“… competitive advantage comes from using standard things in combinations …” - Dave Snowden at "Estuarine Mapping with Dave Snowden"

“Multi-tasking is merely the opportunity to screw-up more than one thing at a time.” — Steve Uzzell

“Productivity is not about being a work horse, keeping busy or burning the midnight oil … it’s about priorities and fiercely protecting your time.” — Margarita Tartakovsky

“Code will be used in ways we cannot anticipate, in ways it was never designed for, and for longer than it was ever intended.” — Joshua Corman

“Read 500 pages like this every day,” Buffett said to the students, while reaching toward a stack of manuals and papers. “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

“The performance of the whole is never the sum of the performance of the parts taken separately, but it's the product of their interactions” – Russell Ackoff

“Those who master large-scale software delivery will define the economic landscape of the 21st century” - Mik Kersten - Projects to Products

“We get things wrong before we get things right.” - Alistair Cockburn

“Never accept a traffic-light status report in a portfolio evaluation meeting. The traffic light provides no data for your decision.” - Johanna Rothmann in “Manage Your Project Portfolio”

“So that’s my aesthetic as a coach. If I do everything perfectly, then my contribution is totally invisible to the team. The team says, “We did this.”” - Kent Beck

“Better to have some measure rather than nothing—right? No! Give me a fuzzy (or relative) metric of something valuable (an outcome) rather than a precise metric for something unimportant (an output) any time.” - Jim Highsmith

“Anybody who doesn't change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.” - Jeff Bezos

“We are all experienced at living with uncertainty and managing complexity. Until we go to work.” - Esther Derby

” “If you only quantify one thing, quantify the Cost of Delay”- Don Reinersten

“This means organizations go through three phases as they improve. They start off by focusing on resource usage efficiency, and the move on to flow efficiency, and finally to optimizing value.” Mark Skarin “Real-World Kanban”

“Often people want to devise formulas based on the output of various tools for scoring. It’s an understandable inclination. However, value is hard to measure. It is better to form a subjective judgment leading to a score. This lets us give weight to dimensions of value that rely on many forms of evidence, including just a felt sense of value.” from "Patterns of Systems Renewal" by Michael Feathers but generally applicable.

“Early failure is tuition. Late failure is punishment” - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“Here's the secret of project portfolio management: you can do it all. Just not at the same time.” - Johanna Rothmann in “Manage Your Project Portfolio”

“Since we reduced our workforce last year, one surprising result is that many things have gone faster. In retrospect, I underestimated the indirect costs of lower-priority projects.” – Zuckerberg in March 14, 2023 Message to Meta|