Augustine's Laws - Softcover

Augustine, Norman R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1563472392 ISBN 13: 9781563472398

Publisher: Amer Inst of Aeronautics &, 1997

Synopsis

This text is a collection of 52 laws that cover every area of business. Each law formulates a home truth about business life, such as, "One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the output. Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output". Another example of one of "Augustine's Laws" is Law Number 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 20 times as fast, everyone else would get twice as much done since all the managers would fly off".

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Drawing on his experience as an aeronautical engineer in industry and for the Pentagon, Augustine, vice-president of Martin Marietta Corp., formulates 52 "laws" designed to avoid or correct bad management practices. In this expanded version of a book originally published by a technical press, his rueful comments and facetiously didactic style, interspersed with numerous examples, quotes, aphorisms and adages, overlay much common sense and shrewd judgment. He is appalled at the inexorable rise in production costs and schedule delays, many of them caused by faulty government cost evaluation and contract-letting systems, and distressed by top-heavy administrations and over-reliance on technology. Among his targets are MBA programs, a surfeit of lawyers and experts of all kinds, along with lengthy maintenance manuals, and unnecessary committees and meetings. Rules and regulations, he concludes, cannot replace management competence. Photos.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

Augustine, executive vice-president of Martin Marietta, has put together a book made up of three parts that seem to bear no relation to each other, yet are forced into an unlikely union: a sort of running commentary on the fortunes of the Daedalus Model Airplane Company; 52 "laws" formulated by Augustine and intended to explain everything from advertising to saving money; and an enormous array of observations, quotations, charts, anecdotes, and bits of information on a baffling number of topics. While this book is obviously the fruit of immense industry, it is scrappy and diffusethe material for a good book rather than a finished work. A. J. Anderson, Graduate Sch. of Library & Information Science, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Amer Inst of Aeronautics &
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1563472392
• ISBN 13: 9781563472398
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 6
• Number of pages: 395