Marcus Buckingham Quotes

As we were growing retail, and it was a huge growth phase, it was very important to keep our quality under control. Therefore, it was not just distribution, not just back-office operations, but also the risk-management practices. And these we learned together, supported by technology.

I have always been a hard worker. I had to make some adjustments to find a way to make my delivery crisper and more repeatable.

Checklists turn out...to be among the basic tools of the quality and productivity revolution in aviation, engineering, construction - in virtually every field combining high risk and complexity. Checklists seem lowly and simplistic, but they help fill in for the gaps in our brains and between our brains.

The most efficient way to produce anything is to bring together under one management as many as possible of the activities needed to turn out the product.

I'm grasping with how you do something on a large scale with multiple operations and not have quality decrease.

No altered system will work a miracle. Any wild experiment will only add to the confusion. Our best assurance lies in efficient administration of our proven system

It is processes that are important.

As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly - including creating new products - have a way of becoming bureaucratized.

I've never been in a business where safety performance was excellent and the business performance was not, so they go hand in hand, and for me, safety performance is an indication of discipline, of focus and of how joined up an organisation is.

Now the whole point about machines is they are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.

We want a system that will improve consistency and steadiness in the quality of government.

Customers require the effective integration of technologies to simplify their workflow and boost efficiency.

But now they have it down to a real science where it's about an hour.

Right now we have a closure rate between discovery and exploitation of four to six months. We need to be more in the realm of seven to 10 days. That is an enormous challenge.

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing... layout, processes, and procedures.

Business principles are only as good as the practices that back them up.

If you don't understand how to run an efficient operation, new machinery will just give you new problems of operation and maintenance. The sure way to increase productivity is to better administrate man and machine.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

Whether you're a programmer or a seamstress, it's all about new techniques, simplifying old techniques, and consolidating steps. Making things go faster - but not worse.

I got to get the right people in the right job. Because a lot of costs can be taken out in the context of your administration without the legislature. For example, using technology to do more with less. Using technology to fight fraud. Reorganizing and streamlining can be done within the context of the administration.

Processes break in two ways. They break because they don't have the right checks and balances and because they don't have the right execution.

The reason my kids like McDonald's is that they always know what they're going to get. It's not gourmet food, but the french fries they order in Indianapolis are just like the french fries they order in Tampa. Wherever they get McDonald's fries, they know it will be the same. That's what McDonald's does.

I think there is a sort of box-ticking mentality. Not just in the teaching profession. You hear about it in medicine and nursing. It's a lawyer-driven insistence on meeting prescribed standards rather than just being a good doctor.

Generally speaking, if you control matter more precisely, you can get more efficiency out of any process.

A shot is a lever; it's all it is. You don't open a car door differently each time. A car door is efficient - it opens and closes. So is a shot.