Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.

Multitasking, throughput, efficiency - these are excellent machine concepts, useful in the design of computer systems. But are they principles that nurture human thought and imagination?

Despite all our gains in technology, product innovation and world markets, most people are not thriving in the organizations they work for.

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

Productivity has always been the justification for the prepackaging of programming knowledge. But it is worth asking about the sort of productivity gains that come from the simplifications of click-and-drag.

Productive power is the foundation of a country's economic strength.

Because of technological limits, there is a certain amount of food that we can produce per acre. If we were to have intensive greenhouse agriculture, we could have much higher production.

It is possible for the assembly-line worker consigned to tightening the bolts on the transmission and the office worker who processes medical insurance claims to work with pride and efficiency, but it's not easy to maintain that attitude.

There is no substitute under the heavens for productive labor. It is the process by which dreams become realities. It is the process by which idle visions become dynamic achievements.

The most efficient way to live reasonably is every morning to make a plan of one's day and every night to examine the results obtained.

The emphasis on innovation and technology in our companies has resulted in a few of them establishing global benchmarks in product design and development, manufacturing practices and human resource capabilities. However, there is no room for complacency.

IT for a long time has been about how do you make old processes more efficient. But with all of the progress in digital technology, there is a kind of digital transformation that is occurring. And you see it with the explosion in the number of devices; you see it in the explosion in the number of applications.

The truth is that technology is only valuable if it helps you run your organization better.

Profitability comes from loyalty, productivity, and having a character base from which to work.

It's all about quality of life and finding a happy balance between work and friends and family.

Profitability is coming from productivity, efficiency, management, austerity, and the way to manage the business.

Work is a way of bringing order to chaos, and there's a basic satisfaction in seeing that we are able to make something a little more coherent by the end of the day.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.

The new information technology... Internet and e-mail... have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications.

I do not equate productivity to happiness. For most people, happiness in life is a massive amount of achievement plus a massive amount of appreciation. And you need both of those things.

In America, you keep on hearing productivity is low; secular stagnation, it's a new normal. It's just not true: We've had multiple wars; we're not educating our kids. We had government shut downs, badly-spent money, failures in the health system, failures and an extreme amount of regulation - that's why we're going slow.

Adam Smith pointed out that there were three things that make us more prosperous, in a general sort of way: freedom to pursue our own self-interest; specialization, which he called division of labor; and freedom of trade.

Cell phones, mobile e-mail, and all the other cool and slick gadgets can cause massive losses in our creative output and overall productivity.

To make flexibility work, it is not only necessary to change our attitude about who is a good worker and who is not, but we have to train managers at all levels to recognize the difference between the number of hours worked and the quality of work produced.

Smart vacations lead to greater happiness and energy at work and, therefore, greater productivity, intelligence, and resilience.

Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.

Conserving energy and thus saving money, reducing consumption of unnecessary products and packaging and shifting to a clean-energy economy would likely hurt the bottom line of polluting industries, but would undoubtedly have positive effects for most of us.

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

I see a future where states compete with one another to see which can be the most efficient, and where businesses seek out efficient states in which to locate so they can reap the economic and environmental benefits for their businesses and employees.

The true measure of the value of any business leader and manager is performance.

The most efficient way to live reasonably is every morning to make a plan of one's day and every night to examine the results obtained.

The product of mental labor - science - always stands far below its value, because the labor-time necessary to reproduce it has no relation at all to the labor-time required for its original production.

Being busy does not always mean real work. The object of all work is production or accomplishment and to either of these ends there must be forethought, system, planning, intelligence, and honest purpose, as well as perspiration. Seeming to do is not doing.

The ability to change constantly and effectively is made easier by high-level continuity.

Technology has enormous potential to address educational needs more efficiently, help teachers improve their performance, and enrich and individualize student learning.

We can do it better, more consistently, and in the end, it will cost us less because the students that we produce will be superior to those without technology experience.

Precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs - these are raised to the optimum point in the strictly bureaucratic administration.

If you can make finance more functional, make it a tiny percent better, you create a great deal of resources, which you can use for other things like education and healthcare.

There are jobs, particularly database-oriented ones, for which computers are necessary, but for everyday office life, I question whether they have brought the productivity that their enormous cost, up to £10,000 per person, demands.

With the observable fact that scientific knowledge makes our lives better when applied with concern for human welfare and environmental protection, there is no question that science and technology can produce abundance so that no one has to go without.

There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity.

Productive achievement is a consequence and an expression of health and self-esteem, not its cause.

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

If you could utilize the resources of the end users' computers, you could do things much more efficiently.

The productivity of a work group seems to depend on how the group members see their own goals in relation to the goals of the organization.