we should make each decision at the point where further delay no longer increases the expected economic outcome. By avoiding “front-loading,” we can take advantage of the fact that market and technical uncertainty decrease with time. Instead of waiting for the “last responsible moment,” we can recognize that the cost of certain decisions can rise steeply past a certain point, or that the value created by waiting may have stopped increasing. The timing of economic choices should be based on their economics, not broad philosophical concepts like “front-loading” or “responsible deferral.”
When economics change, we must reevaluate the economic wisdom of our choices. Remember Principle E1, our primary objective is to make good economic choices. To blindly conform to the original plan when it no longer represents the best economic choice is the act of a fool.
Reducing risk, which is the primary mission of testing, clearly creates economic value for product developers. In fact, reducing risk is so centrally important to product development that it is indispensable for us to quantify its economic impact.
manufacturing deals with predictable and repetitive tasks, homogeneous delay costs, and homogeneous task durations. As a result, manufacturing sequences work in a simple first-in-first-out (FIFO) order. FIFO prioritization is almost never economically optimal in product development, because product development deals with high variability, nonrepetitive, nonhomogeneous flows. Different projects almost always have different delay costs, and they present different loads on our resources.
The king was the law, and once the law was dead, chaos reigned. Nobles fastened their cloaks, pulled on their boots, and saddled up their horses. Some grabbed gold, some grabbed documents, and some even grabbed the meat and wine in the royal cellars.1 Meanwhile, as they rushed back and forth, Chilperic remained where he had fallen from his horse2 in the stable yard. The sky turned from violet to black and the shadows of the surrounding forest fell across the crumpled king, now completely alone.
If pressed, Cook will disagree, politely, with the portrait painted by some that he is a spreadsheet guy, a suit running a company built by a man who disdained suits. “Steve saw this—one of the things I loved about him was he didn’t expect innovation out of just one group in the company or creativity out of one group,” Cook says. “He expected it everywhere in the company.” Including in operations, where Cook worked: “When we were running operations, we tried to be innovative in operations and creative in operations, just like we were creative elsewhere. We fundamentally had to be in order to build the products that we were designing.”
Pot odds are the payout offered by the pot expressed in comparison to the price to call a bet. For example, if there was $100 in the pot and the player had to put in $20, the pot was offering 5-to-1 odds. These odds were then compared to the likelihood the player making the decision would win the hand, either by having the best cards or drawing to the best hand.
When I looked up at my father as a boy, I thought being a man was having control. Being the master and commander of your own destiny. How could any boy know that freedom is lost the moment you become a man. Things start to count. To press in. Constricting slowly, inevitably, creating a cage of inconveniences and duties and deadlines and failed plans and lost friends.
The Soviet regime manufactured a famine in Ukraine that would kill 3.9 million people, a tragedy of unimaginable scope that’s known today as the Holodomor, a combination of the Ukrainian words for “hunger” and “extermination.”
In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.
