the right stuff

is an excellent book by Tom Wolfe (isbn 978-0-099-47937-6). A marvelous tale of courage. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

In the military they always said "flight test" and not "test flying".

Once the theorem and the corollary was understood, the Navy's statistics about one in every four Navy aviators dying meant nothing. The figures were averages, and averages applied to those with the average stuff.

What people were seeing on television were, in fact, ordinary test events. Blown engines were par for the course in testing aircraft prototypes and were inevitable in testing an entirely new propulsion system, such as jet or rocket engines.

Conrad stares at the piece of [blank] paper and then looks up at the man and says in a wary tone, as if he fears a trick: "But it's upside down."

This obsession with active control, it was argued, would only tend to cause problems on Mercury flights. What was required was a man whose main talent was for doing nothing under stress.

The boys' response, however, had not been resignation or anything close to it. No, the engineers now looked on, eyebrows arched, as the guinea pigs set about altering the experiment.

The esprit throughout NASA was tremendous... Bureaucratic lines no longer meant anything. Anyone in Project Mercury could immediately get to see anybody else about any problem that came up.

They had barely moved the first stick of furniture in when the tour buses started arriving, plus the freelance tourists in cars. ... Sometimes people would get out and grab a handful of grass from your lawn. They'd get back on the bus with their miserable little green sprouts sticking out of their fingers. They believed in magic.

Herein the world was divided into those who had it and those who did not.

the mind of war

is an excellent book about John Boyd by Grant T. Hammond (isbn 978-1588341785). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

…in order to determine the consistency of any new system we must construct or uncover another system beyond it… One cannot determine the character or nature of a system within itself. Moreover, attempts to do so lead to confusion and disorder.

he was always testing the limits - of airplanes, people, science, the military, and, most especially, bureaucracies.

In dozens of interviews, conducted for this book, the most consistent theme and nearly universal comment was that John Boyd was the essence of an honourable man and incorruptible.

Oral, not written, communication and conviction, not accuracy, still rule in military culture.

Boyd liked putting things together (synthesis) better than analysis (taking things apart)...

He also came to appreciate the routine practice and repetition that was required to become really good at something and to overcome the boredom by focusing on minute improvements.

He observed very carefully.

Boyd could go from 500 knots to stall speed, practically stopping the plane in midair, which would force any aircraft on his tail to overshoot him and thus gain the advantage for Boyd. In another trick, he would stand the F-100 on its tail and slide down the pillar of its own exhaust. Fire would come out of the intake in the nose of the aircraft and the tailpipe simultaneously. A seemingly impossible feat, it was challenged by others. Boyd when to Edwards Air Force Base in California, where NASA had two fully instrumented F-100 aircraft, and demonstrated it and other techniques to a series of nonbelievers. The test pilot at Edwards who challenged him at the time was a fellow by the name of Neil Armstrong.

Boyd had never designed an airplane before, but as he told Colonel Ricci and Gen. Casey Dempsey, "I could fuck up and do better than this."

The rule of thumb in the Air Force is that a plane will gain a pound of weight a day for the life of the aircraft.

High entropy implies a low potential for doing work, a low capacity for taking action or a high degree of confusion or disorder… The tendency is for entropy to increase in a system that is closed or cannot communicate with the external systems or environments.

A natural teacher, he understood that if he told you something, he robbed you of the opportunity to ever truly know it for yourself.

We are never deceived. We only deceive ourselves. [Goethe]

Boyd's dictum: "Ask for my loyalty and I'll give you my honesty. Ask for my honesty and you'll have my loyalty."

Beating the system

is an excellent book edited by Russell Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin (isbn 1-57675-330-1). As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Beating the system can be a serious and occasionally risky business; some courage is needed.

Bureaucrats are usually empowered to say no to even reasonable requests, but they cannot say yes to them. This requires passing requests to a higher authority. Saying no inflates bureaucrats' self-images.

Nothing beats knowing how the system you're trying to beat actually works because the chances are that no one else knows, with the possible exception of secretaries.

We do not try to cure headache by perfuming brain surgery. Rather, we put a pill in our stomach.

