- Start with a very grandiose vision
- Deploy the idiot index (ratio of component cost vs cost of its raw materials)
- If idiot index is high, question every requirement
- Delete any part of the process you can
- Simplify after deletion
- Optimise cycle time
- Automate the process
- Please mark anytime a date has slipped. All bad news should be given loudly + often. Good news can be said quietly + once.
- all technical managers to have hands on experience e.g. managers spend at least 20% of time coding
- comradery is dangerous and makes it hard to challenge each other
- during problems, don’t meet with managers, go to level below
- attitude > skills
- maniacal sense of urgency is core
- the only rules come from physics, everything else is a recommendation
Walter ended this book with the perfect quote – “One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people, he wrote, are“molded out of faults.” “