Collage 091               H u m o u r N e t                    1995

And the car acronyms (Collage 85) continue to come in (with FORD
easily leading the field). The most recent one, submitted by Brett:

	FORD - F**ked On [a] Raw Deal

That said, we come to Collage 91--Augstine's Laws, dutifully
submitted by the still-ever-prolific Lorraine.

Happy scrolling!

- Vince Sabio
  HumourNet Moderator
  HumourNet@telephonet.com
____________________________________________________________________
          Opener (above) Copyright 1995 by Vincent Sabio
  Permission is hereby granted to forward or post this "Collage";
  please observe the guidelines stated at the end of the message.
____________________________________________________________________

SUBJ: Augustine's Laws

Norman R. Augustine, president and chief operating officer of
Martin Marietta has written a book (available in paperback) called
"Augustine's Laws" in which he succinctly sums up the pitfalls that
confront business managers today.

LAW I: The best way to make a silk purse from a sow's ear is to
begin with a silk sow. The same is true of money.

LAW II: If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be,
it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was.

LAW III: There are no lazy veteran lion hunters.

LAW IV: If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to.

LAW V: One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the
output. Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the
average output.

LAW VI: A hungry dog hunts best. A hungrier dog hunts even better.

LAW VII: Decreased business base increases overhead. So does
increased business base.

LAW VIII: The most unsuccessful four years in the education of a
cost-estimator is fifth grade arithmetic.

LAW IX: Acronyms and abbreviations should be used to the maximum
extent possible to make trivial ideas profound...........Q.E.D.

LAW X: Bulls do not win bull fights; people do. People do not win
people fights; lawyers do.

LAW XI: If the Earth could be made to rotate twice as fast,
managers would get twice as much done. If the Earth could be made
to rotate twenty times as fast, everyone else would get twice as
much done since all the managers would fly off.

LAW XII: It costs a lot to build bad products.

LAW XIII: There are many highly successful businesses in the United
States. There are also many highly paid executives. The policy is
to not intermingle the two.

LAW XIV: After the year 2015, there will be no airplane crashes.
There will be no takeoffs either, because electronics will occupy
100 percent of every airplane's weight.

LAW XV: The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of
the cost and two-thirds of the problems.

LAW XVI: In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase
just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air
Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year, when
it will be made available to the Marines on the extra day.

LAW XVII: Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp,
weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics--i.e., it
always increases.

LAW XVIII: It is very expensive to achieve high unreliability. It
is not uncommon to increase the cost of an item by a factor of ten
for each factor of ten degradation accomplished.

LAW XIX: Although most products will soon be too costly to
purchase, there will be a thriving market in the sale of books on
how to fix them.

LAW XX: In any given year, Congress will appropriate the amount of
funding approved the prior year plus three-fourths of whatever
change the administration requests--minus 4-percent tax.

LAW XXI: It's easy to get a loan unless you need it.

LAW XXII: If stock market experts were so expert, they would be
buying stock, not selling advice.

LAW XXIII: Any task can be completed in only one-third more time
than is currently estimated.

LAW XXIV: The only thing more costly than stretching the schedule
of an established project is accelerating it, which is itself the
most costly action known to man.

LAW XXV: A revised schedule is to business what a new season is to
an athlete or a new canvas to an artist.

LAW XXVI: If a sufficient number of management layers are
superimposed on each other, it can be assured that disaster is not
left to chance.

LAW XXVII: Rank does not intimidate hardware. Neither does the
lack of rank.

LAW XXVIII: It is better to be the reorganizer than the
reorganizee.

LAW XXIX: Executives who do not produce successful results hold on
to their jobs only about five years. Those who produce effective
results hang on about half a decade.

LAW XXX: By the time the people asking the questions are ready for
the answers, the people doing the work have lost track of the
questions.

LAW XXXI: The optimum committee has no members.

LAW XXXII: Hiring consultants to conduct studies can be an
excellent means of turning problems into gold--your problems into
their gold.

LAW XXXIII: Fools rush in where incumbents fear to tread.

LAW XXXIV: The process of competitively selecting contractors to
perform work is based on a system of rewards and penalties, all
distributed randomly.

LAW XXXV: The weaker the data available upon which to base one's
conclusion, the greater the precision which should be quoted in
order to give the data authenticity.

LAW XXXVI: The thickness of the proposal required to win a
multimillion dollar contract is about one millimeter per million
dollars. If all the proposals conforming to this standard were
piled on top of each other at the bottom of the Grand Canyon it
would probably be a good idea.

LAW XXXVII: Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse
than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right
to expect so much.

LAW XXXVIII: The early bird gets the worm. The early worm....gets
eaten.

LAW XXXIX: Never promise to complete any project within six months
of the end of the year--in either direction.

LAW XL: Most projects start out slowly--and then sort of taper off.

LAW XLI: The more one produces, the less one gets.

LAW XLII: Simple systems are not feasible because they require
infinite testing.

LAW XLIII: Hardware works best when it matters the least.

LAW XLIV: Aircraft flight in the 21st century will always be in a
westerly direction, preferably supersonic, crossing time zones to
provide the additional hours needed to fix the broken electronics.

LAW XLV: One should expect that the expected can be prevented, but
the unexpected should have been expected.

LAW XLVI: A billion saved is a billion earned.

LAW XLVII: Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water.
The other third is covered with auditors from headquarters.

LAW XLVIII: The more time you spend talking about what you have
been doing, the less time you have to spend doing what you have been
talking about. Eventually, you spend more and more time talking
about less and less until finally you spend all your time talking
about nothing.

LAW XLIX: Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds.

LAW L: The average regulation has a life span one-fifth as long as
a chimpanzee's and one-tenth as long as a human's--but four times as
long as the official's who created it.

LAW LI: By the time of the United States tricentennial, there will
be more government workers than there are workers.

LAW LII: People working in the private sector should try to save
money. There remains the possibility that it may someday be
valuable again.

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