The usual way of doing things often gets in the way of doing things.

Time is our only absolutely nonrenewable and, thus, most highly valued resource. To place a low value on another's time is to show a lack of respect for that person.

Persistence is a fundamental attribute of a system beater.

In most workplaces explicit and implicit assumptions often constrain behaviour.

Implicit assumptions lead to behaviours that are carried out automatically, without thought, and these behaviours constitute an organisation's or a society's culture. Culture is what we do when we do not consciously decide what to do.

Most assumptions made in and about organisations usually go unquestioned, and their validity is taken to be self-evident, despite Ambrose Bierce's (1967,289) admonition that "self-evident" means evident to oneself and no one else. "Obvious" does not mean "requiring no proof" but "no proof is desired."

No particular virtue exists in doing things the way they've always been done and in thinking about things in the way they've always been thought about.

Undesirable customs persist because they are tolerated without thought.

Effective police officers think like criminals; effective criminals think like police officers.

The major obstructions between a person and what he or she wants is not "out there" but in the person's mind.

A problem tends to be placed into the discipline of the one who first identifies it.

Problems are not defined by disciplines, although disciplinarians think so.

bureaucracy

Back to quotes table-of-contents

From The Right Stuff

The esprit throughout NASA was tremendous... Bureaucratic lines no longer meant anything. Anyone in Project Mercury could immediately get to see anybody else about any problem that came up.

From Beyond Culture

By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind.

From Jerry Weinberg (in person)

Bureaucracy can be measured by how much people don't know why they're doing what they're doing.

From Good to Great

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline. Avoid bureaucracy and instead create a culture of discipline.

From It's Your Ship

More often than not, bureaucracies create rules and then forget why they were needed in the first place, or fail to see that the reasons for them no longer exist.

From Quality Software Management: Vol 2. First Order Measurement

Bureaucracy is each thing in control, but everything is out of control.

From John Boyd - the fighter pilot who changed the art of war

Anything new and different is feared by a bureaucracy.

From A Little Book of f-Laws

A bureaucrat is one who has the power to say 'no' but none to say 'yes'.

From Beating the System

Bureaucrats are usually empowered to say no to even reasonable requests, but they cannot say yes to them. This requires passing requests to a higher authority. Saying no inflates bureaucrats' self-images.

From the Mind of War

he was always testing the limits - of airplanes, people, science, the military, and, most especially, bureaucracies.

From Ackoff's Best

The most variety-decreasing type of social system is one we call a bureaucracy.

If you're going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't. [Admiral Hyman G. Rickover]

From Are Your Lights On?

Bureauracies always begin with some process of selection - a process which is never quite "natural" selection.

From Quality Software Management: Vol 2. First order measurement

Bureaucracy: people doing things whose purpose they don't understand.

From the DevOps Handbook

Bureaucracies are incredibly resilient and are designed to survive adverse conditions - one can remove half the bureaucrats, and the process will still survive.

Quality Software ManagementVol 2. First-Order Measurement

is the title of an excellent book by Jerry Weinberg. As usual I'm going to quote from a few pages:

Software development is not primarily a manufacturing operation for we (ideally) never develop the same software twice. This uniqueness of product means that Deming's "statistical signal" - though necessary - is not sufficient for feedback control, because there often isn't enough repetition - enough stability - to generate meaningful statistics.

In software we are attempting to obtain value by achieving higher precision than human beings have ever attempted before.

The switch from cost observation to value observation is the strongest indication that an organization has made the transition from Pattern 2 (Routine) to Pattern 3 (Steering).

Under emotional pressure, people literally stop thinking.

A fact becomes a feeling as soon as you observe it.

The triad has special significance for observation, because it is the first grouping in which there is both interaction and observation of interaction.

The way I remember the difference between faults and failures is to think of earthquakes. Faults (in the ground) leads to failures (in bridges, buildings, and so forth).

One of the most sensitive measures of the cultural pattern of any organization is how quickly it finds and removes problems.

Any plan is just a plan - a series of guesses about how the future will work out.

Bureaucracy: people doing things whose purpose they don't understand.