, and that's because we're getting vaccines out, economic improvement also helps there, but the vaccines are why we've seen an acceleration in getting that down.” ChildrenHelpingHalfCuttingEconomicPercentRateImprovementVaccinesAcceleration Author:Bill Gates
“Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That's pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.” YearsMindBigsWould BeDesignPercentBillionsImprovementPlanesEfficiencyJetLameVerticalBoeing Author:Elon Musk